I Know

Again, sorry for the delay in updating!

As I said, self-harm is a really complicated subject, so I'm touching on it again following immediately on from my previous post to make another strange thing clear.

Sometimes, when I thought about hurting or even killing myself, it wasn't to remove my existence or even to relieve stress in that weird way I explained in my previous post. My motivator was, in one very real sense, spite. At one point, there were multiple parties in my life whom I felt didn't value me as much as I wanted. So, often, a passing thought would be something like this: "If I throw myself in front of this lorry and end up in hospital or dead, then they'll be sorry. Then they'll realise how much they love me."

Now the other side of this reasoning is a lot more normal, if you think about it. I thought I wasn't getting recognition for trying. Like my efforts were just passing unnoticed. And hurting yourself is a very drastic - and sometimes unsuccessful - way of getting noticed. The Goo Goo Dolls had it right in their song Iris: "You bleed just to know you're alive."

As always though, God gave me a simultaneous rebuke and reassurance for each of these misconceptions. God, He who is Love, flooded my memory with all the wonderful times I'd had with each party involved, all the times when I had keenly felt their love, and He said, "Do you really think they don't love you already?" And He knelt down to my small, confused, angry, desperate self, curled up in a ball on the floor, and looked me right in the eyes: "Do you really think I don't notice you? Do you think I don't notice how difficult it is and how hard you're trying? Dear daughter, there's not a single breath you take, a single blink of your eyes, a single tear that you cry, that I don't notice. I noticed how frustrated you were with that essay because you couldn't get the feeling of worthlessness out of your head. I noticed how difficult it was to force your body to move and cook dinner last night. I notice it all."

It took a while, but I learnt that I could never be invisible to or unloved by the Father who always watches over all His children because He loves them beyond all love I could ever comprehend.