I told her...

So last night my RA came in my dorm room to have a discussion with my roommate and I about the guidelines we set up at the beginning of the year. We had to discus weather the guidelines were still what we wanted to be going by or if we needed to change any of our "rules" because of issues we have had so far. Anyways while we were talking my RA brought up the fact that my roommate is gone most weekends, she mentioned how that could possibly make me lonely. I believe that she was possibly referring to when I came in her room the other day on the weekend and I wanted to just be with someone (more on that later) so I asked her as she was leaving if I could stop by later to talk, and she said "Of course!" I also asked her what time Give me a Break (our study break in her room where we watch an episode of friends) was.

Later I went to her room for Give me a Break along with a few other girls from our floor. We watched friends and after she asked me to stay so we could discuss our biology assignment. After we had talked about biology she asked me if I wanted to talk then, I told her no but that I would come by later to talk.

Later I went to her room to see if she was there and could chat for a while. I told her that I wanted to talk about what she had mentioned earlier, about how I could be getting lonely over the weekends. I told her that I wasn't lonely when I came in the other night, but that I just needed to be around someone. I told her that I was really stressed out and that stress is sort of a trigger for me because I used to self-harm.

She looked at me and told me that she was really proud of me for coming to be with her and not just sitting by myself and trying to keep from cutting myself by myself. She told me over and over how proud she was and how happy she was that I had come to her instead of just going through it on my own.

Then she started asking me questions about why I had started self-harming. I told her about my friend in junior high who was having sex and doing drugs and about my friend who was diagnosed with cancer during my freshman year. I told her how hard those things were and how I felt out of control and the self injury became something I could "control" and it helped me to deal with the things going on in my life. She then asked me what had triggered it specifically that night. I told her that I honestly don't know what triggered it that night, and that I was mainly just feeling stressed out.

She continued to ask me questions about my self-harm and she told me about a friend of hers who self-harms and who cannot stop. She asked me about some of the things I had mentioned to her earlier during the semester. Like for example she asked about why I had said before that it was hard to tell people because I was afraid that they would judge me because there are so many misconceptions about self-harm and we also talked about a few other things.

She told me that she is not going to judge me for what I have done. I guess it kind of helps that she has taken a few classes in Psychology and that is currently her major as well. She started to tell me some stuff that made me smile, a whole list of other ways she will "judge" me, like how I am from a very cool place and a culture that she really wants to visit and how I have never experienced a real winter and I am going to freeze my butt off this winter. She made me really happy and made me think that I can tell people about this. She gave me hope in humanity. Hope that people won't automatically judge me, and hope that there are people worth trusting with your secrets.

Hope. What a simple four letter word. But it really isn't so simple. I have spent too much time not knowing what I can and can't hope in. I still don't understand hope, but I am learning more and more each day. The childish hope I used to have was torn from under my feet time and time again. Just as I would start to hope again there it went. Gone. Another simple four letter word. But this one is really simple. Hope. Is. Gone. That is what I felt for so long. I am starting to see a glimmer in the future. I am starting to hope again.






My next goal: God. I don't think he has been mentioned in anything that I have written thus far. There is a reason for that, you see, I don't know what I believe about Him anymore. As a child I had such a child-like faith. I was never really even given any other options besides to believe. When I went through the thing with my friend in junior high I tried to grasp tightly to God, at the time I believed that if God could get me through that he could get me through anything. I made profession of faith during eighth grade because I was basically on what I would consider a "faith high". When my friend was diagnosed with cancer at the end of my freshman year, and the things that had happened leading up to her diagnosis, I sort of lost control and I didn't understand what was going on, that is when my self harm started. I hated God at that point and blamed him for my friend's illness, and I guess in a sense that I still do. It is something that I have been trying to break through for a while now. I just don't know how to believe anymore since I have been angry at Him for so long now, I don't even know if I believe that he exists anymore.

Anyways...enough of my ranting for tonight...I am going to take a short nap and then go get Breakfast Replacement and then do my homework.

Later,
Emmy R.