Stephanie Kuehnert

I am happy to present our first guest in “People You May Know”: Stephanie Kuehnert! Stephanie is the author of “I Wanna be Your Joey Ramone” and “Ballads of Suburbia”. Stephanie’s blog was also the inspiration behind this site, so I am thrilled to have her be our first guest.

I started cutting when I was twelve. It began on accident. I was having a bad day. I had a lot of those in junior high—friendships were in flux, early crushes were painful and awful. I was at stage crew, constructing or tearing down a set and I scraped my right arm on a nail. Normally when something like that happens (I seem prone to stubbing my toes when I’m in a rush or already in a bad mood), I yelp and curse my luck. But this time I realized that the rush of pain felt like a wave of relief, a release for all the dark emotions I’d been bottling up that day. I wanted to scrape my arm again.

I didn’t, but the next time I was upset I took a safety pin and scratched at my ankle. In grade school we used to carve the initials of the guy we’d decided to like (and I phrase it that way because those weren’t true crushes but strategic decisions made to meet approval of so-called friends) into a tree. By eighth grade I was carving initials into my own leg. Since I started with safety pins the scars were light and faded fast so I could easily cut over them when my crush or eventually boyfriend changed. Now if you look closely right above my ankle you see the name Sid… for my cat, whom at one point I decided was the only boy I loved.

I graduated from safety pins to scissors and scissors to razor blades. I remember trying to break open my first razor. A pink Lady Bic. I cut up my thumbs trying to pull it apart. Little ruffled flaps of skin that reminded of window blinds. Finally I stomped on the pink Lady Bic repeatedly with my combat boot until the plastic surrounded the blade cracked and freed it. That was too much effort so I got a box of straight razor blades and kept on in my wallet at all times. Where hopeful teenage boys carried condoms, I kept my razor blade in case of emergency. I saved that old wallet and you can still see where the blade cut through the leather.

When the razor blade wasn’t handy, I used other sharp things. I accidentally-on-purpose broke a hand mirror. Fuck seven years of bad luck. My life was all bad luck. I scratched the word “Lost” into my stomach with the shards.

During my lowest, most upset and desperate moment, needing to X through the initial of my emotionally and psychologically abusive boyfriend that I’d stupidly carved in my thigh at one point, I found a rusty piece of metal in a parking lot. I cut so deep it made me sick. I almost vomited at the sight of the wound and I panicked, wondering after the fact if I’d given myself tetanus or some horrible disease. But in that moment I’d needed to cut so badly it didn’t matter. I was like a junkie so in need of a fix, they didn’t care who they shared needles with. I was a junkie, though my fix may be harder to understand. But cutting was numbing, it was cleansing, it reminded me I was alive, and it made feel like I was claiming my body as mine.

Even after that moment in the parking lot with the rusty metal, when I realized how dangerous what I was doing had become, it didn’t stop me. I wore long sleeves all the time because my arms were a mess of scabs, scars, and fresh wounds. I put so much energy into carefully hiding them, but one day I hit rock bottom and showed my parents.

I was stressed beyond belief. I’d just gotten into my first car accident—not really a big deal, no one was hurt, just the back bumper ripped of my car—but it was a huge deal to me and I had a big test the next day and I was panicked and overwhelmed. So I ripped off the army jacket I wore constantly to hide my scars and showed my parents what I’d done to my arms. I said, “I need help.” I remember thinking that they would probably check me into an institution and I wanted that because I needed a break.

My parents didn’t have me committed, but my act of show and tell led to therapy and lots of uncomfortable talks. I wish I could say it helped immediately, but it didn’t. I’d been cutting for five years and would continue for five more. That was just the point where I recognized it was unhealthy. For awhile after that, I would cut and feel guilty about it. Then in my late teens/early twenties when I was drinking heavily I just didn’t care. I was bent on self-destruction. I was shocked to make it to my twenty-first birthday. And that shock forced me to settle down.

I don’t remember my last cut. I remember a lot of moments when I said to myself that this will be the last time, but it wasn’t. What helped me heal was writing. I went back to school for creative writing and I also went back to therapy. I learned slowly that writing made me feel just as good as cutting, better really because there was no guilt afterwards and no scars, just a sense of accomplishment.

Have there been times I wanted to cut or injure myself in someway? Yes. When one of my dear friends died last year, I kept having urges to just scrape my wrist across cement or accidentally snag  my arm on a nail like I did when I was twelve. But I didn’t because I haven’t in eight years and I don’t want to go back to that again.

Words are my way of dealing now. Not just writing, but doing what I couldn’t back then: talking. Talking about what’s hurting me, admitting aloud to someone that the pain is so great I want to cut to let it out and allowing them to comfort me. That’s why I write freely about my history with self-injury and I wrote about it in fiction because I truly believe that breaking the silence is a step toward healing.