Keep Your Eyes on the Road and Not on Your Skin Whether or not you’d like to believe it, the uncontrolled obsessiveness many have with their phone is similar to how people feel when they need to self-harm. Here's what I mean by that analogy. When you’re driving, distractions are everywhere. You may not realize you’re distracting yourself by making your music louder or adjusting your sunglasses in the mirror, but you are. Whenever your eyes are off of the road for a second, you are that much closer to getting in an accident. We have seen so many deaths and injuries from texting related incidents and it’s extremely hard not to look down at your phone during a commute. Most of the time, you have no reason to look at your phone in the first place, but you are just drawn to it, automatically.

When self-harm is brought to the table, how do you think it feels when you call someone a cutter? Do you think the person wants to be seen as just that – a self-harmer? Why not call them a musician or a writer? An athlete or an artist? Why not recognize them as the person they really are, not the struggle? Why do negative labels often take priority over the positive ones?

Life doesn’t always go as planned. Routines are broken and schedules are never set in stone the way we want them to be. This is because life gets in the way, whether or not we want it to, and it is up to us to handle those bumps in the road. Some people turn to self-harm as an answer due to something unplanned happening in their life. This can range from getting a bad grade to the death of a loved one. Everyone has a different breaking point and for some, the smallest things can make that break occur. The most important thing is to look at the big picture and decide how important the issue really is and figure out a healthy way to go about dealing with it.

We all have songs that bring us back to a certain moment in time. Sometimes it can be a song from your childhood that makes you feel a sense of innocence. It could be a song shared in a past relationship that brings forth some fond memories. Sometimes powerful lyrics can bring you back to a place of happiness, hardship or love. However, songs have the ability to flick a switch in your brain and bring forward thoughts you want to push away. The problem is, sometimes music brings you to the point where you can’t make yourself to push stop. You may visualize a time when your arms were filled with fresh scars and those images could bring you to the brink of making those self-injury marks again.

To Talk or Not To Talk About Self-Injury When it comes to talking about uneasy topics, everyone holds a different opinion. Many people stray away from conversations surrounding religion or politics because it makes them anxious. Maybe you feel uncomfortable when others openly discuss sex or drugs because you’ve never been that way. For some people, discussing difficult topics can be more comfortably done in a personal setting while others would rather talk about it in a large group. When I speak to health classes about my novel, Noon, I find myself more at ease talking about my past relationship with cutting to a larger group.

A moment of normalcy in self-harm recovery can go unappreciated. But we shouldn’t wait until we are feeling sick or depressed to realize how it feels to be happy or content. We often don’t recognize how we feel when we no longer struggle with unrelenting urges to hurt ourselves. In fact, it usually takes a negative situation to make us realize how lucky we were to feel, well, normal. I know it’s difficult to describe what normal means, but let's try to find our own normal so we can appreciate those moments of normalcy in self-harm recovery. What would a moment of normalcy be for you?

Growing up, I did not have a TV in my bedroom. Instead of staring at a screen for hours on end, I would climb the tree in the backyard or run around in the woods. I was the geek who would choose to write in a journal, over some movie marathon. Even now, I do not have one in my bedroom, but I do have a few shows that I obsessively follow. It’s hard not to get hooked on a show if it grabs your attention for some reason or another. However, I’ve noticed that some shows seem to embrace the idea of self-harm without even realizing it. Shows that are set in different eras or in lands of fantasy may cut the skin of others or their own even if it is not for the reason many harm themselves for today.

It’s important to have people you look up to in your life. Some people look up to certain family members or friends. Maybe you looked up to a positive celebrity such as Maya Angelou, who sadly left us recently. Some people may find comfort in teachers or therapists who have positively affected them. By having a role model, you have someone who can guide you towards becoming a role model yourself. Maybe this person was a self-harmer in their past and they overcame the uneasy battle. It’s impossible for them not to have stories that can help you overcome your own struggles with the addiction to self-injury.

It’s just as hard for those who have stopped self-harming to move past daily, difficult urges to hurt themselves. Triggers are everywhere. When some may see a pen cap as, well, a pen cap, you may see it as a way to release some stress. For those who use paper clips to hold together papers together, you may see the sharp edge as the escape you need. These triggers still hit home for those who haven’t self-harmed in years. Even when you have found other ways to overcome negative thoughts, flashbacks of self-harm may still flicker in your mind. Memories are built into the music you listen to, the smells surrounding you and the people you keep by your side. Sometimes, these memories bring you back to an unsafe time.

We all want to be happy. However, many of us fight a battle that makes happiness not an easy thing to hold onto. We tend to stress over the journey to finding happiness or to finding ourselves. Some people cut or burn themselves because they are lost on this path and are at a place in their lives where they think they need to have all of these answers. When these answers aren’t crystal clear, it can cause unneeded anxiety and stress. You can’t always search for happiness or devote your life to finding the ideal person you want to be. Sometimes those answers find you first and it’s up to you to open your eyes and realize it.