March 24, 2026
Recently I gave myself a new tattoo that says "it's not that deep".
When I was a kid I cut myself for a few years. At the time it was seen as self-harm and a symptom of mental illness by everyone around me, so I went along with that viewpoint. I think that being told I must have low self-esteem or be at risk of suicide did more damage than the cutting did in the first place.
I hadn't really thought about my self-esteem before that. I knew that I got good grades, had a few friends, and was treated well by my family. I knew that I cried more easily than other kids if I forgot my homework, but I didn't think it made me worse than them. I thought about the general concept of death a lot, and wondered what it would be like to die, but I didn't think I wanted to kill myself.
There's not really a specific reason I started cutting. I think it was a combination of liking the physical feeling and look, feeling in control of my body and privacy, and the cultural aspects of body modification. When I wrote in my journals at that age I connected it to my new experiences with emotions, but I mainly just liked doing it regardless of how I was feeling that day. It was more of a part of growing up that coexisted with other things in my life than a cry for help. I didn't want help, I wanted privacy and freedom of expression.
I don't consider it self-harm anymore because I don't think it was harmful, and I wasn't trying to harm myself. I could understand if I did something like smoking cigarettes where there's a provable risk of serious bodily harm like cancer, but all I did was make small cuts in my skin with school supplies and shaving supplies. I was at no more risk of infection or serious injury from these cuts than I would have been from skinning my knee on the concrete while riding a bike. I have more visible scars from falling off playground equipment designed with safety in mind. I have more visible scars from jobs where I was expected to get minor injuries as a normal occurrence at work.
This idea that I wasn't permanently harmed or traumatized by falling into gravel at age 11 but I was self-harming and mentally ill at age 12 when I scraped staples across my skin for fun makes me feel weird. Just because I made the choice of where and when to have minor skin damage, it was suddenly frightening to the people around me. I still don't really know how to explain why I find this wrong. I know that most people would say that just being capable of having the intent is what makes it a mental illness, and the fact that cutting isn't a socially accepted form of body art is what makes it self-harm. I just can't get behind the "harm" part of it though.
I understand that a lot or maybe even most cutters are doing it with the intention to self-harm, and to express mental illness, but that wasn't the case for me. Being pressured to talk about my cutting that way did a lot of damage to the way I saw myself at that age.
My friends and a couple adults kept putting pressure on me to stop. I went through a lot of interpersonal drama because other people kept acting like this was some dangerous thing I was doing and that if I would just not cut my own skin it would improve everyone's life. They would pressure me to promise to stop, try to get me to count days without cutting, etc. I'm very lucky that my parents didn't know for most of the time it was happening, and they didn't see it as a huge crisis when they found out.
When I was 14 I gave myself a tiny tattoo with a sewing needle and a bottle of ink from the craft store, and I mostly stopped cutting after that. This is another thing that makes people act like I'm going around to hospitals to drink from the hazardous waste bin. Of course there is a risk of infection with this method, just like there has been for the thousands of years that humans have been tattooing themselves without knowing about germ theory.
After giving myself that tattoo, I only cut once every few years. I didn't really plan to stop or think there was anything good about not doing it anymore. I just felt like I got the same feeling of autonomy and expression from tattoos, but in a much more socially accepted and visualy lasting way.
Anyway I guess the point of this is that people pathologizing my cutting got it wrong, which led to me getting it wrong and agreeing with the pathologizing for a long time.
it's not that deep
more coming soon
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