Loving Myself a Beginner's Guide

Learning to love myself has been a pre occupation of mine since a very early age.

A point of crisis was age 14. My disliking myself was at my own all time high. I cried when ever I looked in the mirror. I was heart broken by the image staring back at me.

I was in my first  year in high school and my last year.

I had no friends.

I got my matches out and went in to my mothers drawer and took her couple of her bobby pins.

They where metal and I got them very hot with the flame of the matches and I held it to the flesh of my fore arm.The pain brought tears to my eyes.Yet there was some thing satisfying about it.

I believed at the time that physical pain would erase my  emotional pain.

Some girls took long baths or polished there toe nails and I did this.

I knew it was wrong and abnormal but that didnt matter to me. 

I was in a strange mental state. I thought the burns where beautiful. I thought I was making a bracelet for myself that never needed polishing.

The bobby pin burns where nearly white and puffy against the redness of the surounding skin.

I took deep deep breaths with each press against the skin. But I found it pleasurable.

Eventually it led to buying cigarettes and lighting them and holding them against my arm. The pin was a little intense but I found I had a pretty high pain thresh hold.I tried smoking them but did not get much from it.

I remember being with a college boy and he asked me was I a sadist or a masochist. I didnt know what the words meant and I asked my dad and told him the question the boy asked me.He got a very confused expression and he got angry so I looked up the words in a dictionary.

Apparently there was a name for this. 

I wanted scars. I wanted scars to show in the future that my life had been pain full. So I put rubbery tape on them infection will cause deeper scarring.

This was so many years ago in another life. 

You could smoke back then in places. I lifted my sleeve and showed my new friends what I was up to.

We hung out. And drank. I was drunk one night when I grabbed a hand full of napkins and put them on the table with my friends and started a table top fire. They stared and the nice manager came and extinguished it with out asking me to leave or even scolding me/us. He was young himself and always smiled to us. I usally got the right ppl and took what ever they offered as long as it was free.

Mostly they where pot and the first couple times it did a job on my head and I got suspicious and paranoid. Later on it relaxed me but I didnt feel any need for it. Coke was offered at bars and all it did was make me talk a mile a minute.The only chemical consoling I got was alcohol.

Im glad that I never sought mental peace any more from pains and burns As I grew up.

My arms are marked up but when I am real tanned its very hard to see them but maybe it has the purpose of reminding me to like myself a little more.