I began to receive frequently, mainly from teenagers, messages from people confessing that they self-mutilated. I remember the discomfort I felt when I opened the photo sent by a follower and I found a strong image: an arm full of recent cuts and several scars that reveal an ancient and persistent anguish.
Trying to understand what they feel to the point of hurting their own body, I discovered that the answer is far from simple. It is much wider than I imagined.
Some people get hurt in an attempt to transfer emotional pain to the physical, in a desperate attempt to ease the soul a little. Others are cut off because they no longer feel anything: no love, no anger, no peace, no fear. Therefore, they prefer to feel pain to live in an insensitive way.
What I learned with the «ugliest woman in the world»
But I also received a message that reveals another profile of self-mutilating. A young woman told me that she cuts herself because she feels disgust for her own body. She told me with sincere and profound words the following: «Every time I look at my body I feel disgust and I decompose. I have dizziness, vertigo, headaches and even vomiting, all that when I look in the mirror. » A sharp statement, is not it? But no more cutting than the tormented attitude of one who is submerged in despair.
When knowing cases of that type, we do not ask: «What could have caused that pain?». We can see people, but we can not see the emotional baggage they carry. Some are so heavy that they prevent them from leaving the place and even prevents them from breathing. How suffocating and imprisoning it must be to carry that burden! After all, what could have made this young woman feel disgusted with herself?
«I suffered bullying, I was abused when I was 6 years old by several men, and one of them is from my family. It was not once, they were many times. I tried, Manu. I hit them, but they were many. My family knows, but he never
