She’s alone in the bathroom, feeling empty, feeling nothing. And so, perhaps out of a desire to feel something, she glides the blade across her arm. The deep red drops confirm that, yes, she is alive.
He’s just returned from a disastrous date with his girlfriend, or is she his ex-girlfriend now? He’s a miserable failure, he feels, worthy of punishment. He wants to remember the wounds of this moment, to mark them into his skin as they’ve marked his heart, so that he’ll never forget. And so he reaches for the piece of broken glass…
Maybe it’s not “she” or “he.” Maybe it’s you, or a friend. The thing is, there is a way out of the bleakness, a way from this hopeless cycle to one of hope and meaning and joy. Truly.
Rachel Zoller has been there. She knows the emptiness, the lack of any emotion besides fear. Year after year after year she turned to cutting as a way of dealing with her issues:
“I spent all of the 90s cutting. I had started self-injuring to try to drown out the internal struggle that raged daily in battle. But as I kept telling myself that I shouldn’t be feeling, that I needed to distance myself from my emotions, I ended up becoming completely out of touch with them. Over time, I didn’t know how I felt about anything anymore. I knew that tragic events should fill me with grief, but I didn’t know how to feel sad. Even the death of a friend evoked nothing.”
Even as a Christian, she struggled with what she recognized was a disorder. But then she found herself emerging from the miserable web…
Whether it’s you or a friend who is cutting, or even if you know nobody who practices it, let me encourage you to read Rachel’s story.
