Giving up…

The other day I gave up, gave in and stopped fighting. It was awful.

I knew that I would regret it afterwards. I knew it wasn’t what God wanted for me. I knew that I was giving up on a good five months without having done any damage. But I just didn’t care.

Afterwards, I didn’t feel any better. In fact I threw up. Not clever. I’m not even sure what it did help really.

Now it is time to slowly start climbing back onto that wagon, step by step and day by day.

I sing in a Gospel choir, and one of the songs we sing is going round and round in my head: “I want Jesus to walk with me”. Right now, that is so true. He is my only hope.

Who knows?

 

Sometimes when I feel particularly insignificant, I wonder whether it really matters if I self-harm or not. I mean, who really cares if I have a few more cuts and bruises than normal? Yes, it hurts, but does that mean anything to anyone except for me?

I think I am in a slightly unique yet all-too-common situation of feeling like I am all alone. My parents don’t really get me, and sometimes my friends just feel too far away, or they don’t really know what is going on. Sometimes, it feels like I don’t really even have any friends.

I guess the standard answer to this is that God is always there, and He cares. Trite, yet true. But for me, it is because God is always there, and because He cares that other people care as well. The people I go to when I am in trouble or when I feel like I might do something that I will later regret do seem to care for some reason. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it might be because they love God themselves. They know that it is not His plan that I am hurting, and they seek to do all they can to help me not hurt.

I think it is also unhelpful to think that I don’t have any friends. Because I do. They might not be the stereotype you often see others with or in films where you spend all your time together and tell each other all your secrets and walk along arm in arm. But they are still my friends, and they would be hurt to know that I don’t consider them to be a friend.

So there are people who care on some level or other. And even when I feel like I just don’t care anymore and that I just want to hurt anyway, I know that I can’t lie to them. They care about me enough that they want me to get better and not just to stop hurting myself. They are wise enough to realise that they cannot show that they are disappointed if I do harm myself despite their best efforts, or to feel that it is in any way their fault that I have hurt myself.

And I think that that is what makes me contact them if I am feeling low. Somehow it is far easier to say something before than afterwards having to own up. Even if they can’t help. And getting a response from them makes me realise that someone does know and does care. Which is a constant reminder that God knows, and God cares.