Read Online Skin Game: A Memoir by Caroline Kettlewell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Caroline Kettlewell
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caring.
* * *
Somewhere over the course of that winter I started thinking about killing myself, though not so much because I wanted to be dead, precisely, as because I yearned for resolution, for escape from the scratching distress of now. I thought killing myself was the only way I’d get that. Somehow, I wasn’t really picturing the long-term consequences of dead: that I’d be dead now, dead later, and dead ad infinitum. I was looking for dead in the short term. Dead until maybe, say, it was time to go to college.
Would I really have killed myself? I don’t know. I was skeptical enough even then about my theatrical streak to suspect that suicide might be just another piece in the performance. Slit your wrists in the bathtub, where the warm water makes it easier, I’d heard. The plinking drip from the faucet. The billow of red clouding the water against the bone white of the tub. I could see it all just a little too cinematically, a movie starring the soon-to-be tragically regretted third-person Caroline.
I needed to kill something in me, this awful feeling like worms tunneling along my nerves. So when I discovered the razor blade, cutting, if you’ll believe me, was my gesture of hope. That first time, when I was twelve, was like some kind of miracle, a revelation. The blade slipped easily, painlessly through my skin, like a hot knife through butter. As swift and pure as a stroke of lightning, it wrought an absolute and pristine division between before and after. All the chaos, the sound and fury, the uncertainty and confusion and despair—all of it evaporated in an instant, and I was for that moment grounded, coherent, whole. Here is the irreducible self. I drew the line in the sand, marked my body as mine, its flesh and its blood under my command.
11
Why? That’s the question you always come back to, the tough one. Why cut? Why, of all things, take a razor blade to my skin?
This is a story about how an ordinary sort of person can end up traveling some dark and unexpected roads. So I can tell you that any one of us might sometimes be driven by blind, inchoate need. I can tell you that the idea and the urge to cut seemed to arise from my very skin itself. That doesn’t really answer the question, though.
I can tell you that a well-timed wound focuses the mind marvelously—don’t you remember the sudden clarity that followed a skinned knee, a split lip, when all the world came down to body and blood, nerve endings and adrenaline?
I can tell you that on a global human scale, ritualized self-mutilation is surprisingly common. What in Western culture is pathologized as an indicator of profound dysfunction is in other cultures the very vehicle, the visible sign of a society’s claim upon that body—in scarification, in tattoos, and in measures more drastic than anything I ever considered.
None of this, of course, answers the question.
I can tell you that our bodies sometimes serve as the symbolic ground where order and disorder fight for supremacy, an uneasy divide that to some of us feels as porous and inconstant as a frayed tatter of gauze. The minions of chaos threaten to cross over at every turn, lurking in the cheating spouse, the undiscovered tumor, the murderous dictator, the brewing tornado, the salmonella in the Christmas turkey, the leak in the brake line. At any given moment, life is falling apart as fast as we’re shoring it up.
“Self-mutilation may sometimes be a creative act linked with the restructuring of chaos into … order,” writes Armando Favazza in his study of self-mutilation, Bodies Under Siege.
Not that any of these points necessarily brings us closer to an answer.
I can tell you that I am far from alone, that there are cutters and biters, pickers and pokers, bangers and breakers and burners and pullers and prickers. Some of us are specialists in our chosen method, and some of us care only to get the job done and will take whatever’s handy. Have you ever wanted
* * *
Somewhere over the course of that winter I started thinking about killing myself, though not so much because I wanted to be dead, precisely, as because I yearned for resolution, for escape from the scratching distress of now. I thought killing myself was the only way I’d get that. Somehow, I wasn’t really picturing the long-term consequences of dead: that I’d be dead now, dead later, and dead ad infinitum. I was looking for dead in the short term. Dead until maybe, say, it was time to go to college.
Would I really have killed myself? I don’t know. I was skeptical enough even then about my theatrical streak to suspect that suicide might be just another piece in the performance. Slit your wrists in the bathtub, where the warm water makes it easier, I’d heard. The plinking drip from the faucet. The billow of red clouding the water against the bone white of the tub. I could see it all just a little too cinematically, a movie starring the soon-to-be tragically regretted third-person Caroline.
I needed to kill something in me, this awful feeling like worms tunneling along my nerves. So when I discovered the razor blade, cutting, if you’ll believe me, was my gesture of hope. That first time, when I was twelve, was like some kind of miracle, a revelation. The blade slipped easily, painlessly through my skin, like a hot knife through butter. As swift and pure as a stroke of lightning, it wrought an absolute and pristine division between before and after. All the chaos, the sound and fury, the uncertainty and confusion and despair—all of it evaporated in an instant, and I was for that moment grounded, coherent, whole. Here is the irreducible self. I drew the line in the sand, marked my body as mine, its flesh and its blood under my command.
11
Why? That’s the question you always come back to, the tough one. Why cut? Why, of all things, take a razor blade to my skin?
This is a story about how an ordinary sort of person can end up traveling some dark and unexpected roads. So I can tell you that any one of us might sometimes be driven by blind, inchoate need. I can tell you that the idea and the urge to cut seemed to arise from my very skin itself. That doesn’t really answer the question, though.
I can tell you that a well-timed wound focuses the mind marvelously—don’t you remember the sudden clarity that followed a skinned knee, a split lip, when all the world came down to body and blood, nerve endings and adrenaline?
I can tell you that on a global human scale, ritualized self-mutilation is surprisingly common. What in Western culture is pathologized as an indicator of profound dysfunction is in other cultures the very vehicle, the visible sign of a society’s claim upon that body—in scarification, in tattoos, and in measures more drastic than anything I ever considered.
None of this, of course, answers the question.
I can tell you that our bodies sometimes serve as the symbolic ground where order and disorder fight for supremacy, an uneasy divide that to some of us feels as porous and inconstant as a frayed tatter of gauze. The minions of chaos threaten to cross over at every turn, lurking in the cheating spouse, the undiscovered tumor, the murderous dictator, the brewing tornado, the salmonella in the Christmas turkey, the leak in the brake line. At any given moment, life is falling apart as fast as we’re shoring it up.
“Self-mutilation may sometimes be a creative act linked with the restructuring of chaos into … order,” writes Armando Favazza in his study of self-mutilation, Bodies Under Siege.
Not that any of these points necessarily brings us closer to an answer.
I can tell you that I am far from alone, that there are cutters and biters, pickers and pokers, bangers and breakers and burners and pullers and prickers. Some of us are specialists in our chosen method, and some of us care only to get the job done and will take whatever’s handy. Have you ever wanted
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