Read Online Skin Game: A Memoir by Caroline Kettlewell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Caroline Kettlewell
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to punch the wall, pull your hair out? Don’t think you might not be one of us.
I can tell you that the “typical” self-mutilator, the textbook case, is someone just like me: young, female, probably with an eating disorder thrown in (but that’s another chapter), who started cutting sometime early in adolescence.
I can enumerate the various theories of self-mutilation, the sociocultural and the psychosexual, the biogenetic and the family-dynamic, all of them argued ardently by their various proponents armed with statistical charts and case studies.
Would any of these details really explain why?
I can offer you, as I have, my little penny-ante repertoire of teenage troubles. Collectively or individually, however, do they constitute sufficient grounds for taking up self-mutilation? Even as I set forth these explanations, I want to withdraw them again. I think what I thought when I was twelve, and thirteen, and fifteen, and twenty: None of these is reason enough, none of these is legitimate cause.
Well, how many troubles should equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There’s probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem, to most people, like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse.
We’re always looking for the logical explanation, the smoking gun, the inscrutably sagacious detective who will reveal all in the final chapter—but some things are too complex to suffer reduction to a simple equation of why/because. I know that cutting was my defense against an internal chaos, against a sense of the world gone out of control. What I can’t tell you is where that chaos came from, what exact balance of factors blew up the maelstrom of my mind. Maybe what drove me to cut doesn’t have any cause I can name. Maybe it oozed up from nowhere, from within my blood, my cells, my very DNA.
Our family tree is hung with cranks and eccentrics, the merely batty, the existentially despondent, and so on down the precipitous decline to the drinkers and depressives and suicides. My father, in trying to explain to me once how I was related to a distant cousin, took me along a genealogical pathway strewn with bodies, including one entire family done in by razor and rope and revolver. So maybe I got my father’s eyes, my mother’s nose, and in the bargain an altogether murkier inheritance.
I suffered homesickness so extreme when I was a child that it bordered on panic, with frantic midnight calls begging my parents to come rescue me from wherever I had been invited to spend the night. I was paralyzingly afraid of the dark, and sometimes visited by nightmares so vivid and strangely disturbing that I can remember them still in almost perfect detail. I was so easily and thoroughly absorbed into the imagined world of my books or my toys that the lived world sometimes felt less real to me. It was an absolute policy of mine that I would not read any book in which the animal died in the end. In retrospect, should we have understood these things as indicators of a mind playing in the wrong key? Or is it only in retrospect that they start to look odd?
* * *
On a trip to West Virginia once, I stopped at the place billed as the official headwater of the Potomac—a paltry spurt of water burbling up into a trickle of a stream choked by winter leaves. In the end, if we could ever really pursue the question why to its true headwaters, we might find it is often no more than this: a beginning so trifling that it hardly bears notice. The flip of a switch. The flash of a neurotransmission. Maybe there was always something amiss, like a bulb planted and forgotten that blooms when the season is right. I can’t stop wondering what, if anything, about who I’ve become was written inevitable into my chromosomes, lying in lurk, waiting for the
I can tell you that the “typical” self-mutilator, the textbook case, is someone just like me: young, female, probably with an eating disorder thrown in (but that’s another chapter), who started cutting sometime early in adolescence.
I can enumerate the various theories of self-mutilation, the sociocultural and the psychosexual, the biogenetic and the family-dynamic, all of them argued ardently by their various proponents armed with statistical charts and case studies.
Would any of these details really explain why?
I can offer you, as I have, my little penny-ante repertoire of teenage troubles. Collectively or individually, however, do they constitute sufficient grounds for taking up self-mutilation? Even as I set forth these explanations, I want to withdraw them again. I think what I thought when I was twelve, and thirteen, and fifteen, and twenty: None of these is reason enough, none of these is legitimate cause.
Well, how many troubles should equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There’s probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem, to most people, like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse.
We’re always looking for the logical explanation, the smoking gun, the inscrutably sagacious detective who will reveal all in the final chapter—but some things are too complex to suffer reduction to a simple equation of why/because. I know that cutting was my defense against an internal chaos, against a sense of the world gone out of control. What I can’t tell you is where that chaos came from, what exact balance of factors blew up the maelstrom of my mind. Maybe what drove me to cut doesn’t have any cause I can name. Maybe it oozed up from nowhere, from within my blood, my cells, my very DNA.
Our family tree is hung with cranks and eccentrics, the merely batty, the existentially despondent, and so on down the precipitous decline to the drinkers and depressives and suicides. My father, in trying to explain to me once how I was related to a distant cousin, took me along a genealogical pathway strewn with bodies, including one entire family done in by razor and rope and revolver. So maybe I got my father’s eyes, my mother’s nose, and in the bargain an altogether murkier inheritance.
I suffered homesickness so extreme when I was a child that it bordered on panic, with frantic midnight calls begging my parents to come rescue me from wherever I had been invited to spend the night. I was paralyzingly afraid of the dark, and sometimes visited by nightmares so vivid and strangely disturbing that I can remember them still in almost perfect detail. I was so easily and thoroughly absorbed into the imagined world of my books or my toys that the lived world sometimes felt less real to me. It was an absolute policy of mine that I would not read any book in which the animal died in the end. In retrospect, should we have understood these things as indicators of a mind playing in the wrong key? Or is it only in retrospect that they start to look odd?
* * *
On a trip to West Virginia once, I stopped at the place billed as the official headwater of the Potomac—a paltry spurt of water burbling up into a trickle of a stream choked by winter leaves. In the end, if we could ever really pursue the question why to its true headwaters, we might find it is often no more than this: a beginning so trifling that it hardly bears notice. The flip of a switch. The flash of a neurotransmission. Maybe there was always something amiss, like a bulb planted and forgotten that blooms when the season is right. I can’t stop wondering what, if anything, about who I’ve become was written inevitable into my chromosomes, lying in lurk, waiting for the
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