notes from a person passing through

Written while looping “Mine” by Alice Glass and wondering if pain can ever really become mine again, after someone else claimed it first.

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ

It’s easy to romanticize survival when you’re no longer bleeding. People want a clean narrative concluded in three, possibly clean and presentable parts: resilience, rebirth and recovery. What about the versions of survival that doesn’t look like healing? What about the scars you gave yourself just to remember that your body was still yours? There are wounds no one gave me but myself. To reclaim my shell, I didn’t want beauty or softness, I wanted to interrupt the silence, to say: no one gets to hurt me without leaving a mark I control. Maybe that’s why, even as a baby, I refused to be fed. As if the absence of my mother needed to echo somewhere. A kind of protest born before language. A silence I weaponized.

It’s never clean. Vomiting, bleeding, starving were never graceful ways to protest, but they were mine. And protest was never supposed to be neat anyway. My therapist once told me he noticed how often I say “vomit” when talking about expression. I think he’s right. I don’t open up; I get rid of what I can’t hold anymore. Expression, for me, has always been something physical. Something I force out when it becomes too heavy to keep. I still feel owned by things I can’t name. I still flinch at shadows shaped like hands, sound like threats and vibrate like earthquakes. 

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ

My self-harm was never strictly about drawing attention. I didn’t want anyone to see it, I wanted someone to  look at me and just know. To stop me without my having to ask. Without my having to break the silence first. I fantasized about being saved, but only in secret. Therefore, I kept it all under my clothes. Kept it hidden even from mirrors. It wasn’t until years after the bleeding stopped that I could finally speak about it. And even then, the words felt not quite right. Too soft. Too late.

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ

I don’t hurt myself the way I used to. There’s no more blood, but the rituals remain, just dressed in subtler clothes. I starve my body like it’s a negotiation. I smoke like I’m trying to burn something out of me. I drink like I’m trying to dissolve parts of myself I can’t bear to carry anymore and sometimes like I’m trying to fill a hollowness that nothing else ever touches. The ache of it echoes, and I pour things into it just to make the silence stop. It’s still self-harm. Just quieter. Easier to explain away. More socially acceptable. But the truth is, I’m still trying to be saved without asking, which is pathetic. Still hoping someone might see past the performance.

And sometimes, they do. The people I love aren’t blind. They catch glimpses. They ask questions I don’t know how to answer. And when they do, my mind goes blank. I freeze. Being seen stops me in my tracks even though I ache for it. It’s like I wait for someone to look straight through me, and yet the moment they do, I disappear. I still act like it’s nothing because naming it makes it too real. Too raw. Too mine. When that contradiction becomes too loud to carry, when I can’t hold the silence or the ache, something from “Mine” creeps back in. That desperate, guttural need to reclaim what was taken. Even if only for a moment.

Maybe I’ll write more pieces like this. When a song stirs something up and I don’t know where else to put it. A place to let something land.

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟᶻ 𝗓 𐰁 .ᐟ