Asking My Guardian Angel to Hit Me with a Bus

TW: SH, suicidal ideation, calorie counting, disordered eating.

I was around twelve when I began cutting myself. Much of that time I do not remember: it is a hazy blur of long-sleeve shirts in summer, isolating myself in my room, and being admonished for torturing the family cat by my aunt (who mistakenly believed the marks on my arm were cat scratches). But I do remember that when I faltered and was afraid to keep going with the self-harm ritual, thoughts of my family were what pushed me forward.

Not like that. Not the way you expect. I have two siblings- a twin and a little brother- and I am not always the best sister, but I know I would die for them without hesitation, and I suppose that's what I was doing at twelve years old. I believed very deeply (and very desperately) that God doled out suffering to families in proportion to each other, and every family could only have one sick child.

In hindsight this is ridiculous. But I grasped onto the hope that the more I hurt myself, the more I was protecting my family from the clutches of depression and self-hatred. I wanted- needed - to believe that something good was coming from my self-harm. That every cut on my body ensured my siblings would live in blissful oblivion of how it felt to want to die.

I was wrong. I could not protect them, and to this day- only a few months clean of SH- I still struggle to protect myself.

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I first encountered the works of Henry Suso as a 19-year-old freshman in college. Suso was a 14th century friar who devoted his life to a mystical and impassioned pursuit of God, authoring a multitude of theological books and undergoing a spiritual marriage to Christ. In short, he was nothing similar to me at all. But he self-harmed.

It is unlikely that you will find the word self-harm in any academic or biographical account of Suso: religious experts tend to prefer the term "mortification of the flesh", which to me- as someone who practiced mortification myself- is a fancy way of saying the exact same thing.

This is not to say that all self-harm is religious or "purgative" in nature: as a maladaptive behavior, the emotions and logic behind a person's self-harm behaviors are as myriad and infinite as there are people. There is no one rule or pattern to the disease that is self-harm. But it seems inane to disqualify self-harm that is religious in nature purely on the basis that the responsibility is being pledged to an entity larger than oneself; I cut myself for my family, and Suso cut himself for God. To me, there is little difference.

I could not have expected to feel such a connection to someone seemingly so different from me. Yet, as I studied his writing- and even now- reading the accounts of these "mortifications" I felt a deep, aching pain in my chest and a need to cry. "He was like me," something small and young in me seems to say. "He was like me and he was alone too."

Depictions of Suso's self-harming practices are not difficult to find. On one occasion, he carved the initials "IHS"- the first three letters of Jesus in Greek- into his chest to mark his body as belonging to God. On another he constructed a cross and hammered nails into it, and wore this for eight years to imitate the suffering of Christ. For a long time, he wore an iron chain (stopping this practice only because of extensive blood loss). He slept in straps and padlocks to prevent himself from moving, then wore spiked gloves so if he tried to free himself from his bindings he would only cut himself further. He deprived himself of food and water, of sleep, of pleasure.

He was an ascetic, unique from me only in the severity of his wounds, and in that while I prayed to God as I cut myself I was much less certain anyone was listening. But the fact remains: as Suso did, I spent much of my life certain that pain was holy, and in suffering I could somehow bleed the sin out of me. I deprived myself of food and attempted to place a cut on my arm for each calorie I had eaten that day. I scratched rubbing alcohol into my cuts to make them hurt worse. I beat my legs black and blue with a tennis racket. I forced myself to see how long I could go without touching another human being, without speaking a word aloud, without looking away from a mirror even as disgust rose up in my stomach. At church, I prayed to God first for world peace, then (if he had time and it wasn't any trouble) to kill me.

You can imagine what a ridiculous and tragic miracle it was to feel the first person I could truly relate to about my self-harm was a monk from the 1300s. But that's how it happened. For the first time, I felt I wasn't alone, that someone else had felt what I did, that maybe there was truth to what I had believed as a kid: that whatever was wrong with me wasn't just brain chemistry, but something deeper, a blasphemous soul-sickness that God was responsible for and only He could cure.

It's a tempting thought, and one I have to beat back with a stick every day if I want to get out of bed in the morning. Somehow my 9:40 chemistry lecture just doesn't seem that important when I'm busy begging God to tell me what I did wrong and how I can fix it.

When I read Suso's work, I wonder if he felt this way too. If some part of his soul was terrified he'd been born wrong, like I did (and maybe still do); if he felt different from everyone else, alone and estranged from the all-seeing eye of God, not really dead and not really alive. I wonder if he used pain the way I did, like going over a scribble in ink: staving off dissociation by drawing out the boundaries of your body by where the pain ends and begins.

Some things I don't have to wonder, thanks to his writing. I know he flinched away from pain, and hated himself so much for it that he increased the punishment out of spite. I know he reveled in suffering but sometimes his body's reactions scared him. I know he tortured himself but admonished the girl he mentored for attempting the same thing, with an anger that betrays his fear she would end up like him. How many other people could relate, if his work was more well-known?

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In the end, Suso gave up his self-harm practices by age 40. I'm still working on it. With self-harm, the lines are unfortunately blurry: one could argue Suso takes too much pleasure in his mortification for it to count as self-harm, but I ask myself the same thing in the bedroom or when I turn the water in the shower too hot. Where is the line between pleasure and pain when for some people they seem to be the same thing?

Academics do not, and probably never will, write of Henry Suso as a victim of self-harm. But I find it impossible to ignore that- beneath all of the devotion and the theology and the eloquence- he was someone strangely like me: someone alone and lost, finding direction only in penance, relief only in pain. Even if no one else is writing about it, I can't forget that beneath the robes he was covered in scars.