Entry 19: Don't

Dear 16 year old Jules,

Don’t make that first cut. Don’t skip meals. Don’t purge your food. Don’t exercise for 5 hours when you haven’t eaten anything. Don’t isolate. Don’t push people away. Don’t shut down. Don’t make that first cut. Don’t take those pills.

Tell your therapist what you are thinking about doing. She will help you, and won’t tell your parents.

You may not know what I’m talking about in regards to don’t make that first cut. But you will. The feelings will soon come; once you are introduced to it. That first cut is a slippery slope into the hospitals and scars that will last forever.

Don’t skip meals. You are not fat. Your perception is skewed because of your eating disordered thoughts. That’s fine. Seek help; don’t skip meals. Don’t purge your food; it makes your teeth gross. It makes your breath smell bad. It makes your hair brittle. It takes the color away from your face. It stresses out your heart. It will destroy your kidneys and esophagus. It won’t make you skinny; rather it will make you so unhealthily thin that you will be internally sick. So sick that you will have to get IV fed if you go to far. Don’t count the calories; it will just fuel those thoughts.

Don’t exercise for 5 hours on an empty stomach. Don’t let the voices force you to go to soccer practice, goalie training, and then cross-country when you have eaten nothing. It doesn’t make you stronger. It destroys you. Once your body has burned through all your lipids and adipose tissues, NOT FAT, it will start to eat your muscles. Don’t put your body through that extra work.

Don’t isolate and push people away, it just makes them worry about you a lot more. When they are worried about you they ask you things, and you will just get so fed up that one day you will snap. Don’t put your friends through your snap.

Don’t shut down. Don’t let everything become bottled up; it’s just dangerous for everyone around. You will scare people. You will hurt your little brothers’ feelings for not playing with them. You will hurt your sisters by saying no to everything they ask you; HELP YOUR SIBLINGS. They look up to you. Don’t let them down.

Because I promise if you choose this life you will let them down.

When you are at the point where you believe you cannot push or drag yourself forward anymore, YOU CAN. You underestimate the power that you have to continue moving forward. When you see that bottle of pills, don’t pick them up. Don’t look for all of the other bottles of pills you have. Don’t throw them down your throat like a bag of M&M’s because they aren’t. Taking all of those at the same time is not a good idea. It won’t show anyone how strong you are. They don’t understand. You will be seen as weak.

Don’t let them think you are weak.

Lastly, I beg of you: don’t ever think about taking a razor blade apart. Don’t ever think about taking the blade and using it to carve lines in your skin. Yeah it’ll feel fucking great at first, but the feelings of guilt afterwards will destroy you. The secrecy of your every movement, your every wardrobe, your pain will eat you away. You will lie more than you ever thought you would. You will become a ball full of anger, sadness, hurt, envy, disgust, frustration, loneliness, hysteria, confusion, and helplessness. No matter how hard you try to fight it, you won’t win.

It will take multiple hospital stays. Treatment stays. More hospital stays.

It will cause loss of trust from everyone, guilt for everything, visible cuts that turn into visible scars that you will have to keep covered. Even when it’s scorching hot outside.

You will become addicted.

You will cut yourself whenever you have the chance.

You will hurt those around you.

You will hurt yourself.

Be brave and read this quote. Read it whenever you need support to NOT do these things. It’s from the book you have been reading, Handle With Care, by Jodi Picoult.

“People always want to know what it feels like, so I’ll tell you: there’s a sting when you first slice, and then your heart speeds up when you see the blood, because you know you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, and yet you’ve gotten away with it. Then, you sort of go into a trance, because it’s truly dazzling—that bright red line, like a highway route on a map that you want to follow to see where it leads. And—God—the sweet release, that’s the best way I can describe it, kind of like a balloon that’s tied to a little kid’s hand, which somehow breaks free and floats into the sky. You just know that balloon is thinking, “Ha, I don’t belong to you after all.” And at the same time, “Do they have any idea how beautiful the view is from up here?” And then the balloon remembers, after the fact, that it has a wicked fear of heights.

When reality kicks in, you grab some toilet paper or a paper towel (better than a washcloth, because the stains don’t ever come out 100 percent) and you press hard against the cut. You can feel your embarrassment; it’s a backbeat underneath your pulse. Whatever relief there was a minute ago congeals, like cold gravy, into a fist in the pit of your stomach. You literally make yourself sick, because you promised yourself last time would be the last time, and once again, you’ve let yourself down. So you hide the evidence of your weakness under layers of clothes long enough to cover the cuts, even if it’s summertime and no one is wearing jeans or long sleeves. You throw the bloody tissues into the toilet and watch the water go pink before you flush them into oblivion, and you wish it were really that easy.”