Caroline Kettlewell quotes:
-
For some reason, I believed that I had above all else an obligation to protect everyone-- my teachers, my family-- from the knowledge of my cutting. What they did not know would not cause them pain.
-
The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds."
-
You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I'd crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution.
-
The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.
-
I needed cutting now the way a diabetic needs insulin. It was a bulwark, steady and unyielding, I could throw up against the insidious, corrosive lapping of a whispering sea of uneasiness.
-
That's when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.