The Lines Project 2015

December 19, 2015August 2, 2016Kiddo's Korner 24/7 3 Comments

The Lines Project
December 15 – December 20th

December 19, 2015
Sometimes as a parent you wish to have the power of just being able to tell your child not to do something and have them stop doing it. Sometimes you just want to take their pain and cover it with so much love that they don’t hurt anymore. Sometimes you have to share your pain with them so that they know that you don’t judge them and in fact you truly do understand and that you won’t punish them in an attempt to convince them to stop punishing themselves. I first shared our The Lines Project two years ago and I won’t retype it all here but I will share the links from last year’s post which includes the original post as well. Today we are finally making our commitment to refrain from self-harm a permanent statement by getting matching tattoos. We’ve wanted to get these tattoos for two years because it means so much to us and because it really is a commitment to never ever cut ourselves again no matter how hard life gets. If you are familiar with The Lines Project then you may know that having the lines on your right wrist means that you’re not a cutter and that you support the movement to help those that are. If you mark the left wrist it means that you are a cutter but you support the movement to help yourself and others. Today when my son and I go get ours inked on we’re getting them on opposite arms. We were texting each other about it after we made the appointment for today and we explained why we want it on the wrist we want it on. Even though my son hasn’t been a cutter for over two years he’s getting his left wrist done because in his words: ” I think I’d definitely want it on my left wrist even if just to cover (or slightly cover) the scars that are there and mark it with positivity instead because I’ve wanted to do that for a long time” and I’m getting my right wrist done because as I text him back: “Because the right side means you don’t cut and I will be commited forever to not cut because I will have the tattoo permanently saying that I don’t. I promised you that if you would stop then I never would again and when I have felt like doing it I just couldn’t break my promise to you. So it will be like a promise to myself and it will match yours and to me that’s huge” and then his response made me cry on my lunch break at work: “And that is exactly why I know I want to get this tattooed. I think it’s a great thing and it being on my left will not only cover what has happened maybe but it will make that wrist something entirely different to me. Because when I look at it I’ll only think of you and never the negativity anymore. It being on the left for me is basically guaranteeing I never do it again. So I think us having opposite sides will work perfectly. Because this goes a lot deeper for us than it does a lot of people because we gave it even more true purpose.”
I have always felt some guilt about my baby boy cutting himself. I had never allowed my sons to see any of the marks I had cut into my skin because I had been hiding it from everyone since I was a kid and was really good at keeping it covered. I knew that the hurt that had been mine as a child wasn’t what caused him to repeat my behavior because I had made sure that I protected him from those types of things but obviously other hurt had been done to him. I had failed him in some way. I failed to protect his heart but also somehow I had failed to notice when he had first begun to cut himself as evidenced by the old scars when I first saw the fresh cuts. Then again I failed him when I tried to get him to stop hurting himself just because I explained that he could get an infection. I didn’t want to think that he was doing it because he was hurt on the inside. I didn’t want to acknowledge that he hadn’t just been copying something he had seen other teenagers doing. I didn’t want to tell him that I was a cutter too. For one thing it wasn’t something I liked to acknowledge about myself. I wanted to give my children the impression that I was strong and in control so that they could rely on me. I didn’t want them to see that I was broken. I didn’t want to make it a bigger deal than it was. If I had shared my truth with him from the beginning then maybe he would’ve stopped the first time. Maybe not but there’s always that thought in my head. It breaks my heart to think that my child has ever suffered because of me. After forbidding him didn’t work and crying and begging him didn’t work I finally talked to him about my cutting and knew that I was basically admitting to him that he got it from me. Somehow, someway I had passed on my brokeness to my son. I have never told him or admitted it outloud or even written it in my journal but I think about one instance that I had forgotten about it until I had discovered he was broken in a similar way that I was broken. I may tell him about it today if I can verbalize it. If it doesn’t hurt too much. If I don’t he can read it here…
One night while I was quite pregnant with him I was very upset and hurting emotionally and my pregnant hormones didn’t help matters at all. I was so upset that even though I hadn’t cut or bruised myself much since I had reached adulthood I gave into it that night. I cut myself several times and banged my fist into the fresh cuts repeatedly just trying to feel something other than the hurt I was feeling inside. He was in my womb and I was abusing my thigh but he was experiencing the emotions and chemical changes in utero in whatever way babies experience life from inside their mother. It certainly wasn’t nourishing for him to be inside of me at that moment and I don’t know if it has anything to do with what happened later but it couldn’t have helped. It’s a strange coincidence that I was in the parking lot of a tattoo parlor in 1998 pregant with him when that incident occured and today we’re going to get tatoos to commit to never harming ourselves in that way again.

Our matching tattoos.

His Sharpie lines from the first The Lines Project compared to the permanent ones.

The artist that did our work for us today is such an amazing person. He listened to us and made both of us feel so comfortable sharing our story even when I had to pause to cry. He was the perfect person to become part of our story.

Read my first and second The Lines Project posts by clicking below
My last 2 The Lines Project posts

Not 100%

March 19, 2015June 9, 2015Kiddo's Korner 24/7 Leave a comment

I always feel like I am not 100% here. When I was a kid I developed a top layer which allows me to interact, but in my basic self I am very aloof and cautious. It’s like I am watching a play in which I am acting and I try to behave the way one is supposed to behave when they are interacting with normal people. I try to be normal or funny but it is always to some degree faked. By ‘normal’ I don’t mean like an average person – I mean acting like nothing is wrong. I have spent the majority of my life disconnected because I can’t remember a time when my connections with people didn’t turn bad and sometimes very bad and even though the bad was never EVER mentioned later it was always there even when I was alone.

I used to wait for the magic moment when I would be part of the world again.

When I was very young I had some inappropriate things done to me. Unfortunately this is not uncommon. As a three year old you can get a sense that things aren’t right but you can still be persuaded to do things and go along with things with a little reassurance or bribing or bullying. I grew up with a large family. I had thirteen cousins living in the same town and we saw each other all of the time. All of the aunts and uncles seemed like parents to all of us. I had older cousins that were like big brothers and sisters and they treated us all great for the most part. They watched over us at school and in the neighborhoods and let us play softball or football with the big kids. Sometimes, though, they would make fun of me for my ears or throw me in a deep lake or river and yell that an alligator was coming to eat me. Whenever someone that I loved was mean to me or teased me I would feel betrayed and crushed. I cried very easily when someone I loved mistreated me even though I was very tough physically. Having so many older cousins actually made me tougher. If other people were mean to me or teased me I never cried. I was known in elementary school for putting bullies in their place. I never let anyone at school see me scared or see me cry.

I had a few cousins that were just a year to three years older than me and we got along and fought like most cousins but these cousins that were barely older than me had me participate in activities that they must’ve learned from adults. I don’t know if they had been molested or had watched movies or seen magazines but the fact is that for years there was sort of a “secret club” that I was expected to participate in. If I didn’t want to or started to cry I would be made fun of and threatened to be “told on” for things I had been talked into doing before. I got the reputation of being a “cry baby” when I was three. I was very emotional and easily hurt or scared. Even the adults knew me as a cry baby. I don’t know if children between five and seven know how to make someone an unreliable witness but I was considered to be a baby about being made fun of and a scaredy cat. I never knew if anyone would believe me if I told what was going on. I also feared getting into trouble for being a participant. When I was seven years old I said I wasn’t going to be in that stupid club anymore even if I got in trouble. I would rather be punished for something I didn’t want to do than to be punished by continuing to do things I didn’t want to do. I stopped being a cry baby and pretended to not be afraid of the dark but people still treated me as if I were my past weaknesses. Then when I pretended that the negative opinions of family members didn’t bother me at all some of my cousins and my siblings began to ridicule and belittle me. I was a very athletic child, especially for a girl and could run faster, climb higher, score more points and even out wrestle my older cousins. My cousins and siblings made fun of me and called me cry baby and scaredy cat despite my accomplishments and since they knew about my earlier weaknesses and all of the award givers only knew about the fake me, (the pretend like everything is normal me) then I felt that they must be right.

Even as I got older and hardened my protective shell my family members knew how to push my buttons.

It took a lot more to get me to cry but my family members knew my weaknesses and they would put a lot of effort into breaking me. Sometimes I would last so long that I thought they’d give up but they were persistent and knew eventually I would be a blubbering mess. Even worse than anything physical was the emotional abuse. Occasionally at dinner my dad would say “all you have to do is look at her sideways and she’ll cry” and I knew that I was not going to get to enjoy my meal. Somehow it became a game to make me cry. My dad would point at me and laugh just to make me cry. If my brother and sister didn’t help him make me cry by also pointing and laughing they would get in trouble. My mom never participated but she never made them stop. I think if she tried then it would’ve only made things worse. Once when I was about twelve and it hadn’t happened in a long time and I had started to really think my family had grown out of laughing at me it happened one last time. I sat there and took it. My siblings seemed very reluctant to do as my dad said but eventually they were made to laugh and point at me. I took it for a long time but when I felt the tears burning my eyes and clogging the back of my throat I got up and went to my room. My dad yelled for me to get back to the table because I hadn’t been excused. I had never left the table without asking to be excused. My dad came into my room and made me go back to the table and insisted I eat even though I was likely to choke as I sobbed at the table. No one said anything until I was finished and I asked to please be excused. Thankfully that particular game was never played again. No one ever mentions it either.

I know I may have some problems and behaviors because of the things that were done to me emotionally but also I have issues that have their root in the inappropriate things that were done to me physically. I was very young and so were the boys in the secret club so really I don’t hold them entirely responsible for their behavior. Only one time when we were older did one of them even mention it. I was about thirteen and spending the night at my cousins house which was a usual thing when my fifteen year old cousin said “Hey, remember when we used to….” and made a motion with his hands that we used to use to signify what we did. I said ” I don’t know what you’re referring to” and he said “you want to do it right now?” and I pretended like I didn’t hear him as I continued on my way to the bathroom. I locked the door and I was so scared because I thought he might try to force his way into the bathroom but even more so because it meant that all of those memories were TRUE. I had tried to bury them and had started to believe that none of it had actually happened. I was afraid he would bring it up again when I passed back by to go to bed. I was afraid he would try to force me to do something and that I would have to scream and awaken the entire house and everyone might find out about what I participated in from three to seven years of age. I sat in the bathroom trembling and crying for so long that when I went back out he was not in the living room anymore. I laid in bed all night trembling and nauseous because of all of the things that began floating to the surface of my peaceful facade like cadavers breaking free from roots they’ve been entangled in surfacing in still waters. Still waters run deep.

One of the things that bothers me the most is that even if I could forget about all the bad in my past that I did NOT bring on myself there would still be those people that know what they did.

They can think about it anytime they want to. I wish ignoring it would make it go away completely. I wish that certain people could know what their precious angels did to a genuinely GOOD person (without them knowing it had anything to do with me.) I am a good person, I actually am a naturally good person even though being mean could be so easy after being taught so well by being tortured by others from an early age. I suppose most of them were too young to actually know how much they were destroying in me. Even when the physical acts stopped they would hatefully make fun of me and I was known by then to be a crybaby so they got away with it for years. Most of the time I just played along like it was all just fun and games. After I was grown and put in a situation where I had to spend time with the same people that treated me inappropriately they just acted like nothing ever happened and we were just one big happy family.

No matter what is going on I always feel like two people. The one that I would’ve been if things had gone right and the fucked up one that I actually am no matter how good I am at pretending. They are both just as real and have different emotions and different thoughts and ideas. Whichever one I am being at any particular time the other one is in the background with opinions and judgments of how I am behaving. It’s like I am actually a third person who is a combo of the other 2 just faking like they are ‘normal’ the whole time. I wish I could’ve been who I was meant to be. I have occasionally been able to convince myself that I am GROWN and miles away from any of them and then something would happen and it all comes flooding back and I am helpless and three years old. A couple of times I have found out about others that the same people messed up in the same way and I feel guilty about not saying anything before because maybe I could’ve kept it from happening to them. Then I see how they are called liars and whores and I am so glad I never told.

When I ignore the past for a long time it all comes out in anxiety symptoms. I never believed in actual panic attacks until I started having them myself. At first I just thought I was having heart attacks or strokes and wouldn’t believe the doctors who claimed they were attacks caused by anxiety. I definitely had anxiety and after a few years got to the point where I was over the panic attacks and so happy that I ignored the doctors that said I would need medication to cope. I recovered by starting my yoga practice and intentionally forgiving anything that was ever done to me. I forgave myself. Sometimes I have to REFORGIVE myself.

I want to be my true self but have no idea what that could’ve been. I was with the same man for almost twenty years and he never knew everything that I didn’t talk about from my childhood. He knew of some of the stuff but no one will ever know about everything I went through. But I am GROWN now and should just get over it. I try to let it all go. I make the decision to not let the past effect me and I know I have control and I should make myself better than my tormenters by taking care of me. I have the power to make myself real but I am too afraid of being torn down to put myself out there. I will never have ONE true honest connection with anyone ever because I can’t share my truth and I can’t trust anyone to not be thinking horrible things about me and making fun of me while they pretend to be nice. People are experts at pretending. I honestly feel that no one can like me because if they do then they are liking the fake me…which isn’t me…and if they knew all of my parts that make the real me then they couldn’t like me and they would be revolted by me. People sometimes pretend to like someone so that they can later talk about how ugly or disgusting or stupid they think they are. I’ve even occasionally done that when someone INSISTS on talking to me and they are annoying to me so how can I judge others when I am very good at ridiculing people too? We all have ugliness in us. We’ve all been treated poorly at some point in time and that fact is no excuse for behaving poorly ourselves. I would hate for the few people that I’ve joked about behind their back to hear the things I’ve laughed about. I would be humiliated and feel like such a heel. I would feel very bad but probably not as bad as they would feel if they knew. I usually treat people with respect and consideration and really have no excuse for the times that I don’t.

I am getting old so I at least should begin acting grown and forget my past and never talk bad about anyone again because who knows what each person has been through? It’s easy to ridicule the ridiculous but it doesn’t make me feel less ridiculous.

The Lines Project 2014…and my post from 2013

December 15, 2014December 22, 2015Kiddo's Korner 24/7 2 Comments

The last day of the first The Lines Project I was inspired to share my story by my teenage son who had shared his. He inspired a lot of people via his social media accounts and I am proud of him. I am reposting it today the first day of the 2nd The Lines Project. I am happy to say that we continue to refrain. The Lines Project is a great way to bring awareness to the fact that ‘cutting’ is a very real issue and also to help people that are living with it to realize that they’re not alone, they’re not freaks and they have support to find other outlets for dealing with anything that may make them wish to self-harm

The lines my son drew on my right wrist

The third year of The Lines Project we got tattoos…click here

My post for the first year of The Lines Project was really scary for me to share. Read it below…

WARNING: REALLY LOOONG POST EVEN FOR ME!
Today, December 20th, 2013 is the last day of The Lines Project and last night I had my kid draw my lines for me. It was a very powerful moment for me and I’m so thankful that we both had our lines on our right wrist rather than the left. The Lines Project or just ‘The Lines’ is a movement currently going around on social media to bring awareness to and support for those that participate in self-harm or ‘cutting’. It’s a movement geared toward young people but I promise you that people of all ages deal with this issue. There appears to be no website for this movement, but that’s not stopping it’s momentum. To be part of the movement a person draws 6 lines on themselves with Sharpies. To show your support for those who are experiencing self-harm, draw six Sharpie lines on your right wrist December 15-20. If you are experiencing self-harm, you can express yourself by drawing the lines on your left wrist (or you can just draw them on your right if you don’t want too many questions.)
Although the actual number may be higher, statistics show that 10% of young people engage in self-harm activity. That number is probably very low compared to reality and who could be surprised when we as adults have so many socially accepted behaviours that are more harmful to our bodies and disruptive to our lives than cutting could ever be.

I sorta do and I sorta DON’T want to share my story here but OMG I think I’m actually going to. I might just type it all out and not hit ‘post’ ….I don’t know. If you are reading this I shared it and believe me I don’t blame you if you stop reading right now. We all know that Kiddo can ramble on. ESPECIALLY in the wee hours of the morning. If I do share my story then it’s because I honestly believe that some children and teens began cutting because it was sort of a thing. A fad is what older generations would call it. An accessory to the ‘goth’ or ’emo’ “cultures” but for many it’s a private and shameful act and not shared even as part of anybody else’s ideas of tortured youth. Whatever the reason may be I seriously want the trend to end. I support the project because maybe it’ll make it cooler (is that still cool to say?) to NOT participate in self-harm. Maybe NOT cutting will become fashionable like not smoking did when I was young. For those that are harming themselves for other reasons maybe bringing awareness to the issue will allow them to talk about it and not feel sooooo much like a freak or ashamed or embarrassed. So apparently I’m going to share a little of my story here. Yikes!

It’s kinda hard to make this make sense. I’ll just begin and see what happens….it’ll more than likely be a rambling train of thought, semi-literate attempt to explain something that is difficult to explain.

As a young girl I regularly went through periods in which I would harm myself. Usually cutting but often banging/bruising, jabbing and picking. I would intentionally rip my fingernails past the quick because that would hurt for days and days. I sometimes would rub dirt into my self-inflicted cuts to promote the possibility of infection. Throbbing pain was interesting. Sometimes I would slide the skin of a popcorn kernel between my tooth and gum so deep that it would take days to eventually remove. I did NOT do this for attention. It was NOT a cry for help. I kept it hidden. I knew that other people (adults and children alike) would be appalled to see the injuries. I would be seen as a freak or a crazy person or someone seeking attention. I didn’t really like attention because you can never tell when attention will turn ugly in some way. So I took great care to injure myself in ways that were either hidden by clothing or could be explained. Seriously, do people really so easily believe that a neighbors cat needed to be rescued from a tree or a rooftop? I think they want to believe it so they do…even physicians readily accept the most transparent stories. I actually liked the way injuring myself felt and how it looked….I just knew others wouldn’t. This was before after school specials brought awareness to this. In my mind I was the only one that was doing such a thing. I’m not going to go into all the issues I had growing up because everyone has issues growing up. I will just say that the pain from a cut or a hit made sense. There was a real reason for it. I can say that feeling a physical pain was preferable to feeling internal emotional or mental pain. I will say that I understood my injuries and they understood me. Sometimes during a difficult situation I would squeeze my hurt places and the bright pain would distract me from the pain of being me. I had very low self-esteem and have felt ugly my whole life. The physical scars I watched fade away from my flesh were preferable to the scars I had that seemed to never fade. I walked around trying my best to appear ‘normal’ and not draw attention to myself but sometimes felt like the pain I gave myself not only overshadowed other pains but also was one that I was in control of. I could start it and I could make it stop. It does become addictive though. I would crave the sharp pain of a cut during stressful times and would actually sigh with relief after the 1st cut like people do after their 1st drink after a long day.
I seemed to have grown out of it and I kind of thought of the behaviour in a nostalgic light and felt like the behaviour allowed me to survive my childhood. Then a few years ago I had what I thought of then as a ‘rough patch’ (funny now because I think of my life back then as ‘before the shit’…..how did I think I had problems!?) and just sort of fell back into my old habit of cutting/bruising myself. It felt like coming home. I imagine that falling back into any addiction feels like this. At this point I was married but my husband was on the road a lot so I managed to keep it mostly hidden. When my husband did see the rows of cuts he would get upset. I would feel bad. I would say it wasn’t serious. I even sort of became a proponent of ‘cutting’. I would occasionally meet an adult who was very concerned that a cherished child was self-harming. I would say it’s actually one of the safer self-destructive coping mechanisms kids dabble in. I would ask if they’d rather their child/neice/nephew etc. drink, use drugs, have unprotected sex OR do self-harm, which I explained is almost always superficial and not permanent. I would point out that drinking is a coping method that isn’t only socially acceptable but socially promoted and does so much more harm physically and destroys families and kills innocent people due to drunk driving yet no one sees this as a cry for help unless it becomes very destructive. Drinking and drugs are not only more damaging but so much more expensive. I would advise these people to talk to their loved one without judgement. LISTEN to their loved one. Don’t scold them. Don’t reprimand them. Don’t make them feel bad or like a freak. Tell them you love them and hate to see them hurting physically but also in any other way. I even suggested they advise them to use clean razors and to keep the cuts clean (I know!). In my opinion, I told them, this is the mildest and safest form of self-harm. It’s just not socially acceptable.

And then one day I discovered that my baby. My angel. My sweet perfect beautiful baby boy was. cutting. himself…

everything changed in an instant. This was NOT okay! WHY would he feel the urge to do this!? What bullshit I had spouted to others! My darling child PLEASE don’t hurt yourself. I have lived your whole life PROTECTING you from every discomfort. Please please please PLEASE don’t hurt yourself. The knowledge that he’d already devised a method for keeping his injuries hidden for long enough that older cuts had become healed scars was devastating. I remained outwardly calm while explaining to him that his skin is his 1st line of defense against harmful bacteria which can lead to infection and possibly the loss of a limb or death and told him that it might feel good but it just wasn’t worth the risk. I went to bed that night feeling as if this had to be MY fault. I had either failed him in some way or he was genetically cursed because of me. I swear my husband looked at me with these same accusations in his eyes. My children never knew I had an issue with cutting. I didn’t want to mention it to them. I was their mamma. I had answers not problems. I didn’t want them to see me as damaged or weak. A freak. I didn’t tell my child that I had been injuring myself for years by the time I was his age. I was ashamed. Embarrassed. Lost. Hurt. Scared. Helpless. I needed him to never experience any discomfor or pain. I had known for years that he had self-esteem issues. Like me, my youngest child had very low self-esteem. He honestly thought of himself as UGLY which I totally understood because that’s how I’ve always seen myself but couldn’t possibly understand because he was beyond perfect. I don’t know how or why he felt this way because I had made certain that he was never treated the way I had been treated as a child. I understood that no matter what people say it’s your own opinion of you that counts the most. If you see yourself as disgusting it doesn’t matter if it’s because other people convinced you or if you convinced yourself. The same goes for beautiful. Fortunately this child of mine has now come up with his sense of how he wants to look to feel good about himself.

From the 1st night I discovered that my baby was hurting himself I could never hurt myself again. I prayed that I had talked some sense into him. I berated myself for missing the fact that he had been doing himself harm for months or even a year! When they get to the age of bathing and dressing themselves it’s easier to hide. I hoped that my talk of infection and loss of limb or life would persuade him. I knew how addictive the sharp pain could be so I had my doubts. I did some research and found that nowadays it’s sort of part of the emo culture to harm oneself. I’m not positive I managed to keep the question “so if all of your friends jumped off a bridge would you?” out of my persuasive argument but by the time I discovered he was still cutting himself deeply and more elaborately than I had ever done I knew that whatever the motivation he had for hurting himself he HAD to STOP. I wouldn’t allow one single person on the planet to harm my child even if it was himself so I had to get through to him. I told him I understood. I told him I was also a cutter so I knew it was a compulsion. I told him that almost no one knew this about me. I told him he was perfect and beautiful and that he just wasn’t ALLOWED to hurt my baby boy. I reiterated the infection dangers. I told him that I knew it was sorta cool amongst kids that dressed the way he did and listened to the music he listened to to cut themselves but it wasn’t actually cool. He told me that it had nothing to do with what other people were doing and I believe him because the same was true for me. The third time I begged him to stop and told him he could talk to me about anything. The fourth time I instigated a daily strip inspection. I was never caught as a child but I hoped that my parents would’ve gone through the same sort of process to stop my destructive behavior. I tried not to make him feel punished or judged. I tried not to shout or demand he obey me. I TRIED. I FAILED.

My heart broke. Whatever his motivation for self-harm I wanted it to stop. Just like every coping mechanism we have different motivations and not just person to person but situation to situation. Whether it’s due to trends or self-loathing or the need to punish ourselves, the increased trend of our young people to hurt themselves is just not acceptable. I want to support the movement to stop self-injury. Whatever the reason. If you encounter a loved one, or anyone really engaging in self harm please try not to sound judgmental no matter what your loved one is doing. Be light. Be love. Be accepting and acceptable. To be all of this you must realize that you are worthy. You are beautiful. You are someone’s inspiration. You are strong. YOU ARE WEAK!! You are THE FORCE, the embodiment of the universe. YOU are LOVE!! Don’t judge. Don’t hate. Make your world a better place. We are not all physicians but I think if we all tried to do as Hippocrates is purported to have attempted: to first do no harm – then our world could only be a better place.

When my son used his Sharpie marked right arm to mark my right arm it was so meaningful to me that I almost couldn’t bear it. To those out there marking their left wrist please please see how unbelievably cool we are and determine to follow the trend of right wrist marking. When I was about 21 it had become totally boss to turn down a cigarette at a party by saying “nahhh, I gave those up months ago” so giving up old destructive habits is cool. Even people that had never smoked could use this out and people would respect that. Like, “been there, done that, don’t want it anymore so I quit” So share this post, forget this post, take it to heart or even remember it one day when certain situations arise but either way I’ve shared it. When my son drew my lines on last night I told him that I hadn’t injured myself since the 1st night I discovered he had been hurting himself and he told me he hadn’t cut himself in about 8 months. That feels better than anything ever has.I told him that maybe I would write something about it but that maybe it was just too big to post for the public.
Now here comes a bit of bragging. My child has many many fans and followers on instagram and his band page and has reached a lot of young people. I don’t follow him online but I do see some of his stuff. Many of his post won’t make sense to many adults. He posts lots of selfies. Typical teen posts I guess. The thing that makes me so proud is that he shared his struggle with his fans last year and a couple of months ago he shared that he was observing an anniversary. He hadn’t hurt himself in 6 months. A friend of mine called to tell me about it. She said so many people commented on his post that him sharing his story and his success at stopping helped them to stop too. It was very moving. My friend said she cried. I cried. Anyway this is already waaaay too long so I’m gonna wrap its up. I’m sharing my story because my kid shared his and to be part of The Lines Project.

The 3rd The Lines Project post we got Tattoos…click here