The First Time I Thought I Was Dying by Sarah Walker

Author:Sarah Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2021-06-07T03:00:49+00:00

Inside Out

When I exercise, I go red. Not the dewy, healthful glow of a body whose pistons are running smoothly; my red is alarming. Splotchy, expansive. People have crossed the street to avoid me when I’ve limped home from a run. The blood in me comes so close to the surface I taste it on my breath.

When I exercise, I become aware of just how much blood I contain, thrumming through my veins at five kilometres an hour. I become aware also of how hidden it remains, how rarely it breaches the bounds of my skin. In that, I am surprisingly uncommon.

I wasn’t much of a knee-grazing child. Moving at pace was never my style; books were more my speed. But the taste of blood suffuses my early memories. I recall cuts and nicks, the moment before the red starts flowing, the strange stillness of the body torn open before the inside seeps out. I remember how quick I was to jam a cut in my mouth and suck the salt-sweet tang until it stopped. That process – the cut, the wait, the rush of blood and the suck – was one of the fundamental rhythms of my childhood. Each step had its own pace. The wait was the longest, stretching time out into a strange hush: the gap between a mistake and its consequence. The bloom of blood sped time up again. The taste is unique. It never stops being strange.

I attended an all-girls private school in Melbourne’s bay area, a scholarship kid in a second-hand uniform. I loved that school, loved the roses and courtyards and the message that girls could be anything they wanted. I maintained a joyously sheltered existence, ordered and elegant and deeply naïve.

Within my cohort, the only suffering to which I was attuned was the sort that resulted in starvation. I had laser sight for weight loss, for the emergence of rib cages and wrist bones from flesh. For other types of maladaptive behaviour, for tights in summer and rolled-down sleeves, I had no eyes at all.

When we spoke about self-harm, it was with the derision of the ignorant. We hated emos. We rolled our eyes at the year nine girls with dyed black hair and dark eyeliner. We repeated the words ‘down the road, not across the street’ when discussing the use of knives. The goal for suicide, we knew, was to open your veins from elbow to wrist in one deft movement, thereby assuring a swift death. To cut horizontally was to commit the gravest possible sin for a young woman: to do something for attention.

It wasn’t until years later, watching beads of blood crowd a friend’s fresh wound, that I considered how much suffering could attend a request for help. But we crowed at it, with the viciousness particular to teenage girls. The sort of viciousness that comes with feeling a deep, unstable need for validation and understanding, while also obsessively policing any visible manifestation of that need in others.

Self-harm starts early.

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