Editor’s Note: this month’s blog post is written in the first-person point of view of our front desk receptionist/social media coordinator, Jessica Buettner

This month is Self-Harm Awareness Month, a month that reminds us to pause and acknowledge the complexities of life, even when they’re not obvious or noticeable to loved ones. Self-harm is when a person intentionally hurts their own body. A person who self-harms usually does not intend on dying by suicide, but they are at higher risk of attempting suicide and dying by suicide if they do not get help. This can be a serious topic to discuss and we want to make sure if someone is self-harming themselves, either emotionally or physically, that they are not alone and that it will be okay.

For this month’s blog post, I decided to share my personal experience with self-harm, more specifically, emotional self-harm. This all took place around 2008/2009 when I was in middle school. Back then, I was very different from the other kids and it was so obvious that I was always the first victim of bullying. Every day, I would walk down the halls of the school being called various names by various school kids. “Stupid.” “Useless.” “Spaz.” “Dumb.” It wasn’t just name-calling either, it was their actions that felt like I would take various bullets to the heart every time I stepped into that school. They would talk about me behind my back, leave me out of their friend groups, and mock me for the way I was. There was one day when it got so bad that a girl legitimately told me “Nobody wants you here.”

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I started harming myself emotionally. I would go home from school, lock myself in my room, blast my music, and journal nothing but negative thoughts and affirmations about myself. I would constantly write things in there like “Maybe they’re right, maybe nobody does want me around.” “Maybe the world would be a better place if I didn’t exist.” “Would anybody miss me if I wasn’t here?” “Do people truly see me as a stupid, no-good, person that no one wants to be friends with?”I would always think of new words to critique myself with because all of the negative thoughts would get to me to the point where I would think about harming myself physically.

I never thought about harming myself in that way before, but I thought it was the only way to get rid of the pain that I went through every single day when I went to school. The pain was so much for me and I didn’t know what else to do that I didn’t resort to cutting myself. I resorted to more emotional self-harm which led me to thinking of doing something much worse than that: I thought about committing suicide. I thought that if I ended my life, no one would even care enough about me to miss me. For a long time, I wouldn’t think about anything else other than a plan for how I would kill myself and how the world would be better off if I didn’t exist. 

These thoughts lived rent-free for several years in my head, until I got to my sophomore year of high school. I began to become involved more in my school and make more friends through the band and theater programs. I even became involved in my community because I always had a strong belief in myself helping others. The more I became involved in my school and my community, the more I started to connect with my classmates and I became friends with some of them. I got to talk to them more and developed true friendships with them and they did not seem to care about my past or the names that people called me. Instead, they would call me names that kept saying things that would build up my self-confidence more and more. “Kind.” “Caring.” “Full of love.” “Happy.” “A good friend.” I started to see the people who cared about me more and started to block out the people who were bullying me. It was in those first few years of high school that I realized that people who truly care about me are the ones that I should focus on. 

Pretty soon, all of the negative affirmations that I was journaling about every day became positive affirmations. I would continue to write more about the good things that happened throughout my life and then, I thought about how I would turn the pain I once experienced into joy. That’s when I came up with taking my journal entries and creating poems and short stories. It kind of felt like a true outlet in which I would reflect on everything that I went through and also allowed me to use my real-life experiences as inspiration for my creative writing. 

Of course, I knew that I couldn’t do this all on my own and I knew that I needed to rely on various resources to help me become the person that I am today. I have gone to several therapists and each one of them has become an essential part of my process of rediscovering myself and finding my overall happiness. They helped me realize my full potential of becoming the version of myself that I am happy to be every single day. They helped me open my eyes and see the good things about the world that I live in and help me see the bright side of things. My friends who are like my second family, my boyfriend who loves me for me, my parents who care for me, my job that I love doing, my hobbies that help me stay creative, and even the small things, like butterflies and performing random acts of kindness for strangers.

The Juniper Center is also an amazing place with many clinicians on staff who are here to help anyone reach their true potential and help them on their journey to reinvent themselves. Every single clinician here at the Juniper Center is open and ready to help anyone who is also experiencing any form of self-harm. We believe that anyone is capable of becoming a stronger version of themselves TODAY. If you or someone you know is struggling with self-harm, don’t be afraid to seek help and call the Juniper Center at 847-759-9110, extension 2.