Some people are so desperate to feel alive they’ll hurt themselves

By David McElroy · November 26, 2012

“I need to show you something.”

That’s what I heard as a friend came to sit down where I was eating. She sounded serious, but I didn’t know what might be going on.

She looked around to be sure nobody was watching. Then she held her arm close to her body to shield it from other people and then turned the arm over. I saw several small cut marks. It was shocking to see, even though there weren’t nearly as many cuts as shown in the picture above.

I knew that my friend had been having problems and needed counseling. I knew she had done minor cutting earlier in her teen-age years. I even knew she had been having more problems lately. But I didn’t know she was feeling like doing this again. I asked her why she was doing it.

“I wanted to feel something,” she said.

I’ve read a lot about cutting in an effort to understand it. I’ve encountered it before — all in teen-age girls — and everyone I’ve seen it affect has seemed to get over it in time, usually with good counseling. From everything I’ve read and the few I’ve talked with who’ve been affected by it, it seems that the people who go through this have been experiencing intense, out-of-control emotions. They seem to have repressed the intensity of the hurtful emotions they feel so much that they end up numb.

Some things I’ve read say that girls who cut themselves have pushed their feelings aside so much that they feel as though they don’t exist anymore. Inflicting pain on themselves in minor ways is a relief valve, because it allows them to feel something for a change.

I’m not going to give you any details that could give away who this young woman is, because some people who read this know her. I’ll just say that her home life is such that she’s miserably unhappy and feels completely powerless. She feels invisible and isolated. And she has no idea where to turn for help.

I haven’t figured out anything I can do to help this friend. Talking to anybody involved would probably just make matters worse. If I thought she were suicidal, I’d feel compelled to get her help no matter what. But the problem isn’t anywhere near there, as far as I can tell. I just don’t know where it’s going to lead. And that’s breaking my heart.

I’ve seen studies estimating how widespread cutting is claim that 17 percent of teens harm themselves in some way, but I’ve also seen studies claiming the true figure is more like 46 percent. All I know is that it’s a lot more widespread than I once realized.

I don’t have anything profound to say about this. I haven’t figured out how to help my friend. It just frustrates me when people I care about are in pain and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m afraid the percentage of people who are hurting on the inside — and maybe hurting themselves on the outside in order to feel what they’ve become numb about — is higher than we might realize.

As you walk around and see people acting happy, friendly and functional, realize that for some percentage of them, that’s just an act. A lot of the people we meet are hurting.

Although there’s a lot of dispute about the original source of the line, I like a quote that says, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Many of the people around you today and tomorrow and every day are fighting very difficult battles — in their own minds, in their own hearts, in their homes, in their workplaces and in plenty of other ways.

Be kind and loving to someone today. It might make a difference for someone who’s hurting and who just needs to feel alive.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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