I was staring at myself in the mirror, eyeing the scars and wondering how I would make them go away in time for the spring break trip I'm taking with my family to Florida.

Now, I don't cut myself often, but when I do the cuts are deep and they leave wide, bright розовый gashes behind. That kind of stuff is hard to hide.

The reason for the cutting? I use it as what a shrink might call a "coping mechanism." Sometimes things build up inside of me, little things and big things. As time lengthens between cutting sessions it's like I can feel the pressure inside of me pressing outwards on my skin, taking up so much Космос it crushes my lungs and makes it hard for my head to focus on anything else. When I cut, it's like the connection between my inside and the outside is a hole in a balloon that lets all the pressure slip quietly away.

My Вопрос is: Isn't that a good thing? If you're feeling stressed isn't release of that stress healthy, even if in the form of self-harm?

When Ты think about it, cutting isn't that different from punching a подушка или going for a run или any of those other activities that are considered "healthy outlets." You're still getting rid of the anger, pain, and stress that Ты feel, right? So where is the difference between a good outlet and a bad? If something works for a particular person, that's fantastic and that grand, elusive, oft-blamed society should not be claiming otherwise.

Here's the thing: most people shy away from pain. It's a terribly sensitive world we live in, and people typically equate pain with poverty. I believe, however, that pain is a part of living.

It's a commonly held belief that in romance, for example, having your сердце broken once или twice shapes Ты into a еще mature and grounded person, right? So, should it be different for physical pain?

Some people do even like intentional physical pain in certain situations, such as in sex. There are countless individuals who enjoy the scratching and the biting, because sex is raw and primal, pain is raw and primal. Arguably, the most pure way of life is the way that keeps a person in touch with basic ancestral desires and actions like sex или adrenaline chasing, and pain certainly falls under that umbrella.

Thus, self-harm, a form of pain, is not an evil.

As I'm Письмо I'm thinking about how many objections to my argument there must be, but I think a lot of that argument probably relates to mindset rather than actual self-harm. Certain self-harming individuals certainly have dangerous and destructive thought processes, I know. Some people see themselves and worthless individuals incapable of so intangible and nonspecific a term as "getting better."

The thing is, though, that the psychological issues of those individuals is a separate entity from self-harm itself. Yes, they are connected and the mindset often leads to the action, but no, they are not the same. People can self-harm for reasons other than feelings of worthlessness, and the largest alternative reason is probably my aforementioned personal example of using it to "cope."

I've also heard that Дебаты about "self-respect" and "respecting your body" in relation to self-harm. The claims are that self-harm reflects a lack of self-worth if Ты hurt yourself and physically cause damage to your body.

However, a person's body is their own. They can do with it what they will. Others have absolutely no right to say what an individual can или cannot do to their own skin because humans have the right to choose. We have that freedom.

This same thinking is applicable to people who sleep around или get body modifications like Татуировки - you might disagree on principle but that does not give Ты the right to dictate their choices. They are not wrong because they act differently than Ты do.

So, my argument is that self-harm is not as terrible as many make it out to be. A positive outlet, no matter what it may be, is beneficial to a person. Why pity people who are helping themselves?