Giving Up Control

I don’t remember the exact day it all started. I’ve tried so hard to look back and find where everything went wrong. It was such a monumental thing, because it changed the course of my life. I feel like I should know the exact day it happened. But I do know the two more important days that eventually followed.

November 19, 2014—the last day I cut myself

January 3, 2017—the day I finally let it go

Let me back up and explain. I started self-harm sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas my freshman year of high school, 2011. It didn’t take long for it to turn into an addiction that controlled me. Throughout high school, I struggled. I tried countless times to stop, but I always went back.

November 19, 2014 was the day it all changed. I was a senior in high school and it was the last day I ever cut myself. I was trying to make it a couple days without it, so those cuts could heal, but it took everything I had. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I hit my breaking point. Rock bottom was where God finally got through to me. I knew I had two options: either keep going the way I was going and not make it to graduation or figure out how to live without relying on self-harm.

I haven’t cut since then. It wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. The guilt, the shame, and the need continued to suffocate me. Some days were worse than others.

By January 3, 2017, I was over two years clean, but I almost blew it multiple times around Christmas. I was at Passion, a Christian conference for college students in Atlanta. Leading up to the conference God had been working on my heart about giving Him complete control, but I had only thought about it in the context of giving Him control of my future. I was still holding onto my past.

I heard several speakers that day, but the biggest slap in the face was when Katherine Wolf said, “Pain isn’t the end of your story; it is the beginning of a better story.” Until then, I had refused to say that I will never cut again, because I didn’t want to make a promise I couldn’t keep. Never say never right?

Even though I hadn’t cut for over 2 years, it still had control over me. I thought I had control, but I didn’t. I still wouldn’t talk about it. The shame and guilt that came with cutting myself were still very much a strong part of my life.

At Passion, I finally realized that if I was ever truly going to move on I had to say that I would never cut again. I’m not saying that everything magically became rainbows and butterflies. It opened a door for God to come in and heal the bigger wounds that drove me to self-harm in the first place.