Control: What a Girl in Care Taught Me About Self-Harm

I read something the other day about a bloke called Perez Hilton.

I'd never heard of him.

Apparently he's some sort of celebrity gossip blogger, which probably explains why I'd never heard of him. I'm not entirely sure what a celebrity gossip blogger does, and I'm even less sure I want to find out.

Anyway, he'd been in the news after harming himself while live on TikTok.

My first reaction wasn't particularly sympathetic.

Publicity stunt.

There ya go, I said it.

It was probably an unfair thing to think, and I had absolutely no evidence for thinking it. But we're all very good at being experts on somebody else's life from the comfort of our own armchair.

Then I remembered a girl.

I'll call her Sue.

I knew Sue when I was in care. I knew her well, actually, although there's a great deal about her life that isn't mine to tell, so I won't.

She used to hurt herself.

Badly.

As a young bloke I simply couldn't understand it. In truth, more than forty years later, I'm not entirely sure I understand it now.

Pain is normally something we're programmed to avoid. Touch something hot and your hand is halfway across the room before your brain has even worked out what happened. Bang your thumb with a hammer and you don't immediately think, "Well, that was interesting, let's have another go."

So deliberately causing yourself pain made absolutely no sense to me.

I remember Sue trying to explain it to me once. We were in her room, she was nursing a three-inch cut on her arm, just one of very many. Made by a razor blade she'd run down her arm, with a load of kitchen towel, gently sobbing with the pain.

I remember once seeing her sitting watching telly, a tear running down her cheek and blood seeping from a cut under her T-shirt. None of us said anything to her, but we knew.

It wasn't a big, dramatic conversation. She talked, I listened.

She told me it was about control.

There were so many things happening in her life that she couldn't control. Her own parents had abused her in terrible ways.

Other adults made decisions for her now and Sue lived with the consequences. Social workers, house parents, reviews, moves. All of it done to her.

I was there the day her case worker vetoed her one chance at a normal life by refusing to allow a couple who had previously fostered her to adopt her, meaning she had to stay in the care of Haringey Council.

That absolutely broke her heart.

But this?

This was hers.

She controlled when. She controlled how. She controlled what happened next.

I never forgot that.

And yet I've spent years saying that I don't understand self-harm while merrily indulging in various forms of self-destruction myself.

I've drunk too much when I've been miserable.

I've picked fights for no reason at all.

I've eaten far too much despite knowing perfectly well what carrying all that extra weight was doing to me.

I've done things that I knew weren't particularly good for tomorrow's Richard because they made today's Richard feel a little bit better.

I'm hardly alone.

People smoke despite the warnings being written across the bloody packet.

We drink when we're upset.

We eat for comfort when we're not remotely hungry.

We spend money we haven't got because buying something gives us a little lift.

Some people work themselves into the ground.

Some pick fights.

Some disappear into gambling, drugs or whatever particular escape hatch happens to be nearest.

They're not all the same thing and I'm certainly not suggesting they are. It would be glib to say they are, and disrespectful to people like Sue.

But perhaps somewhere underneath some of them lies a similar, very human question.

What can I control right now?

That's where Sue still stops me.

Because I can understand the bottle.

I can certainly understand the fridge.

What I still struggle to understand is deliberately causing yourself physical pain.

And perhaps that's because I'm looking at the method rather than the reason.

Maybe Sue understood something at fifteen or sixteen that it has taken me another forty-odd years even to begin to understand.

Sometimes people aren't looking for pain.

They're looking for relief.

Or silence.

Or escape.

Or perhaps just one tiny corner of their life where nobody else gets to make the decision.

Control.

Which brings me back to Perez Hilton.

I don't know the bloke. I don't know what was going through his head and I'm certainly in no position to decide whether what happened was private despair, a cry for help, something else entirely, or some complicated mixture of all of them.

And perhaps that's the point.

My first reaction was to judge something I didn't understand.

I've done that before.

A long time ago.

And a girl called Sue tried to explain it to me. I'm finally, slowly, starting to listen.