"What's depression like?" He asked.

"I survived, I recovered, I'm strong now."

Pretend like you're standing in a field. There's nothing there, just grass. It's incredibly hot. The ground is burning underneath your feet, but there's nowhere you can run to.

It's only getting hotter and hotter. You're sweating and the only thing you want to find at that moment is an escape, because you know that if you don't find one, you'll die.

Suddenly you see a lake. The water is clear and blue.

Now here is the thing that it's all about.

You think you can swim. You think you have everything under control if you just jump into that lake and swim around for a bit. Let the amazing cold water touch your burned skin.

So you jump.

You jump and start swimming. But after a while, you realize you can't swim anymore. You lose control and start drowning. You slowly sink down in the deep water, that suddenly isn't blue, but black.

You start kicking with your legs, desperately trying not to drown.

You realize it was a trap. The lake that you thought was an escape, swallows you and sucks you under.

Then a hand appears. You grab the hand and you get pulled out of the water. You don't get pulled out of the lake, just out of the water. Just for a while, until you slip away and sink down again.

The hand starts appearing more often and becomes you're only way of surviving.

You are dependent of that hand. Without it, you die.

This is what selfharm is to me.

The thing I just described up here, is what I feel every, single day. The feeling that I'm drowning and the blade is the only thing pulling me out of this dark water. The only thing saving me from dying.

When my dad started abusing me years ago, the tention inside of me built up. I started to get panic attacks, nightmares, the feeling that people were after me while they weren't. I started to see things that weren't there. Shadows, figures, movements.

I developed anxiety and tried killing myself. I couldn't cope with everything around me. At that point I was standing in that field, burning ground underneath my feet, fire running through my veins. I felt like a haunted animal.

The first time I touched a blade was four years ago. I was twelve years old. I had another panic attack and remembered something I had read a few days before. It was an article about someone who had self-harmed who said it was "a way of coping with the problems he had". He wrote that "it relieved, like a cold lake in the middle of hell."

That was the first time I cut and it indeed felt like I jumped into a cold lake. It didn't remove the pain, but turned the pain I was feeling into a different kind of pain. A pain I could actually handle.

I didn't cut for two weeks. But then I started drowning. My depression and anxiety got worse. I got panic attacks more often. I was a complete mess.

The blade appeared again. It was like the hand I described earlier, that pulled me out of the darkness I was falling into.

As soon as I realized that was the only way to keep me from drowning, I started relying on the blade. The one or two cuts a week, became more and more and more.

I couldn't live without it anymore. If I didn't cut for three days, I would suffer from extreme break downs.

I've heard other people who self-harm saying that it is a choice. That you're in control of taking a blade and ruining your own body.

I don't agree on that. Yes, the first cut I made was my choice. I could've put the blade away and find something else, but at that point there was nowhere else to turn to for me. At that point, I was in so much panic and fear, that cutting was the only escape for me.

I think saying cutting is an addiction, isn't the right way to put it. Cutting doesn't become an addiction, it becomes oxygen. Your whole world starts spinning around that one thing. Without that one thing, everything falls apart.

Everything.

I know it's hard to understand for people who have never experienced anything like this and I don't expect people to agree with everything I write here. I just want to point out, that saying we need to stop, isn't as easy as you might think it is.

We depend on it, like you might depend on food, art, sports. We need it to survive. We need it to keep our head above the dark water.

I've been dealing with this for four years now. I still can't live without it. I don't know when I'll be able to say "I survived, I recovered, I'm strong now."

To everyone out there who recognizes this, I'm there for you. Somehow, we form a family. We need to be there for each other. Not judging or asking why we're fucking ourselves up, just being there and letting each other know that we understand how it feels. That we understand what we're going through. That we are there to help.

So one day we can all say "I survived, I recovered, I'm strong now."

Without hurting ourselves ever again.

- Kyran