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content warning: self-harm
You can cut through any kind of distress with a little pain. Depression and self-loathing, shame that brings you to your knees, grief. I’d separate one hair from the others and pull on it for as long as I could, feeling the filament stretch and cling to its place on my scalp until it couldn’t any more, delivering a tiny zap that seemed to clarify the air. Then I started digging my nails into my palms to keep from crying and pinching the webs between my fingers until the sensation left me breathless but alert. In college, when everything in my life stopped making sense, I’d wrap my hands around my own throat and squeeze until the world blurred into gentle softness. It cut through the existential sadness like a beam of light.
But nothing cuts better than a knife.
My mother had been dead for nine months the first time I took a knife to the inside of my bicep. I used the point, scratching a hundred lines into the soft flesh near my underarm. It sank in like teeth to a peach. Sometimes I used the tip of a needle instead. Rhythmic scraping, bundles of red lines like bales of hay. Lines that bloomed with seeds of blood, that revealed the softness of whatever lies under my skin. A hundred lines on my arm, swiftly carved, then a hundred on my belly. A hundred on my inner thigh, then my wrist. The first stroke always felt like a long-released breath. The rest just amplified the feeling until I reached a glowing state and warm beads rolled along my arm to the tips of my fingers. Whenever I started developing metaphorical pressure sores, the knife or the needle made me weightless, thrumming like a plucked string. It turned my stone of a body into glittering vapor. Writing about it gets my heart racing. There are few feelings so pure when you’ve been so low.
The catch is that the low is never far away. At one point, I was hiding thirty patches of scabs when my spouse Jacob undressed me in the dark. His hand brushed against the roughness on my left arm. I winced (that’s the other catch: once the euphoria wears off, you’re left with loose pain and shame until your skin heals). He froze, then reached for the light switch. Seeing me, he wept.
I tried to explain.
“It helps me,” I said. “It gets me back into my body.” He looked at me with profound sorrow and perhaps a little bit of fear.
“If your body is where you want to be, why do this to it?”
I could go a week without hurting myself. Usually I drank instead, because if it didn’t make me fall asleep, I’d get the spins and have to focus on that. But drinking was so public, even if I did it at home.
On Halloween, I undressed along the way to the shower—black shoes in the driveway, Cruella DeVille wig in the stairwell, black dress in a heap beside the bathtub. I vomited in the toilet, then turned on the shower. I don’t remember much else besides crying about my dead mom, lying face down on the shower floor while water pooled around my neck and shoulder. Jacob darted in and out of the bathroom, taking care of the dog, setting up a bed for my sister, who was staying over, and making sure I hadn’t drowned myself even as I puked again in the running shower, face down and dead asleep. Far too public to do things like this on a regular basis, and I don’t like the blank spots in my memory—my memory is all I have to prove that I’ve existed.
Sometimes I couldn’t cut myself or drink to excess, so I’d mix weed edibles with Benadryl until I was catatonic. I had Oxys from my vocal surgery, but I’d thrown them out a few months before my mother died. Lucky, because I dreamed about those pills even in the best of times.
The only thing that stopped me from pulling the knife out of my desk drawer for three weeks straight was a family trip with the nieces and nephews. We were going to a hotel on Cape Cod for a winter getaway. A hotel with a pool. So I had to be able to wear a bathing suit. Grief may have deranged me, but my love for the children in my life provided a small signpost along the road of grief coping: Don’t fuck up around the kids. I talked to them about my grief in age-appropriate ways, but I wasn’t about to unwrap an edible in Nana’s hotel room or get alcohol poisoning in the hot tub.
Three weeks was enough time for the scabby patches scattered around my body to heal. I looked at myself in the mirror, turning from side to side. Clear.
The hotel didn’t inspire calm. It was school vacation, completely packed with children, and the pool room was one of the most humid environments I’ve ever experienced—and I’ve been to the rainforest. The scent of chlorine burned the hairs in my nose. Some kid was always shrieking. Just because I hadn’t hurt myself didn’t mean the weight of my grief had lifted or that I’d suddenly found some way to jam my mind back into my body so I didn’t feel like a robot and a loose piece of flesh forced to experience the world together.
Something was calling me. Driving towards the Cape, I’d caught glimpses of the winter sea, and something inside of me declared itself a mermaid. We’d done a family walk on a beach, wind whipping in our hair, sand skittering across our windbreakers, and I’d been dying to touch the water. But the moment was never right. It was too cold to take off my shoes, and the waves crashed erratically on the shore, nothing like the even, regular waves of summertime.
The call got louder, and I started to hear it in my dreams. I’m not a strong swimmer, so going to the sea alone was risky. Perhaps the idea that it seemed like a suicide mission, or at least a possible death, appealed to the part of my brain that was aching from twenty-one days without any self-harm.
My spouse and his family were congregated in his mother’s hotel room, unaware that when I’d stepped out to go to the bathroom in my own room, I’d changed into a bikini, sweatpants, and a very long wrap sweater, pocketed my car keys, and slipped out the door closest to my car—my mother’s gray minivan, now mine. I drove the mile and a half to the beach by feel, eyeing the brush that got shorter and scrubbier along the barren highway, turned left into a neighborhood, and felt the ocean call me. It was raining—I wasn’t expecting rain.
Then there I was, in a five-car lot twenty yards from the water. Sand blown up and obscuring the lines that I parked between. I sat there with the wipers moving, revealing slices of the stormy ocean with every swipe. No one knew where I was. Me in my minivan, and two spots down, an old man smoking a cigarette out the window of his pickup truck.
A watcher. A witness.
I wasn’t unaware of the dangers of entering the ocean alone during a storm. But it wasn’t about doing something dangerous. It was about gluing my brain and my bones back together. Shoving my consciousness back into my physical form, even if it felt like shoving a wet foot back into a sock. When you’ve come so profoundly undone, a planned reunion of body and soul simply isn’t an option. You either feel the impulse or you don’t. And if you do, by god, you absolutely must answer the call. Because it may never come again.
For several long minutes, I sat in the front seat, heat on full blast, drying out my eyeballs. I felt myself sink into the seat, my eyelids lowering. For months, my body had played this trick on me, forcing a sleep shutdown whenever I was on the brink of something either terrible or amazing. A sort of protective paralysis.
I glanced at the man in his pickup truck. His cigarette was a short stub. He would leave soon. But I needed him there. To call the Coast Guard if I went down and didn’t come up. To run to the edge of the water and peer for me under the waves. Most importantly, to bear witness to my madness. Maybe he could drive home and tell his buddy that he saw the craziest thing this afternoon. He sucked another half-centimeter off his cig, and I pictured him throwing it on the wet sand and backing out of the parking spot. I flung open the door of my van, keeping it running.
I saw him turn to glance at me—what’s she up to? I reveled in his gaze as I ran to the water’s edge. Breathed in, a slow, shallow breath—am I supposed to do something? I pressed my hands together like a prayer. It seemed mystical and intentional enough to count. Then, before I knew it, I’d shoved my sweatpants to my ankles. Flung my sweater onto the beach. And I was flying, flying forward.
“Go,” I whispered to myself as my feet touched the steely gray water. Go, I repeated in my mind as I kept running. I was in at my knees, in at my waist, I flung myself face down through the waves, felt the water rake its frigid fingers through my curls and along my scalp. My skin tightened everywhere at once and I felt the most recent wave recede, pulling me out into the sea only as I surfaced and gasped like I’d never tasted air before. Water, flung from my hair, fell in front of me like pebbles. My legs worked like pistons and I was on the shore, skin suddenly aflame and blooming. I heard the echo of a scream blending with the gulls above and I realized it had come from my throat and I was gasping again, again, like the air was water and I’d never had a drink. I shook my head like a dog, looked at my thighs, glistening and red, gathered my things and ran to the car, grinning like I needed to light up the world with my teeth, like I was ready to take a bite of everything I laid eyes on. Salt seeped into the corners of my mouth, slid across my tongue, the sand on my feet ground into my burning skin. The man in his pickup truck shook his head at me, but he was smiling. He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground as I threw myself into the front seat of my car, my mother’s car, laughing and laughing and laughing, wide-open and euphoric and finally, finally one being. Like I’d glued myself together with magic.
By the time I arrived back at the hotel, I was shaking violently and my nails were purple, but the euphoria still coursed through my veins, coated my nervous system with the most divine glitter in the universe. I poked my head into Jacob’s mom’s hotel room. The little kids were on the floor, working on a puzzle.
“You guys,” I said breathlessly. “I just jumped into the ocean.” I felt the smile stretch across my face again like a blooming peony, a rainbow, the string of a bow. My mother-in-law looked at me, an anxious expression flitting across her loving face.
“I wish you hadn’t,” she said.
“I needed it.”
And I did. For the first time in nine months, I could see a way forward. The faintest glow of something ahead. Proof that maybe I could keep living. That grief could expand outside of my body like a mist, instead of filling me like heavy stones. That it could flow off of me into the vast anonymity of the ocean and be carried in and out with the tide. I felt the floor beneath my feet. I felt the bones of my legs, the breath in my lungs, the muscles in my arms, the wetness of my hair. In the middle of it all, the hot blood of my beating heart.
Kimaya Diggs is an essayist and musician living in rural Western Massachusetts. She was a 2017 Callaloo Fellow in poetry and a 2023 graduate of the Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop memoir incubator program. In 2020, Kimaya co-headlined the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Tell It Slant Poetry Festival alongside Ada Limón and Jericho Brown. She is currently working on her third studio album and completing a memoir manuscript. Kimaya also writes and produces “Kimaya Diggs Deeper,” a weekly newsletter & podcast that explores creativity, art-making under capitalism, and reasons to hate the internet. Listen to her music and read other words at www.kimayadiggs.com or @kimayadiggs.