Red Opium.

(background)
Once a week, I go to a GLBTQ youth support group in St. Louis. This week the discussion was open discussion about sex. It started off good with some people wanting to know how to use different condums and what the differences were and alternatives to condums. But then someone asked about inapropriate touching at school and it spun off into a discussion about whether you should tell if you see someone doing that stuff.

(the point)
Well, then someone posed the questions of which situations should you tell on people. Cheating was one situation, as well as harassment, and suicide and cutting got brought up. First someone didn't know what cutting was and it had to be explained, and then we ended up getting into what felt like a pretty long discussion (probably 15 to20 min) about self-injury and suicide. I was the only one there who's ever experianced having suicide attempts and self-injuring, so I was just kinda sitting there awkwardly not wanting to say anything. It's just something that I don't talk about. Everyone else in the group couldn't seem to grasp why someone would do that and the advisors explained about emotional pain and that the people were trying to reach out and get help and that it really wasn't about the actual act of cutting but more about something else going on in there life. They all seemed to think that if someone was hurting themselves that they should tell an adult, like a school nurse or councelor. It just made me feel uncomfortable to sit there listening to all of that and not really wanting to out myself about doing that stuff, mainly because if I said something that was taken the wrong way, the advisors would have to report me to the state, and all the stuff that I delt with two years ago would happen all over again. But I did feel that I could have and probably should have contributed something to that conversation, like a defence to the other side that not everyone is an attention cutter, some people are addicted to the actual cutting, and that just because they told you doesn't mean that they need you telling someone else, and all of the hardships that I've personally seen with that. It was just an awkward situation in and of itself that really caught me off gaurd. Do you think that I should have spoken up more?

~Lee
~Without rain, there'd be no rainbows.~