It’s lunchtime at Maria Carillo High school and 15 year old Amanda Wells can look around and spot more ‘cutters’ than she can count on her fingers. The trend of cutting, or self-mutilation, is a theme poured over in chat rooms and counselors’ conferences, but Amanda thought that no one was getting at the heart of what it feels like to cut your own body.  In this sound collage, she focuses on the fundamental urge to self-mutilate, what it would take for someone to stop, all the while hinting at some secrets from her own life.

Behind-the-Scenes Essay

By author/producer Amanda Wells

Why did I set out on this story?  What were my questions at the beginning? Well, I originally did it to discover two things. Number One: WHY DO PEOPLE CUT? But Number Two, a very different question: WHY HAS IT BECOME COOL TO DO THIS? These questions stemmed from people around my school showing off their cuts like symbols of being cool, and from hearing my own friends start talking about it. The Voice of Youth director and I thought we had two good questions that could look at the problem from all its angles. So the universal question becomes how much of self-destructive behavior is kids finding a way to respond to real psychic pain from abuse, depression, anxiety, etc. versus how much is a cultural thing, just kids trying to fit in, in a culture that’s created dangerous, seductive ways to rebel, whether it’s by joining a gang or becoming a cutter.

So I started with those two key, universal questions, interviewing those who cut and having long talks about self-injury with people in Voice of Youth. I even did a lot of research on the issue. I found all these articles on the Internet that would go into great detail about the side effects, the infections, and the fact that you could hit a vein, but that was only telling me what might happen. The only people who would heed these warnings are people who actually cared about themselves, who would never cut in the first place. And these warnings would only add another reason to do it for cutters looking to destroy or isolate themselves. How could I write a story that wasn’t preaching to the choir without giving depressed kids a cool new idea of how to hurt themselves?

Well, this story took me around 7 and 1/2 months. I gradually realized that the questions I had been asking were not the right ones- but these early questions were slowly revealing the actual questions I should be asking, that anyone exploring a question like this should be asking. Using an analogy of gang violence, parents, counselors and police will always be asking WHY a kid decided to join gang, but that kid will always be asking WHY NOT be in a gang? A WHY just gets you a WHY NOT.

WHY is the question from the outside looking in at the freaks. It’s never going to be the question that will ever get you anywhere when dealing with people living in a world different from yours, especially a prison in their minds. WHY NOT: that is the right question, looking from the inside out. Instead of the question I was asking: WHY do people cut, the question had to get at an alternative to or way out from cutting, WHY NOT  become a victim of self-injury? Once you’re stuck in the dark cell, what can you really see, peaking out from your cave, as the light shows you there’s something outside?

Editing my interviews later, I listened to my friend as I interviewed her. I hadn’t really understood what she was saying at the time, but finally I got it, I could hear the answer to why not. See, I could hear the real risk she had run, the real damage. She had split herself into two people: a whole person, with connections to her parents, and friends;  and who she was when she was alone with her blade, when she cut. They are real and separate identities. I finally decided that there is nothing wrong with cutting, not in the taboo way, …there’s nothing wrong AT FIRST. It’s not wrong as a noun; it’s wrong as a verb. What it does, every time you cut.

What hurts you is the splinter of the self. Each cut divides yourself further and further apart into those two halves of a person.  The gap grows, and finally splits so that you can’t get back to who you used to be. Except this realization doesn’t come until you start to feel the pain of yourself wanting to be whole again, which hurts more than its’ worth to cut.

Essentially I hope this story closes the gap between the whys and the why-nots. The gang kids in Voice of Youth are always like, “Why would anyone cut?!” and the other kids are like “Why would anyone join a gang?” I hope this story can say something about how it’s crazy that people think they’re different from other people just because their instrument of self-injury is different. Maybe what you can do is think about the “why nots” you have and imagine substituting that when you ask “why” someone would do crank, or let themselves be abused, or drive drunk.

But I especially hope closing the gap makes it harder for cutters to isolate, and slice so much that the threads of identity dissolve; and that it makes it easier for them to put themselves back together.

“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” (Emerson)

Amanda Wells. 15 years old. Maria Carrillo High School Junior. (‘I just went to school hella early.’)  If you like her story, be her MySpace friend (she’s ‘Pétasse’), and write any advice on doing a story about Creationism and the Minutemen (her next two projects).