13.

What were you doing when you were 13?  Who were you at 13?  What would you say to yourself now that you wished you’d known then?

There are a lot of different things that may come to mind when you see ’13.’  The movie, maybe?  Good luck?  Bad luck?  Friday the 13^th, step on a crack, break your mother’s back, etc.  For me, 13 is mixed with good and bad.  Good: my older sister was born on the 13^th of her birth month.  Bad: my grandfather’s funeral was 13 days before my 13^th birthday.  Good: if you include Jesus, that makes 13 disciples… (this was actually pointed out to me at a youth retreat a month after my 13^th birthday).  Bad: on a particularly bad Friday the 13^th my senior year in college, my ex best friend plotted against me (she’d describe it differently, I’m sure) to make sure that she was safe (long story).  Good: on my 13^th birthday, I had a boy I liked call me at home for the first time (I should mention that was the first and only time Craig called me!).  Bad: 13 years ago today, I cut myself for the first time.  I can still see the scar, and I wonder, can others?  Can you?

I've never been one to talk about why I started cutting.  And I’m not sure why I’m talking about it now.    But here goes.  Every year in high school, I went to a youth Gathering in Lansing with kids from my church.  In 2000, I was having a great time hanging out with my boyfriend Matt, his brother, and his brother’s girlfriend Jenni, and a couple of others, and we were all watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off on the TV in a hotel room.  To this day, I hate that movie, because of what happened.  He gave me my first kiss that night.  But the next morning, he told me he had gotten drunk after giving me my 1^st kiss & said then he didn’t remember it at all.  Then when we talked on the phone a few weeks later in January & he started talking about this other girl being his girlfriend it hurt, because we technically were not broken up yet.  At the Gathering, Jenni had told me she cut herself & it put the idea into my head.  Couple that with what happened with him, I started to cut myself.  This by no means is the only reason, though.  The other reason, you won’t find out, because no one believes me about that anyways, so there’s no way I’d put myself out there again. 

I don’t want to count the number of physical scars; I’m sure they number well over 100 by now.  I wish that number was only 13.  I wish it was 0.  More than that, I wish I didn’t have the 13 years of emotional scarring before I even started to cut.  Or the 13 since.