4 months and going strong


Some can view 4 months as a long time while others consider it to be a short time. You can think of 4 months in many different ways as 4 months itself, 16 weeks 121 days, 2921 hours or even 175316 minutes.

For me at this moment I think of 4 months not only as 4 months but also as 4 months of taking positive steps to ensure I continue on my road to recovery. You might be wondering what I am talking about and well if you haven't already guessed it today marks 4 months since I last engaged in self-harm. That’s 121 days without harming myself, 16 weeks of battling intrusive and obsessive thoughts and 2921 hours of containing on a long road to recovery.

The past 4 months have not been easy, not by any stretch of the imagination. The past 4 months have been filed with ups and downs with many more ups occurring over the past number of weeks, which may be as a result of my recent med reduction.

4 months may not seem like a long time for some people but when thinking back to about 2 years ago when I would self-harm between 5-15 times a day, everyday 4 months without self-harm is a pretty long time. I have had long stretches of time without self-harm since coming out of hospital in 2012 but I have never had 4 solid months of no self-harm, not a scratch, a cut, nothing.

While you might be thinking so what, why is this such a big deal, you were the one inflicting it on yourself in the first place, you have to look at this from my point of view. For me while I did inflict injuries on myself I didn’t do it for attention or to get people to feel sorry for myself, I did it to help me cope, to get the frustrating, obsessive, crippling thoughts out of my head, to allow me to be able to get some piece and most of all to allow me to be able to live. While I understand many of you reading this are not in a position to understand self-harming and the relief it can give a person or how it allows a person to cope, something which I plan to cover of the next couple of weeks though different means on my blog but 4 months straight without any self-harm is a pretty huge achievement for me and what’s more is I am still feeling pretty strong and able to challenge the negative thoughts I encounter of self-harm. So for now I am happy to say that I am self-harm free for 4 months and I feel I could have another 4 months free from self-harm within me and even more in the future but for now like with my med reduction I am taking things one day at a time because after all I don’t know what tomorrow brings.



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