THE CUTTING EDGE.

Anxious about their sexuality, young lesbians sometimes turn to self-mutilation

AIMEE ELIZABETH BELL CLEARLY RECALLS the first time she began to cut into her skin. It was a hot July night in her small Michigan town. She was in her bedroom, listening to Tori Amos, and the knife that she used to trim the wicks on her candles suddenly caught her eye. Soon eight thin dotted trails of bright red blood ran along her left forearm, from the crook of her elbow to the heel of her hand. Only when she saw the blood, Aimee Elizabeth says, did she realize what she had done.

"While I was doing it, I felt kind of numb," she recalls. "But then I snapped into reality. And I was scared. It surprised me that I had been able to do that to myself. But it also felt kind of good to have control over something like that. I had the control to make myself feel pain or not feel pain--it was my decision."

In a strange way it also made her feel safe. And for the two weeks prior to her first cutting, Aimee Elizabeth hadn't felt safe at all. On the Fourth of July she had fallen asleep on her friend's living room floor. She woke up shocked and scared--an older male friend was on top of her, raping her. She tried to fight him off, but she couldn't. She turned her head to look at the clock. It was 3:54 A.M. She was 11 years old.

Now, seven years later, as an 18-year-old high school senior, Aimee Elizabeth is talking publicly about her cutting for the first time.

According to Lynn Ponton, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of the The Romance of Risk, about one in ten women and men intentionally injure themselves. Most start as teenagers. Many have been sexually, physically, or emotionally abused as children. Some are struggling with depression. Others are experiencing conflict and anxiety about their gender or sexual orientation. "I view self-injury as a form--albeit an extreme form--of adolescent risk-taking behavior," says Ponton. "And in a culture that disparages gay youth and gay bodies, it's not surprising to me that these youth would be involved in more risky behavior."

Whether self-mutilation is more common among gay and lesbian youth than it is among heterosexual youth isn't known. "What we do know," says Ponton, "is that the group that's cutting is the group that's been abused, and more often gay youth have been abused. Also, those who cut often have unconscious conflicts, and if youth are questioning their sexual orientation, there can be a lot of conflict and anxiety. So it's not that they are self-mutilating because they are gay and lesbian, it's because they fit in these other categories."

Jane Hyman, author of the book Women Living With Self-Injury, agrees. "There was one woman I spoke with who explicitly mentioned the self-hatred she felt as a lesbian as one of the reasons she began to injure herself," recalls Hyman. "She felt this intense pressure to be straight, especially in high school, because the students who were accused of being gay were ridiculed and ostracized. She was determined that that not happen to her. So she wanted to be anything other than who she was."

After that first night Aimee Elizabeth began cutting herself two or three times a week. "It would depend on how bad the week had been," she says. "I never did it during the day; it was always at night. It would be after 10 o'clock, and I would go down to my room, light some candies, put on some music. I didn't use the knife after the first time. I used razor blades. And I had a stash of those that I kept hidden in my room."

She usually cut only along the inside of her forearm. But there were times, she says, "when things were really, really bad and I felt like I really had to have that pain and my arm was too damaged to do any more to my forearm. And that's when I'd cut my upper arm or on the top of my forearm."

Kelly (who asked that her full name not be used) began cutting herself when she was a sophomore in high school. When everything felt like too much, she would pick up a piece of broken glass or whatever was handy and cut into her upper left arm. "I was at this small Christian high school," Kelly, who is now 31, recalls. "It was the type of school where everyone was witnessing for Jesus, and I was trying so hard to fit into that culture. But there I was, attracted to the girls on my softball team. And the cutting just reinforced that I was this freak of nature."

Repeatedly injuring the same part of the body is common. "Girls tend to do more of the slender, delicate cutting across the wrist areas, or they'll cut on the back of their legs, while boys tend to bruise their arms or legs or will burn their arms with cigarettes," says Ponton. "Some do this because they are trying to get help. But many keep it hidden for years. I know girls who cut above the nipple on their breast, and they are not showing this to anybody."

Aimee Elizabeth came out at 16. But although her friends know she's a lesbian, few know about the cutting. She often wears long sleeves. In the summer she tries to keep her arm out of view. "I worried that the kids at school would think I was a psycho if I told them the truth," she says. "So when anyone asked, I'd say that my cat scratched me--even though I don't own a cat--or that I was doing dishes and broke a glass or playing softball and slid into some rocks. I had whole lists of excuses."

Aimee Elizabeth didn't start cutting because of conflict over her sexual orientation, though it's linked to some of her scars. "When my mom learned I was gay, she didn't handle it well at all--and that's an understatement," she says. "She had come down to my room, and as soon as she went back upstairs I got out the blades from under the stereo speaker, where they were hidden, lit the candies, turned on the music, and went through the ritual."

But Aimee Elizabeth's sexual orientation has also been her savior. It was her first real girlfriend, she says, who helped her to understand what she was doing to herself--and to others. "She kept trying to get me to quit, but I couldn't," Aimee Elizabeth recalls. "Not until the day when this girl that I loved was holding a knife to her own arm in front of me. She cut herself and then showed me the marks, and that's what got me to realize what I was doing. That's what it took for me to try to decide to stop."

Kelly stopped cutting when she left home to go to college. But when she was 28 her life became incredibly stressful, and the urge to cut resurfaced. This time, as she watched the damage she was doing to her body, she sought help. But the first psychologists she spoke with didn't understand the meaning of her cuts. "People think you are suicidal," says Kelly. "But cutting is the opposite of suicide. It's a self-preservation tactic. It may be a poor one, but it's a way to let go of the pain and to try to get things back under your control."

Difficulty in finding a therapist is an all-too-common experience for people who injure themselves. "Therapists need to realize that those who do this don't see their behavior as negative," says Hyman. "They see this as something positive and helpful because it has enabled them to function in life. It's helped them to stay alive because they feel they'd rather die than feel what they'd feel if they didn't self-injure."

Kelly hasn't cut herself for two years. And now, for the first time, she's considering getting a tattoo or dermabrasion to erase her 35 scars. Still, she can't say that she would never cut herself again. "I think of myself as someone in recovery," she says. "There's always the possibility that I could."

The last time Aimee Elizabeth cut herself was about four months ago. She's still attempting to stop completely. But it isn't easy. "For me, trying to stop is more like someone who is dealing with alcoholism," she says. "It feels like an addiction. I'm not totally over it yet, but I'm trying."

Find more on self-mutilation and links to related Internet sites at www.advocate.com

Rochman is a San Francisco--based freelance writer.