EDITOR’S NOTE: To recognize Self-Injury Awareness Week, Feb. 22-28, The Daily’s Brittany Burden shares a first-person account of her battle with self-injury in a two-day series. Today’s installment deals with her descent into the disorder. Tomorrow’s will focus on her continuing recovery.

For me, the last eight years have been a journey toward home. It’s a journey that has brought me through disorder, depression and hospitalization.

The journey has also been a battle, a battle with self-injury, the deliberate damage one does to one’s skin with knives, razors, lighters, slapping or punching walls.

According to a 2001 study published in the Journal of Threat Assessment, self-injury affects roughly 10 percent of undergraduate college students in the United States. Yet this condition is one of the most widely-misunderstood mental health problem in the U.S.

The government has little reliable data on the disorder, and discussion of self-injury is hampered by a close but inaccurate association with suicide. Self-injury has nothing to do with suicide. Instead, it is a way to relieve pain.

My attempts to deal with pain via self-injury began at 14, when troubles at a new school led me to scratch myself with a rusty letter opener I found in the desk ay my aunt’s house.

I was living like an alien in the house of a family member when I started high school. Leaving old friends and trying to make new ones proved too difficult for my young, anxious body. Somewhere I had learned that when I broke my skin, my body released the deep tension built up inside me. As time wore on, I eased into my new life but not out of my new addiction and the acts went unnoticed for years.

By 18, I had grown accustomed to hitting myself on a near-daily basis. The loss of friends I had worked so tirelessly to gain pushed me to experiment and eventually abuse drugs and alcohol and led me to become a long-term smoker. This continued through graduation, when I became obsessed with body piercing. I practiced pushing needles deep into my skin. I was trying to find how I could harm myself in a more socially acceptable way than the cutting I had done before.

At age 20, I transferred to OU to study English literature. With my ambition to be a writer and scholar of literature, I pushed myself continuously.

One day I pushed myself too far.

Panic and pain

During Thanksgiving of my junior year, while trying to write a paper, I panicked.

I remember sitting at my computer at 4 a.m. Suddenly, I was blisteringly hot. My heart rate skyrocketed, my pulse drove upward and my vision blurred. I paced my room for hours. I was nauseous, I was disabled, I was lost, I was gone.

The episode was a result of a panic disorder, a situation which the sufferer experiences mental collapse along with the same physical sensations of a heart attack.

For about a year, with little medical attention, I continued my education with a worsening panic disorder. Eventually I started seeing a therapist in order to discover more about myself and more about my new diseases.

But at 21, round two of my real pain had begun. Although the new school year started out promisingly with new classes, a new boyfriend, group and individual therapy, great friends and a loving family, I drifted further apart from myself and into depression and self-injury.

I remember my first cut from that period of my life so well. I made it with a push pin taken from a bulletin board in Gaylord Hall. My heart pulsated rapidly as I dug the sharp point into my skin. On my biceps, I drew a deep vertical line. In time, after every cut I would make a new cut next to my first one across my arm, one for each time I’ve ever cut myself.

I recognized the danger I was heading into, so I warned my loved ones about the pain I had been experiencing and the way I was dealing with it.

“Take the knives,” I told them, “Because I will use them on myself. Do not for one second leave me alone with myself.”

My boyfriend cleared away every sharp object in my possession. I had to ask for permission to use simple objects like scissors. The depression and cutting had made me a prisoner in my own home.

One night in particular, sick of the absence of sharp objects in my life, I insisted on walking home instead of letting my boyfriend drive me to my apartment.

Glass, broken into sharp shards, laid at my feet on my walk back, and quickly I pocketed the sharpest I could find. But guilt-ridden as I was from my many broken promises to stop hurting myself, I broke down and gave him the piece.

This was my last cut, or so I thought, until I discovered two things: a set of box cutters that lay in the utility kit in my closet, and the fact that razors can be bought for 99¢ at any gas station in North America.

Soon, I was at my skin so many times a day that I can no longer remember the total number of cuts I made. I started wearing dark, long-sleeved and wearing sunglasses so that friends and classmates would not notice my skeletal face or the guilt behind my eyes.

A once bright and energetic girl was crawling away inside herself, sleeping up to 6 hours during the day and 14 hours per night. All I saw in my mirror’s reflection was an over-rested, underfed girl with sunken eyes. At a time when I could have turned to friends and family for support, I turned instead to my old, bad habit: a razor and a box of Band-Aids.

The purpose of pain

Self-Injury is not the creation of pain for pain’s sake; it is the exact opposite. It is the attempt to create a way of escape for pain that is already present in the sufferer. It is known as a “coping device,” a way for the brain to figure out how to deal with what the body has failed to do.

I became obsessed with cutting and cutters, wanting to know every detail of my coping device. I researched the disorder to learn the nature of the chemical release I felt each time I dug a knife or a pin through one side of my arm and out the other.

Endorphins, adrenaline, and dopamine surged through my body, taking it all away: the depression, the Zoloft, Clonapen, Cymbalta and Vistaril prescription drugs that were pumped daily and ineffectively into my body.

I joined Facebook groups dedicated to Self-Injury and talked with others around the globe who dealt with life the same way I did. I even asked random strangers whose scars I recognized if they had followed my same path.

Pain pushes the limits

However, everyone has limits, and my deepest scar showed me mine. Around 4 p.m. Nov. 10, I took a razor, pushed it into my skin, and pulled it hard and fast toward myself making a long and very wide cut. It bled for an hour.

Seeing this brought me to my bottom, and so, at 4 a.m. Nov. 11, I checked myself into the behavioral medicine wing of Norman Regional Hospital.

The first question anyone asked me was why I tried to kill myself. I didn’t have an answer.

Hospitals for the mentally ill are always so revealing, yet so impersonal and unnerving. Daily therapy is helpful, but the deepest desire is always to go back as soon as possible to that place that feels most like home. For me, home is where my boyfriend is. What I learned about myself on the fifth floor of Norman Regional Hospital was that I was loved.

My sweet family, friends and boyfriend came to me every day. I learned to hand-make jewelry and made an extremely unlikely set of friends otherwise known as ‘crazies.’

I walked out of the hospital a healthier, happier woman. But this wasn’t the end of my story; you can’t be cured in four days.