In Summer

I can see the past. 6/24/2025

TRIGGER WARNING: I am candidly writing about mental health and mention self-harm and suicide at times. PLEASE reach out to family, friends, and a professional if you are struggling. It is absolutely ok to do that. If you are feeling suicidal or think you may harm yourself, call 911, or go to your local emergency room. There’s help out there.

It’s been hotter than hell this past week. Supposedly we will get a break from it in a few days. But when the weather goes from still lighting the stove at night to broiling in your own skin in the same week...welcome to summer in New Hampshire. I swear that the weather has the same mercurial moods as I do. Currently, I’m sitting in the shade, still feeling every bit of the humidity and just plain 97 degree heat. I just took a cold shower, but my efforts to sweat less-- well, quite pointless. You get the idea.

In summer, when my skin tans, my scars appear. White lines going this way and that way, dots here and there. I always notice. I always feel like they’re a blinking neon sign, saying how messed up I was, and can, be. But every summer, when I talk about it with Stacey, she swears that you cannot see them at all unless you know exactly where to look. They’re very skinny and not at all like the neon light my mind sees them to be. But, even if I am the only one who sees them, I look and jet backwards in time.

I ride that airplane to the past and see what happened that made me resort to self harm. I’ve written about my teenage years, where things at home were tumultuous at best sometimes, and the anxiety around school and life in general ran rampant. My moods did the same, running the show sometimes, running me, and then there’s me flailing, trying to stitch my mental self up and shore myself up so that I could function. All those things led me somehow to self harm. I don’t remember how it came to be, to be a thing I knew about, or stumbled upon, becoming a last-ditch effort to relieve some of the pressure crushing me. Some kind of backwards way to help myself. Please don’t try it out in any way. It just leads to worse and worse times. It can lead to attempts of more severe self harm. It can lead to thoughts of suicide. It can lead to attempts. And then sometimes in future summers, you might have so much sadness and regret, at the very least, when you look down and see everything that was. And me, I begin to cry. This isn’t an easy topic for me to talk about and share. But it needs to be brought into the daylight, erase the fear of getting help, be able to be a thing we can be open about. Because I am definitely not one of a few-- I am one of probably millions who have gone down the self harm road of any kind at some point. But within those millions, within the families and friends, care providers...there’s so much difficulty to understand, to wrap one’s head around. The only way to crack open this box is to talk about it. That’s why I’m here.

And I am here. I didn’t stop self harming by myself. I made promises and commitments to myself and still resorted to it. I flailed, failed. But then, but then-- here’s what happened two decades after this awful train had started rolling: I found someone I could talk about it with. Not my therapist, not a family member-- someone who saw it for it’s desperation, for it’s pain, for a person drowning. Who saw me in all the ways. Who didn’t recoil like I was so certain she would do once I opened up. Like all the others I tried to talk to had. Clearly I didn’t know Stacey as well back then as I do now.

So long ago I opened up to Stacey. Perhaps it was easier to do that because we chatted over messenger and texts in the beginning of the story of our life together. People can say a lot of things through a keyboard that they might never let past their lips, never utter in even the smallest whisper. Perhaps this was the case with me. But more likely, it was that Stacey threw me a rope to help me climb out of the darkest of dark places, and up into a daylight I hadn’t seen in a long time. Stacey didn’t solve my problems. She was the conduit for me to begin wrestling, grappling with myself, starting me on a road of putting my pieces back together as much as I could. The road where I dug out all the messy, dirty, cobwebbed old hurts and pain and began to deal with them, working harder with a therapist than I ever had at the time. The road where I was finally honest about it all.

It didn’t become perfection overnight. I had no solid coping skills, I was out of ideas and out of energy. But I kept talking to Stacey. She was like the sun fighting to come out from behind my clouds. She worked the overnight shift at her job, from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am. She could text me sometimes from work, if I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know how she did it, but she was seemingly always awake in the daytime hours too, because every time I sent a text or a message, she answered within a couple of minutes. She had some kind of energetic super power (she still does). She made me feel better, like I was a person worth talking to. At the time, I truly didn’t think I was. She also had an unwavering belief in me, that I would make it through, where I had no such confidence.

There was a day when I was alone and I was in that subbasement of my being, where it’s dark and scary. It was in the morning, I was facing hours upon hours of this scary place, which made me afraid of myself. I was capable of many things, none of them good. I texted Stacey, thinking that she had just gotten home from work, so probably she wouldn’t answer, she’d be in bed, she’d see it was me and be sick of me, so probably she wouldn’t answer. Even though she’d proven me wrong on many, many occasions, these are the things I believed. I said I was scared. I said I was by myself. After so many hours of work and zero sleep, Stacey asked if she should come to my place. I lived two hours away. She would come if I needed her. If I wanted her. That, alone, was enough (this is making tears roll down my cheeks right now). The act of offering to come to me was enough. We hadn’t seen each other in a million and five years, and she was saying she’d come, that was enough. That was huge. I set aside the ideas of self harm that I was nearly going to resort to. The idea that Stacey would come, would come two hours away to lift me up if I wanted her, needed her to—that made me feel a lot more like I was worth her time, her energy, her caring. Which was plenty to help me that day. I promised that if I felt worse, I would go to the ER, and let her know where I was at. We kept texting.

It wasn’t long after that day that I finally, after a million and five years, got to see Stacey in real life. I ran to her, throwing myself at her, hugging her as tightly, as mightily, as I could. Not wanting to let go. Wanting to impart by osmosis how much she meant to me, how much she’d done for me. Not long after that, I moved more like fifteen minutes away instead of two hours. Not long after that, we joyfully tumbled into love. Then living together. Then married. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. You know the rest of this part of the story anyway.

After the never wanting to let her go, not long later came a chance for us to talk about what I was doing to myself. How it wasn’t serving any good purpose for me. How important I truly was to her, regardless of what I told myself. To others. To my family. When we were finally together, a pair, Stacey said I was part of her family now too, and they saw how important I was to her, how happy I made her. How important I was simply by being here. That I was someone worth knowing. That I was interesting and sometimes funny and in spite of being in that subbasement sometimes, I was wanted on this planet, liked and loved. Wanted by these people, some of whom I hadn’t seen since they were tiny and barely knew me (tears and lumpy throat still happening here). Stacey asked me to make a promise. Looking at my arms, she asked me to promise to stop harming myself, whatever it took. Even if it took doctors, medications, hospitals, reaching out to someone, even if it was so uncomfortable that I would want to jump out of my own skin.

Sometimes in summer, I see my healed arms, with their small evidence of where I was for a good chunk of my life. I see a reminder of that. I get sad. Regretful. I said to Stacey the other day that I could see them and I was feeling sad, feeling like I do every year. She said the same thing she says every year, reminding me that it’s the past. That they’re hardly noticeable at all. That what I see isn’t what the world sees. That for fourteen years, I’ve done the hard stuff that is so fucking uncomfortable-- doctors, medications, hospitals, I’ve done it and I still do it. The hard stuff is the stuff that works. The route out of the subbasement isn’t an easy climb. What’s right is very rarely the easy thing.

I’ve kept that promise for fourteen years. I intend to keep it for all of my days. In the early days of making that promise, it was rough, I won’t lie. But time and support, through risk-taking with honesty, with talking, with finding the professionals who help me manage my brain and my moods, through the work on myself, it got easier to keep that promise, by increments. I found other, far better, tools than harm. I made a list of seventeen things, with Stacey's input and ideas, that help me through when I can't think of anything that will get me through. It's a faded little sheet of paper, folded, it resides in my wallet. Maybe it can be a jumping off point for you to make your own list, an idea. I hope so. Don’t follow in my footsteps of harm. Think of anything big or small that you do that make you feel better. A nap. A coffee. A movie. A shower. Anything simple and that you like.

If you are in the same boat I was, or have been, feel free to reach out to me. If you feel alone, like nobody understands, use one of the links below, one of the crisis lines, or reach out to me. You’ve got me. So you’ve already got one person in your corner. You’re not alone.

Thanks for reading this. It was hard to write, but it was also good for me to do so. It’s still not easy to revisit that past, but in its own way, it’s therapeutic. I’m glad it’s the past. I’m glad I promised. I’m glad and proud that I’ve kept it. I didn’t do it alone. I owe a ton of my progress to others, especially Stacey. An offer to be there for you can go for miles.

--Megan

PS: Thank you to everyone who reads and comments and follows along. I really appreciate your support. My writing will always be free, all subscriptions are wonderful. If you feel like sending me a one time appreciation, (like sending me a coffee hahaha), the Venmo Appreciation button will lead you there. Thanks again.

Resources:

The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 and you will be connected to a support person. You can also do an online chat at www.988lifeline.org.

Crisis Text Line: text 741741 and you will be connected to a trained crisis counselor.

The Trevor Project: For LGBTQIA+ youth who need a safe person to talk to, call 1-888-843-4564.

Research:

Please check out these sites (which do not sponsor me in any way). They have helped me tremendously. Please do not use Dr. Google.

www.dbsalliance.org: The Depression and Bipolar Alliance hosts free online and in-person support groups around the country. They also provide a wealth of information and offer support and articles on social media.

www.apa.org: The American Psychological Association

www.mayoclinic.org: The Mayo Clinic is a fantastic resource for current research and education for anyone wanting to learn about any topic. They are also incredibly reputable.

www.clevelandclinic.org: Like the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic also has a wealth of current and reputable information.