Content warning: This article discusses depression and self-harm
Garbage frontwoman Shirley Manson has penned a moving and harrowing op-ed for The New York Times on self-harm.
Titled ‘The First Time I Cut Myself’, it details her experience with self-harm and depression induced by an incredibly toxic relationship in her adolescence.
“I didn’t know I was a cutter until the first time I chose to cut,” she wrote. “I didn’t even know it was a ‘thing’.”
“I suddenly felt I was part of something much bigger than this stupid situation I had found myself in. To my mind, my life had just immediately become more grand and expansive,” she wrote. “The problem of course with any practice of self-harm is that once you choose to indulge in it, you get better, more efficient, at it.”
Manson also says that she stopped self-harming after she left the toxic relationship, but picked it up again following the release of the band’s wildly successful 1998 album Version 2.0.
“I was under immense physical and mental pressure,” she wrote. “I was a media ‘it’ girl, and as a result I was lucky enough to be invited to grace the covers of newspapers and fashion magazines all over the world. Perversely, the downside of attracting so much attention was that I began to develop a self-consciousness about myself, the intensity of which I hadn’t experienced since I was a young woman in the throes of puberty.
Read the full, powerful op-ed here.
