Effecting others

Human beings are not solitary creatures. We live in communities and, whether we know it or not, effect and are effected by all the people around us, and even people beyond that.

We must accept, then, that any behavior, destructive or otherwise, will be noticed and possibly mimicked by others, and that it will effect their lives in one way or another. We cannot control this reaction, we can only control our own behavior.

That is the other side of this though, for, if we are to be a community at all, we have to be a community of individuals. we all have the choice to do whatever we want to do, despite what anyone else may be doing. That, of course, is much harder then it sounds.

In my small school, I know six people who do, or have in the past, self-injured. One of them is me. Of the four other girls and one boy, I can be fairly sure that my cutting influenced two of them to cut in the first place. I gave them the idea.

This could be a source of great guilt for me, but I have to realize that, in order to be capable of harming oneself at all, the destructive behavior had to have been there in the first place, for one reason or another. I did not create that. If they had not copied me, they would have found another way of expressing their pain and who knows whether that would have been more, or less, dangerous and destructive.