You don't know.

The first time I met her, we were in a night class somewhere in London. I remember thinking that she looked like she could do with a good meal. I remember thinking I bet she is way younger than she actually looks, and then continued to learn whatever it was we we’d signed up for to learn.
Eventually she came and sat next to me. We started chatting and discovered we lived in vaguely the same area, she offered me a lift home, I was delighted.
Over the weeks we became more friendly, resulting in me asking her in for a cup of tea before she continued on her way home one evening. She accepted nervously, entering my home timidly and scurrying to the overlarge and decidedly uncomfortable lump of a sofa, looking even smaller than she really was. I made our brew and sat in a chair in the corner of the room. It was all a little be reserved and uncertain, awkward I suppose. I stood up, offering her a second brew, really unsure what to say and wondering to myself why she accepted the second cuppa, ease of conversation was not something that was happening. I came in and put the brew on the floor by her foot, moved towards my chair, turned around and to my surprise, she’d stood up very quickly, and was splurging at me “I need to tell you something….”
Hmm.
The mood was very tense, anxious, agitated, you could feel it humming all around us. “Shit!” What on earth was she going to say to me? Her nervousness swamped her and started to radiate out, heading in my direction. I was still trying to comprehend what was happening, to be honest. Struggling to answer myself as to why she needed to be standing up and telling me whatever it was she needed to tell. She was fumbling with the button at the top of her jeans, and then the zip, I remember thinking, “oh my god, is she trying to initiate some kind of ‘come on’?, Does she think I am gay? What is she doing? Fcuk, how can I explain to her she has somehow misunderstood me?” She had continued talking whilst trying to undo her jeans, I refocused on what she was saying “….barrassing, so difficult…. Don’t know how to tell you…”

I asked her to stop, told her that she was confusing and scaring me, this did no good, she was caught up in her panic, continuing to tell me “this is the best way, I don’t know what words to use, I am so sorry…” Her jeans puddled around her feet, she stood there in front of me, white as a sheet, eyes huge and dark. That silenced me pretty quickly, let me tell you. I was trying to make sense of what I could see and it took some time. Stick thin pale legs, knobbly knees, white knickers. Her hands were noticeably shaking, she had clasped them together in front of herself and she was fearful, and that didn’t make sense too me either, why was she scared? It was her causing all the fear and awkwardness, not me. I was in my own front room trying to be the good little hostess. None of it made sense, my brain was searching and rejecting several possibilities and coming up empty. She didn’t move from the spot she’d stood up in, that didn’t make sense for someone who was about to approach me. She was standing rock solid, like Little Nell in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, when she gets turned into a statue by the bloke in the wheelchair (Scotty?). Shaking visibly but not moving, at all.
We remained like this for (hours) probably only half a minute, and slowly as the atmosphere changed I realised that her hands were protecting my view. As she moved her hands, unclasping and then smoothly showing me her palms, moved her hands either side of her, as if they were the curtains of a theatrical show, and allowed me to see what she was in two minds whether to show me or not.

What I hadn’t managed to recognise, due to the complete unexpectedness of her disclosure, were the two nappies she had placed one on each of her inner thighs. My mind was struggling so hard to comprehend what it was she was trying to show me, that even though I could see the nappies, (shop bought, white and very, very small - preemie size I can only assume) their placement, on an adult female and on her thighs was just too much to take in. My head went off in a million directions, I could feel it actively chomping through all the possible and of course, impossible reasons for this entire scenario.

Now, almost ten years on, I realise why it took me so long to compute the images I was seeing into any form of understandability. I knew nothing of self-harm, had never heard of it, never imagined anyone would do it (let alone did and she was standing in front of me, entirely vulnerable) and so had nothing on which to latch the images too. My mind was coping with my logic, and that logic did not have any place in the world this woman was showing me. None what-so-ever.

I was recently asked to tell a group of people something from my past life. This scene jumped straight in to the #1 spot, I don’t recall actually searching it out, it just was there in my head, so I told it how I remembered it. Once I had finished recounting it, someone asked me, “what is your message then?” I hadn’t really thought of it as a message, to be honest. I thought about it for a moment and said, “just so people are aware, really. Aware that a fully grown woman could be sitting in your house now, right next to you and be wearing nappies on her inner thighs, cruelly cutting her-self, and you don’t know.”

The Dark World of Self-Injury