Everyone is asleep at your house; you've made sure of this. You slowly creep into your room and lock the door behind you.
You turn the television on to conceal your true actions. This way your parents will think, "Oh, he's just up late doing homework again."
You crawl onto your bed, feeling numb from head to toe; a dead feeling. You reach for the knife you keep in the desk next to your bed.
Slowly, you start to aim the knife for your arm.
The blade is cold against your skin as you begin to cut. Not too deep you don't want to leave a mess, but it has to be deep enough so you can start to feel alive again.
After wiping the tears and cleaning the blood off your sheets, you go to bed. All that is left as a reminder are the fresh scars on your arm.
Cutting is the most common type of self-injury and affects more than 1 million Americans, especially teen-agers.
People who cut themselves are not necessarily suicidal, but commonly inflict injuries on themselves to help relieve stress or trauma in their life. "Cutters" may use razors, needles, broken glass or anything with a sharp edge.
The reasons why some teens use self-injury vary everything from rebellion to peer acceptance to emotional problems.
But the last reason is the most common. As one self-proclaimed cutter said: "Physical pain is a hell of a lot better than emotional pain."
Many teens use cutting as a way to deal with stress and frustrations. They think it is impossible to deal with these issues problems that never seem to end in healthy ways.
People who often harm themselves will hide their emotions rather than face them. They go on with their lives as if everything is OK. Soon, they become out of touch with their emotions.
This often leaves them feeling numb or lifeless. They hurt themselves to make the numbness go away.
Taking their mind off things
The pain of cutting doesn't necessarily make them feel more alive, it just helps to take their mind off what's going on inside them.
One cutter, who asked not to be named, started injuring herself in sixth grade.
Her unhealthy habit was recently discovered when she was caught in class poking safety pins through her skin and making small cuts with razor blades, secretly below her desk.
She was sent to the nurse's office and suspended from school for the rest of the day. The nurse called home and informed her parents, who tried to discuss the problem with her.
They couldn't understand where she was coming from or why she was doing this.
"They cried for a very long time," she says, and her parents aren't emotional people.
All she could tell them about cutting was that "it feels good, in a sick and twisted way."
She now has more than 60 scars, mostly on her arms and legs. She chooses razor blades for cutting because "they sting more, cut quicker and deeper, and also bleed a lot more."
However, she soon may stop her destructive habit: "I don't want to stop cutting, but my parents took my car away as a punishment, and I need that car."
She doesn't believe she can stop right away because she sees self-mutilation as an addiction.
"People will be saying, 'God, I want a cigarette', while I'm thinking, 'God, I want to cut myself.'"
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