When it comes to self-harming, burning your forearms is a bit wimpy. I never even considered it self-harm until a girl in a pub pulled up the sleeves of my hoody and said she thought so. I used to be very self-conscious about the scars, constantly pulling down the sleeves when I had absent-mindedly pulled them up. But then someone told me they wouldn't even have known they were from self-harm if I hadn't told them so. But I guess some people know and don't need to be told and recognise them for what they are. These days I feel pretty comfortable wearing short sleeve shirts and no one has asked me about them, which I dread the thought of having to explain. Oh, these? I don't really like myself, or life, or this world, my family, friends, future prospects, the constant cycle of anxiety and depression that I live with etc. I don't know why I expect people to ask about them. Maybe I want them to. They say that motives for self-harming behaviours include expressing feelings that we can not or do not know how to otherwise express and as a means of communicating our need of support etc. But then why the dread? I guess because I don't really understand why I self-harm. I mean I've read the explanations for self-harm and some definitely seem more pertinent than others, like the need for immediate relief and to feel something/anything, but what exactly am I thinking about prior to self-harming? I know I do it in moments of panic when I have recurring thoughts, depressive ruminations that I can not shake, feelings of hopelessness, unfairness and not being able to cope and if I somehow burn myself everything will be ok. But its more like an impulse more than any sort of concrete thoughts, you have a lighter in hand, you feel like shit and you burn yourself. I felt like doing it again tonight. I didn't. Its been months.

So last night I was feeling pretty down, probably connected to having an exam today that I was in no way adequetly prepared to sit and wanted to listen to something cheerful to lift my mood. Searching for such an album proved a daunting task. Like Antoine Roquentin's reflection, my music collection was transformed into an amorphous abstraction of ugliness and despair. One of the questions asked by High Fidelity is which comes first the music or the misery? Do we listen to sad bastard music because we are miserable or are we miserable because we listen to music? Despite studies having failed to find a correlation between depressing music and negative mood, today I was thinking of this in relation to Nietzsche's often quoted phrase of he who fights monsters should take care so that he himself does not become a monster himself and when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. If we listen to sad bastard music, we should take care that we ourselves do not become depressed, as listening to depressing music will affect us, although research does not support this. Earlier today, I was thinking of the popularisation of depression through albums such as Nine Inch Nails' "The Downward Spiral". I was wondering whether musicians as a side-product of their recounting depressive episodes facilitate depression amongst their listeners or make it seem desirable. I was thinking of this in relation to the propagation of "emo" and "goth" subcultures, in which negative affect seems to be a defining charcteristic, although this is clearly a stereotype. What I find alarming is the potential popularisation of the desiribility of depression, although as stated earlier there is no evidence supporting a causal link between depression and depressing music. Depression is an extremely dehabilitating illness and as someone who has been diagnosed with it, I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. It is crippling. One of the predictors for suicide is knowing someone who has themselves attempted to kill themselves, or who has in fact killed themselves. I was wondering whether this effect could be also seen through music which deals with such subjects. I'm not saying that such music isn't valid or that depressive episodes shouldn't be chronicled, it is possible that experiencing such works of art might prove to be cathartic to the listener, but we must tread carefully lest the abyss gazes back. I think that depressing music faces a similar dilemna to that of movies that depict the Holocaust, in that any attempt to portray it is simply going to be by necessity an abstraction of reality. You simply can not accurately depict an un imaginable horror. You can not fathom the pervasiveness of depression, and how it can instantaneously ruin a day unless you experience it first hand.