After thinking for some time about how best I could make this project beneficial for those trying to understand self-harm, I decided I wanted to hear from multiple people about their experiences.
On my journey to find people to share their stories, I came across a woman who willingly told me about her experience with self-harm in her teenage years. For purposes of protecting her privacy, her name has been replaced with the name ‘Sadie’, and I will refer to her as that from hereon in.
As I approached Sadie’s house, a reality check hit me that I was about to invade into someone’s life, someone’s home and their darkest memories. Sadie had agreed to let me film her in a lighting that preserved her identity, which made things even more intimate.
Hearing Sadie’s story was really the start of my realisation that self-harm is very much happening a lot more than I first thought before starting this journey. The stats had told me what I needed to know in terms of how it impacts those in our society as a whole, but hearing how it affects someone individually made it all seem so much more real. I felt privileged to have been allowed into her world to listen and understand all that she had been through prior to this moment.
You can watch Sadie talk about her story and how she dealt with self-harming here.
