The Wound I Can Author: A Meditation on Cutting
Cutting as Authorship, Mythological Descent, and the Language of Rupture
Readers Note:
This essay is not an attempt to romanticize cutting. I do not believe the act itself is guided by conscious, intentional meaning. People cut when they feel unbearably alone—when sadness, shame, or rage become too overwhelming to contain. Cutting is not usually a satisfactory strategy or solution for the person, but often a desperate attempt at relief. A momentary reclaiming of control amidst internal chaos.
These underlying needs—the longing for connection, the terror of falling apart—are best addressed within the context of psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy, where unconscious material can slowly become speakable.
What I hope to offer here is not an explanation or justification, but a reimagining. A way of thinking about the meaning of cutting before it can be fully known. A symbolic language to help us trace the outlines of pain before it finds its words. This is not a glorification of the wound, but an inquiry into what it might be asking for: contact, containment, witness.
In part, this is a meditation for clinicians—and for anyone trying to understand their own past—on how to hold the complexity of cutting with care. Because it is often not the act itself that determines its trajectory, but how it is met. The way a wound is received—whether with judgment, intrusion, silence, or presence—can shape whether it hardens into a cycle of destruction and isolation or opens into something else: a deeper relationship with self, and with life.
Perhaps, in time, what was once cut into the body may begin to be spoken aloud. Not to just anyone, and not all at once—but in the presence of someone who listens without trying to fix or erase the pain. Someone who helps you make sense of it. Someone who allows you to move at your own pace, in your own language. Someone who honors your need for space—who receives only what you feel safe enough to share.
And perhaps, after a while—maybe even years of work—you will begin to feel safe enough to let that person in.
This is not a path toward being “saved.” It is an invitation to step out of the spiral of solitude and pain, and into a world where deep, human connection is still possible.
This essay is not a treatment manual. It does not offer clinical prescriptions. Instead, it is an attempt to evoke an emotional truth beneath the act—to enter the atmosphere in which cutting emerges, and to imagine how it might one day give way to speech, relationship, and life.
I. The Labyrinth, the Cut, and the Refusal to Forget
There is a girl — silent, stubborn — who crawls into the underworld not to escape her pain, but to give it form. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the 2006 movie directed by Guillermo del Toro, Ofelia does not run from trauma, she descends into it. She walks its twisting paths. She answers its riddles.
Like a person who cuts, she does not submit to the tyranny of silence. She attempts, desperately, to reclaim her right to meaning in a world that gives her none.
So too is the cut: not random, not senseless, but a path chosen when no other doors seem open. When the door to deep, understanding relationships seem cut off, one turns inward. A path with monsters, yes - but also with the potential of meaning. Of guardians. Of fragile hope for relationship with anything, anyone. And if not with the outer world, then with the inner one.
Ofelia meets the faun, Pan — a figure who sees her without explaining her away. Who does not rush to rescue, but offers her the chance to rescue herself. In this, he is the opposite of the world above, where adults speak over her, betray her, reduce her to a body to be handled. Without the support of an attentive, loving adult to protect her on the journey- she must face these creatures - some are monsters and some are helpful, although she does not understand how one decides at first - by herself.
And what is the therapist, at their best, but a kind of faun — one who knows the labyrinth, who does not fear the dark, who can speak the strange language of pain without trying to shut it down? Not a savior. Not a judge. A witness. A guide. A translator of what once had no words.
The wound, like the labyrinth, becomes the site of transformation — not because it is ignored or destroyed, but because it is honored. Tended. Explored for its very meaning. Given a place in the story.
Ofelia’s journey does not end in triumph. It ends in death—shot down by a world that could not hold her, that could not meet her pain with understanding. She is forced back into the underworld, the only place she was ever truly seen. The external world, so rigid and brutal, full of war and conflict, could not contain the complexity she carried. It could not make space for her grief around her father being killed, her imagination, her refusal to forget.
I want to make this point clear so I will state it again: it is not the wound itself that determines the outcome, but how it is received.
Ofelia was not destroyed by her wound—but by a world that refused to bear witness to it.
She found meaning in descent, in myth, in the sacred strangeness of her inner life. But no one above ground could follow her there. No one could help her translate her pain into relationship. What if someone had? What if the world had paused long enough to wonder what her wounds were asking for?
At the heart of cutting is a desperate plea for expression. One writes their pain onto their skin so they no longer have to carry it in silence. The wound speaks what they cannot:
I am here. I am real. I have felt the sharp, confusing, painful intrusion of life and have chosen to mark it, rather than let it erase me. With this comes both the desire to stay hidden and to be deeply seen. As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott so powerfully observed, it is a pleasure to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.
II. The Silence Beneath the Skin
There is a silence that swells beneath the act of cutting — not emptiness, but a silence swollen with meaning. A scream turned inward, a language too primitive for words, too full of desperation and rage to ever speak to anyone and believe that it could be accepted. This is the landscape where trauma lives. For Freud, trauma is not merely pain but an experience that overwhelms the mind’s defenses, flooding our capacity to think, to feel, to protect ourselves. Trauma breaches what he calls our “psychic skin.” It leaves us confused, fragmented, estranged from our own inner world. Time alone does not mend it. There is no time in the unconscious mind. We lose the ability to weave the event into a cohesive narrative, to locate meaning, to understand our reactions.
Cutting, then, is not chaos.
It is an attempt at order within chaos — a carving of meaning into flesh when the mind has become too fragmented to use words.
III. Authorship of Pain
I have come to understand cutting as a form of authorship.
The body becomes the page and the razor becomes the pen. Trauma descends and creates rupture without consent, but the cut offers a place of chosen rupture. It is a symptom, in Freud’s sense: a repetition of what cannot be spoken, what language fails to hold. It stages the unspeakable on the flesh, a compromise between longing and dread — the yearning for intimacy, for penetration, for healing, and the terror of the violent potential of these — all performed with an outward silence but internal deafening.
IV. If There Must Be a Rupture
Trauma tears through the image we once held of our lives. It ruptures meaning, fractures the self, creates a vast opening inside of us — an abyss into which we fall, arms flailing, unable to find our bearings.
If there must be an opening, the person who cuts acts as if it might as well be at their own making.
If there must be penetration — emotional, psychic, physical — let it come by their own hand.
V. The Wound Is No Accident
The wound is not a random impulse but something fermenting with life and death. It swells with blood, the body’s fervent effort to close the rupture, to heal. In both shape and function, it mirrors what takes in and gives forth - a displaced mouth that cannot speak, that struggles to take in the good, caring nutrients it needs for survival. A displaced genital symbol, a place between inner and outer, pleasure and pain, connection and aloneness. It tries to master the unbearable paradox of all of these things; of longing and violation, creation and destruction.
Cutting embodies the terrifying ambiguity of intimacy: the desire to be entered, known, touched — and the simultaneous terror of pain, of domination, of the tortuous vulnerability it might entail.
There is horror in unwanted invasion, yes, but an even more suffocating prison in absolute isolation.
The cut straddles this impossible tension.
It splits the skin in a desperate plea to keep the mind together.
VI. Writing Pain Upon the Skin
The body, once a passive site of injury, becomes an active instrument of expression.
Trauma colonizes the body, turning it into foreign terrain. But to cut is to reclaim that landscape, to redraw its borders. In the act of cutting, one creates a boundary where none existed.
For a fleeting moment, one feels whole.
One condenses all these internal conflicts into a single, visible stroke.
One chooses where the rupture lives. One chooses its depth, its shape.
VII. The Quiet Wish to Be Seen
Yet beneath this longing for mastery lies a quieter, more fragile wish: to be seen. Not merely witnessed, but truly recognized. To have another trace the scar and understand that it is not evidence of madness, but a map.
A roadmap of pain, yes — but also of endurance.
The cut extends an invitation that words cannot offer. It says:
Come close, but do not intrude. Trace the scar but do not penetrate it. See me, but do not devour me. Stand with me at the edge of my loneliness but stop before real connection unfolds.
This creates a difficult paradox for both the one who cuts and the one who dares to come close.
The person who cuts may dread their wounds being exposed, fearing judgment, abandonment — the world once again forcing its intrusive, unwanted interpretations upon their private reality.
And yet, there is a deeper, more complicated terror when the other does not turn away.
When the other dares to stay, to trace the wound gently, to seek understanding — here, the patient may feel a new kind of invasion: a terrifying loss of control - a flood of shame, anger, sadness, and loneliness, with no words to name them.
Too much pressure to speak, and the person who cuts may feel overwhelmed with intrusion.
Too little acknowledgment, and they may be overwhelmed with isolation.
VIII. Danger and Hope
Cutting flirts constantly with both danger and hope.
It risks becoming a private echo chamber, a closed loop of suffering - a path towards total destruction. But it also carries the fragile potential for transformation: from blood to language, from isolation to connection.
Perhaps what begins as an unspeakable act can, in time, be spoken — and in speaking, be shared.
VIIII. Toward a New Story
The cut has long been a private doorframe, a place to enter into pain, alone, closing it off from the world. But what if it could become a shared crossing? In marriage, crossing the threshold is not an end, but a beginning — the fragile beginning of life together. So too, perhaps, the cut might serve not just as an enclosure of suffering, but as an invitation to another. Not to invade, but to witness. Not to repair, but to walk beside.
To let someone stand at the edge of your pain and see, not a gaping wound, but the doorway to resilience.
This is the quiet hope that lingers beneath the surface.
That the same hands once driven to carve the wound might one day reach outward.
Not to be filled, not to be invaded, but to be met.
Simply, humanly, met.
