“He cheated. He played with my money and with my heart. I couldn’t handle the hurt feelings, so I cut myself.”
Lena described a past boyfriend who was upset that he loved a transgender woman, so his way of expressing his frustration was to beat her. She would self-medicate by drinking alcohol. Each cut on her arm represents a time that she drank and then broke the bottle to mark her arm as a reminder. Although Lena did not talk a lot about her feelings, the scars on her arm are an outward expression of the emotional turmoil she must have been struggling with internally.
