"Black Swan" just about killed me

I'm very far behind making a post about the movie "Black Swan." Many people blogged about it when it came out in theaters, but I just watched it Sunday night. My boyfriend and I almost went to see it in a theater when it first came out, but I knew it looked creepy and I figured it would give me nightmares. Little did I know that it would trigger me into wanting to cut myself or worse.

In the trailers, it just seemed like "Black Swan" was a scary movie about ballerinas. I knew there would be some stuff about mental illness, but dear God, I never expected what it turned out to be.

The movie was well written. Frankly, I think it was too well written. The main character seems to have borderline personality disorder. The character fits all the criteria of borderline perfectly.

She has grown up in an emotionally (perhaps sexually) abusive home. She has an eating disorder. She self harms. She is quite delusional and paranoid. She clearly is going through the "splitting" symptoms of borderline.

I did not expect to see the self harm in the film. The main character scratches herself mostly on her back, and judging by what her mother says, she's been self harming for years. All the blood shown in the movie is haunting me. There was also a scene where she rips a long piece of skin from her hand. It was disturbing and gross at the same time.

The most haunting scene showed Winona Ryder's character stabbing herself repeatedly in the face with a nail file. I had to close my eyes when it was happening. It made me want to vomit.

I never used to be easily triggered by images of self harm, but I'm noticing that I'm getting more and more triggered by TV and movies that depict self harm. "Black Swan" made me want to cut or commit suicide or at least scratch myself. The desire to self harm had already crept into my head a few weeks before seeing it, and the movie added to it. For hours all I could think about was slitting my left wrist.

"Black Swan" was particularly damaging because I didn't expect the self harm images at all. I guess that should teach me to read reviews about movies more often before watching them. Maybe if I had known that the movie included so much self harm images, I would've still watched it but I could've waited until I was in a more stable mental state when I saw it.

I feel like my writing in this post is as scattered as the mind of Natalie Portman's character in "Black Swan." Sorry for the weird rambling...