Wanting to die every day

again. In six months, she was put on life support three times. The last incident left her by her account, ‘‘pretty much dead’’.

Yet, somehow, Gemma once again made a full recovery.

And again, her parents were by her side, hoping one day she would wake up and want to get better.

It took perhaps her lowest point for that to happen.

‘‘I decided I couldn’t look after myself properly, and I needed a man to do it for me. But he made things worse. ‘‘I got pregnant.’’ At first Gemma viewed it as the wake-up call she needed to clean up her act and provide the child for open adoption, but a move toward healthy eating and a drugfree lifestyle was in vain.

In the weeks before, she had attempted suicide using household chemicals, not knowing she was pregnant. She was addicted to synthetic cannabis. She was in no state to become a mother.

Around the time the baby was terminated, Gemma realised something had to give.

‘‘It was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through – I was really messed up after that.’’

Slowly but surely, she made some changes. The self harming all but stopped, the arrests and cries for help were no more. She no longer wanted to die.

After years of ‘‘falling through the cracks’’, Gemma found herself a good support team, and finally started on the road to recovery.

She made a complaint to police about the rape. On January 19, the offender was discharged, with the judge citing insufficient evidence.

But it’s not just recovery she wants, she also wants redemption. She knows how many people she hurt on her path to self destruction, and hopes to rectify it someday. Talk of mentoring and peer support are bandied around as a way of giving back, but she doesn’t know if she can afford the training.

All she knows is if her body is still holding up, there is no way she can give up now.

‘‘I can’t believe I’m still alive. But in saying that, there’s not too much about my life that I’d change. Who I am now is because of what I’ve been through.

‘‘I think I slipped through the cracks, but then no-one knew what the hell to do with me. I was a very difficult patient. The system did fail me but I think I had a part to play in that as well.’’

She now speaks to her parents every day, and has made ‘‘some inroads’’ with her siblings.

She bought a cat – Diesel – who now provides her a ‘‘reason to wake up in the morning’’. She has also since started volunteering at a local animal shelter.

She contemplated suicide only once in the last year, and before one slip-up in December, it had been 10 months since she had been drunk. But that one slip-up was all it took – and after a night of drinking alone in her flat, she was caught shoplifting from New World, in order to self-harm again.

It was the first time she had woken up ‘‘disgusted’’ with her actions. She knows now she needs to stay off alcohol for good.

With the nerve and bone damage years of self-harm has brought her, Gemma relies on Work and Income payments. Her flat is lined with colourful homemade canvases and work-in-progress cross-stitch efforts.

Yet, despite her inward efforts, she cannot change her outside appearance – the scars that tell her story in vivid detail. The word ‘‘broken’’ runs down one leg, and ‘‘misunderstood’’ on the other. With her knuckle tattoos ‘‘help’’ and ‘‘lost’’, she bemusedly spells out ‘‘Help she lost the plot’’ with different fingers.

But on her left hand, etched into her thumb, ‘‘Keep your head up’’ is the one she now abides by.

With her current support group moving on, Gemma hopes she is ‘‘strong enough’’ to carry on alone. Her next goal is a follow-up to her book, penning the last six years of her life. She wants to help other people struggling with mental illness and addiction, but doesn’t know how yet. She hopes by being brutally honest, people might think twice before putting their body through what she has.

‘‘I’m just not sure where to go in life. With such a significant criminal history and the way I look, it’s going to be hard to get employment, to say the least.

‘‘But the looks from people don’t affect me anymore. I consciously chose not to hide my scars.’’