Gideon's Self-Harm and Recovery

Gideon’s self-harm and recovery are presented not as a single crisis followed by a clean resolution, but as a concealed history that becomes speakable through family support, therapy, and poetry. He describes beginning to hurt himself about five years before telling Ava about it, hiding the evidence from his mothers and struggling to ask for help. By the time he speaks, he says he has not self-harmed since; recovery means that the urge has grown smaller, not that difficult feelings have vanished.

Background and Onset

Gideon’s account links his self-harm to distress he could not yet express directly. In his poem “Head of State,” he describes a period when he lacked the words to ask his mother for help and communicated through what he did to himself instead. The poem also presents his mother’s discovery as a moment of painful recognition: she sees what he has been concealing and responds with love and a wish to help. The poem frames that response as care, while making clear that her concern cannot simply erase the distress he has been carrying.

When Ava asks how long the self-harm had been going on, Gideon says it started five years earlier. He recalls deliberately making a glass break in the kitchen and keeping pieces in his pocket while cleaning up. His description establishes both the secrecy and the planning involved, without suggesting that his family knew what was happening at the time. He tells Ava that his parents did not know for a long while.

Concealment and Discovery

A family holiday to the Barrier Reef shows how concealment shaped ordinary circumstances. During a summer trip involving snorkelling, Gideon refused to join in and stayed covered in long sleeves. His mother Susan had begun to suspect something was wrong, and later saw his arms when he had just come out of the shower. The discovery followed a period in which his clothing and refusal to participate had already raised questions; it was not, as Gideon recounts it, an easy confession initiated by him.

In the conversation with Ava, Gideon allows her to see the old scars on his arms. She is shocked by what their extent reveals and asks about their history. He explains that the scars are not new cuts, and later identifies some other marks as burns from a lighter. The scene gives Ava information she had not understood from his poem alone: the distress was not merely a metaphor or an episode in the past, but part of his lived history. Her response is to listen and ask, while Gideon chooses how much to disclose.

Family and Therapeutic Support

After Susan discovered what was happening, she and Gideon sat together in the bathroom and talked for a long time. Susan and his other mother searched for information, and Gideon spoke with several people before finding a therapist he liked. That sequence matters to the account of recovery: discovery leads not to a claim that everything is immediately fixed, but to sustained conversation and a search for support that feels suitable to him.

Robbie is the fourth therapist Gideon has seen since the family moved. Gideon distinguishes Robbie from the previous three, whom he found old, frustrating, or patronising. Robbie does not fit Gideon’s idea of what a therapist is supposed to look like, and, more importantly, does not make assumptions about him. At their first meeting, Robbie asks about ordinary preferences and whether Gideon has a girlfriend or boyfriend, without presuming his sexuality. Gideon values this openness in the context of earlier experiences of being judged by what he said or wore, by having two mothers, or by his scars.

Their first session also begins with small gestures of welcome. Robbie offers Gideon a can of Coke at a time when his mothers have imposed a strict no-sugar diet. For the thirteen-year-old, the gesture makes the therapist seem approachable; the session continues as a conversation about subjects including celebrities. Robbie’s importance is therefore not limited to clinical help: Gideon identifies him as the person who introduced him to poetry. Therapy provides a relationship in which he can speak without being reduced to other people’s assumptions, and poetry becomes one way of doing that speaking.

Recovery and the Meaning of the Urge

When Ava asks whether he has self-harmed since the period he has described, Gideon answers that he has not. Asked whether he has wanted to, he pauses before explaining that the feeling does not disappear. Instead, it becomes smaller in relation to him and to the whole of who he is. He describes it as small enough to imagine putting in a box. His account avoids treating recovery as a permanent cure or as proof that the earlier distress was insignificant. The change lies in the feeling’s diminished scale and in his ability to live alongside it.

This explanation also clarifies why Gideon’s openness to Ava is significant. He has not spoken about his history casually: he shows her his arms, answers her questions, and identifies both the circumstances of discovery and the support that followed. Ava’s attention gives the disclosure a witness, but the scene does not present her as the person who can solve his distress. Gideon’s history includes his own efforts to seek help, his mothers’ response, and the continuing work of making sense of what remains.

Poetry as Testimony and Change

Gideon’s experience appears in two poems that approach disclosure from different angles. In “Head of State,” he uses the image of his mother as a monarch who might take over the painful task of governing his inner state. The poem’s movement is from concealed suffering and an inability to ask for care toward the imagined possibility that another person’s love can reach him. Its performance precedes Ava’s questions about his scars; the later conversation makes concrete the personal history that the poem had already made partially visible.

A second poem, “Broken,” connects a childhood broken ankle with depression and the difficulty of having an invisible struggle recognised. Its speaker recalls a cast chosen after a scooter accident and contrasts that visible injury with a later mental crisis that could not be repaired in the same straightforward way. The poem describes stigma and the work of continuing to face each day, while affirming the speaker’s preference for being alive. Gideon wrote it about a year before he read it publicly, and this performance was the first time he had shown it to anyone.

After the reading, Norma and Andy cheer, while Gideon’s mothers cry and embrace him. He is embarrassed by their reaction, but later explains that writing changes how the material exists for him: what had been circling in his mind becomes something tangible that he can examine and become accustomed to. Even the word depression had once felt difficult to put on the page because writing it seemed like an admission. With time and repeated reading, the work becomes a poem he has made, rather than only a confession or an inseparable part of himself. That shift does not cancel his history; it gives him a form in which to approach it, share it, and recognise that his present is larger than the feeling that once dominated it.