I spent the morning constructing a cupboard door for my garden tools. After attaching the door to the frame of the cupboard, I realised that it was a hair too big (a very thick strand of hair), and I proceeded to chisel it down to size.

In the midst of pecking at the door, the chisel tore through a strip of wood a little more easily than I had anticipated, and the angled edge of the chisel ran itself on the top of my hand, on the fleshy part between my thumb and index.

When I’ve had a cut in the past, I normally dashed frantically to the tap and ran water over it. And with the same urgency of a war medic treating a bomb shrapnel wound, I would have nervously shrugged a strip of band aid out of its sleeve, peeled off the non-stick white pieces, and sealed the gash before I lost consciousness.

Today was different. I felt an uncharacteristic calmness as blood trickled down my hand. To my surprise, watching my life blood flow out of me emerged as a refreshing sensation, and I felt alive. Running through my head at the time was how corpse-like it would feel if I cut myself and did not bleed. So bleeding, once a scary affair, all of a sudden was comforting.

Weirdly, I was also mildly entertained as blots of red started to spread outwards over the thin cover of sawdust on the palm of my hand. The patterns that formed reminded me of the Rorschach ink blots that psychologists use to interpret personality types.

About a decade back, I read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, a brilliantly written book detailing the author’s paralysing journey through mental illness and depression.

Many of Elizabeth’s accounts were scarily lurid, and I distinctly remember a part of the book where she explained that a more effective way to slit your wrist was not to slash crosswise like they do in movies, but to make an incision length wise along the vein so that the rupture is irreparable and the bleeding more intense.

Another detail she went into was how she drew amusement from drawing lines on her body with a razor blade.

Reflecting upon my recollections of the book, it crossed my mind that today’s blood fascination could be a pre-cursor to something more serious. But delving deeper into it, I recognised that I’ve always been a very experiential person, and it was probably the enticement of novelty Iwas attracted to, an unfamiliarity that made the experience unique enough to be enjoyable.

Regardless, I hope this will not be an indulgence that lodges itself in my black book of pleasures. Well, I doubt it will. Especially now that the newness has been breached.

But just in case, my blood type is O.