The Guardian has published a heart-breaking letter by Susan Smith, the pseudonym on an anonymous reader who has spent her entire life with apotemnophilia, more properly known as Body Identity Integrity Disorder. Susan believes that the only way she can ever be happy in life is to have both of her legs amputated:

To the general public, people like me are sick and strange, and that's where it ends. I think it is a question of fearing the unknown. I have something called body identity integrity disorder (BIID), where sufferers want to remove one or more healthy limbs. Few people who haven't experienced it themselves can understand what I am going through. It is not a sexual thing, it is certainly not a fetish, and it is nothing to do with appearances. I simply cannot relate to myself with two legs: it isn't the "me" I want to be. I have long known that if I want to get on with my life I need to remove both legs. I have been trapped in the wrong body all this time and over the years I came to hate my physical self.

After three unsuccessful tries, Susan managed to kill her leg by freezing it until it had to be amputated by a doctor. The freezing required her to pack it in dry ice for six hours, which Susan had to face alone, in agony. As soon as the leg was amputated, she felt happier than she ever had in her life, and vowed she'll do away with the other leg as soon as she can. Because it is illegal to help someone cut off a healthy leg, she will have to have her remaining leg amputated in a similar.

This eponymously imposes on Bodyhack's territory but I couldn't resist commenting on this. I find this story extremely moving, not simply due to the strange nature of apotemnophilia, or my familiarity with the subculture of BIID on the Internet, but because Susan's story is the first account of the disorder I've read where it all became understandable to me, not as a mere psychosis or a fetish, but as a very human desire to be a better person.

I think many of us understand the dream of somehow managing to become our ideal selves: much of my youth was spent attempting to become the ineffable person I was within – someone not perfect, but focused, with the rough edges of my own very real insecurities and grosser faults hewn away and polished. In my life, I spent a great deal of my youth trying to become this ideal inner person, who represented my potential for kindness, intelligence, wit, and love. But something has always been lost in translation between what I felt and how I acted.

My point is simple: I think many people understand the idea that the ideal person they can be is stuck in the amber of the person they are. What Susan's letter allowed me to see was that the person I have wanted to be in my life is in many ways as inscrutable as the amputee that she wants to be. Ultimately, the difference between someone like Susan and any other seemingly 'normal' person is physical. Hacking away at ourselves is the defining quality of the introspective: what makes the apotemnophile is simply in how and what they hack.

I won't be happy until I lose my legs [Guardian]