Project Why

Self-Injury: My Why

Project Why creates space for people to share their experiences of self-injury openly and without shame. The point is not to claim that self-injury is “good”, but nor is our aim to suggest that self-injury is “bad”. Rather, it is to encourage acceptance of self-injury as one of many adaptations that people make on their path to survival. For some that means using self-injury for a time and then moving on to other things. For others of us, self-injury will always be a part of our lives and many of us are okay with that.

This project also challenges people to broaden their view of what ‘self-injury’ even is. It asks them to begin to recognize that most people use some form of self-injury at some point in their lives. In fact, many of us have experienced first-hand the ways in which we’ve been accepted or even rewarded for our socially acceptable forms of self-injury (heavy drinking, overeating or overworking in intentionally self-destructive ways, over exercising, etc.) while being punished for those forms that are not so socially accepted (cutting, burning, etc.). This has been true even when the socially acceptable forms pose much greater risk to our well-being. This has made it clear that many of the objections to self-injury are about someone else’s discomfort and fears rather than the actual risk and impact on us and our bodies.

This disconnect and misunderstanding of our experiences sometimes comes at great expense. Self-injury has been used to forcibly contain us in psychiatric facilities, to challenge our ability to parent or hold a job, and has even led to violent and sometimes deadly police interactions initiated by people who said they were concerned for our “safety”. This has understandably led to our own valid fears about talking about self-injury. But silence and fear don’t lead to healing and connection.

And so we offer this growing gallery of ‘whys’ to:

• Help build understanding about why people self-injure and the different ways it has actually helped many of us at various points in our lives
• Support people who use or have used self-injury to feel less alone even if the near of negative judgements and consequences has forced them to be silent up to this point
• To remind the world that self-injury is not the ‘problem’ so much as a way some of us have navigated our problems and so simply forcing us to stop can’t be the ‘answer’