Fuck Yeah, Gender Studies!

Trigger warning: self harm, purging 

PAPER CHAIN PROJECT

- For every day you go without self harming or purging, add a colourful link to the paper chain
- If you relapse, just add a white link to to the chain and carry on the chain without any disruption
- Over time the paper chain will grow in length and you can see your progress, and see that even if you do relapse, the are still days you go without hurting yourself. The colourful links.
- Over time and through your recovery watch the amount of coloured links begin to increase, and the amount of white links begin to decrease.
- If you feel like hurting yourself, look at the paper chain and realise just how far you’ve made it, and realise that if you’ve resisted before you can do it again :)

• Please reblog, this could help someone towards recovery. ❤

Gross.

Because “recovery” is JUST about behaviour modification and conformity to oppressive notions of corporeal “wholeness” and obedience, and preserving the integrity of the skin is the sole marker of “recovery” and “health”. Right(!)

Self-injury (and here i’m primarily talking about skin cutting and other usually superficial, non life-threatening actions; obviously purging is acutely life-threatening so i’m not commenting on that) is often necessary because the person lacks other coping mechanisms or support networks. Unless the “recovery” process involves putting those in place, all that will happen from projects like this is the person is left without an outlet for their emotional pain. Like that’s helpful.
If self-harm weren’t a necessary action, people wouldn’t do it. If they had other, as effective (or more effective) ways to deal with emotional distress, don’t you think they would use those? But they don’t—which indicates that they don’t exist! 

I can’t support or even understand projects like these that seek to sacrifice someone’s emotional wellbeing for the sake of their skin. Shaming people for trying to cope with emotional pain in the only way they know how, or in the only way that’s available to them, is fucked up and totally wrong.

(via lipstick-feminists)