Status Updates From Saving Our Own Lives: A Lib...

There're some issues to liberatory harm reduction. It wants to destigmatise all survival tactics and coping mechanisms, but some are created to destroy us. Junk food and food deserts exist to destroy the bodies of the lower class. Drugs have been used, throughout history, to nullify resistance to colonialism. We need a systemic critique of insidious survival tactics that lead to self and collective destruction.

Really interesting take on self-harm as a form of self-healing. Whereas trauma dissociates and disconnects you from your body, the pain from self-harm brings you back into your body. It's not merely about regaining agency or soothing nerves, it's a somatic response to a disrupted proprioception, the sensation/configuration of the body in relation to its surroundings.

This book is making me realise that all those years I was abusing drugs wasn't a slow suicide but an attempt to stay alive. That even though I wanted to die, everything in my body was fighting against that.

I never realised how much trans, gay, and sex worker struggles intersected through underground needle exchanges. The fight against HIV coinciding with safe drug use coinciding with HRT, survival mechanisms for those marginalised by the state, demonised by the public, and raped, arrested, and killed by cops. Liberatory harm reduction as oriented to community needs, rather than the needs of capital.

I love therapy, but the focus on dyadic relations can be exhausting. No one person should be expected to fix all your problems. It's why people burnout or lash out, despite their best efforts. So much of this year was me trying to create support networks for vulnerable people, but I experienced a lot of vicarious trauma and compassion fatique by the end of it. Hoping this book reorients me to a more collective frame.

I need to finish this book by the end of the month lol I started it in may 🫠