Self-Harm: The Unhealthy Default Reality in Action

Seeing self-abusive habits as wakeup calls — and invitations to a better way of living.

Photo by Taisiia Stupak on Unsplash

Happy Sunday, friend. How are you doing?

I had a rather rough week (caused in part by some frustrating interactions with AI — a story for another time).

At one point, I found myself scrolling through all sorts of annoying ChatGPT and search results — finding places my work had been misattributed, co-opted, or straight-up plagiarized — and feeling increasingly disheartened.

I’d been enmeshed in that activity for at least 15 minutes when my dog came up, nose-nudged me, and looked at me piteously, like: Please quit whatever stupid human thing you are currently doing and take me for a walk.

Which I did.

The moment I stopped directing my frustration with our mixed-up world against myself — wounding my body-mind with a flood of toxic media and getting more inflamed by the minute — I felt quite a lot better.

This inspired me to go re-watch a little video snippet that I had recorded last year during a Live Session with my Healthy Deviant U (HDU) group. I later included the video in Lesson 4, titled “Break the Machine, Not Yourself.”

Lesson 4 (of 24 ) in Healthy Deviant U focuses on reclaiming your autonomy in the face of mass culture — and ceasing the self-breakage that culture encourages.

This exploration of self-harm and its underlying causes (themes I’ve touched on in my other recents posts) really landed with me this week. And I’ve heard from a lot of my students that it has landed powerfully with them, too.

So I decided to share it with you.

You can watch the 10-minute video here. 👇’