Introduction to Me and My Project
August 18th 2009
Hello,
My name is Ivy and I have a project that I have always wanted to do and finally now have the time to actually try. For the most part I am a seemly normal 21 year old, I have recently graduated from college, I have a job, an apartment and even my own cat but in reality things are rarely what they seem, there are always skeletons in the closet.
Mine is simple enough- I have depression and because of it I used to hurt myself. At this present time I have now gone a year and a half without cutting myself which has been no easy task. I spent half my life hurting myself and even though I have now been able to manage my feelings in different ways I still think about it every single day. This is where you come in; the goal of my project is to create awareness about self-injury or SI. SI is a very lonely activity- most people hide the fact that they are in that much pain or that even that anything is wrong and you feel excluded and strange. You know that what you are doing isn’t normal and isn’t right but most of the time it feels like you have no choice. My goal is to try and educate people about self-injury, show that there others out there and even though there are people who will reject them for this behaviour that you can get help. Similarity I hope to educate people with dealing with the fact that they know someone in that much pain, what they can do to help and the real facts about SI.
I am sure at this point there are already people who have stopped reading, and that is ok, I am not expecting a miracle I am just hoping I can help some people because I know what it is like to lose all your friends to SI and how hard it is to talk about this type of stuff. I am not asking for anything big, I am just looking for your support by helping me educate people. I am providing information and resources all I am asking is that you make people aware that this stuff is out there for them. If you would like to take what I have given you and go further that would be amazing and if you would like to share with me what you did that would be great. Although there is some information in this package there is more on my website HERE.
My plan is for every year to make a new packet of information available to people, through my website and through snail mail, although some of the information will be repeated year to year I hope that I am able to keep it current so that I can provide the best possible help. I have given you the resources to start please go further, if you have other posters made up send me pictures or a copy and I will add them to my collection, the more help I have the better this project will become. My goal for 2009-2010 school year is to have 100 packages mailed out to secondary schools in Ontario by National Self-Injury awareness day on March 1st. I also hope to be able to create awareness in some community places such as libraries and to be able to provide resources online. Although this seems like a lot I am really looking forward to it.
Thank you for your time,
Ivy
