About the Orange Lily Project
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About Kelsey Regan Nienna
- In Which Kelsey Speaks of Herself in the 3rd Person in the Same Manner of a Dating Site.
Kelsey is a part-time grad-student, receptionist, gardener, mask-maker, and youth group volunteer. Additionally, she is a full-time cat mom, aunt, godmother, and highly social introvert (INFJ). When it isn’t COVIDtide Kelsey is ALSO a full-time American Sign Language Interpreter who specializes in medicine and the performing arts.
In her copious free time Kelsey is a Starbucks haunting, meme hoarding, dabbling fangirl, failed stand-up comedian, procrastinating artist, Enneagram obsessed, anxiety and depression enthusiast who is about 7 years older than she looks.
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Kelsey loves singing and listening to music (especially For King & Country), reading, drawing, painting, playing with children, writing, cake decorating, chess, and tending her bit of earth that is so overgrown with lettuce she’s not even mad when deer break in.
Screen time includes candy crush, pinning everything she can get her grubby little hands on, serial killer dramas, and most recently Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Chosen.
Kelsey graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary June 2020 as the test-pilot for the Masters in Theological Studies program, where she wowed the quarantined masses with her 33-paged single-spaced thesis Theological Reflections on the Trauma and Recovery of Self-Harm.
Kelsey is currently a student at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA pursuing her Doctorate in Ministry (D.min). She has become semi-known on campus as the student who crochets in class and asks people to pray for her because she’s been “plagued with a D.min.” (Apparently she is the first doctoral student to make this word-play joke.) Her end goal is to train priests in pastoral care for self-harmers, and equip teens with mental health tools.
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*Kelsey loves hearing from you but is not a counselor and cannot take the place of one.
The Orange Lily Project: What IS the OLP?
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Here at the OLP, I am creating trigger-free resources for harmers and their loved ones. Rather than what I consider the Pimple Approach (Don't cut, the end) I'm going for an all-encompassing, wholesome approach like a massage therapist who is not only working out the kinks to the knot, but is also exploring the other factors that led to the injury in the first place.
1. Youtube
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Interviews
These next few years I will continue
to interview self-harmers through every
walk of life and stage of recovery.
The end goal is to bombard Youtube
with trigger-free, educational self-harm
videos communicating HOPE, rather
than more destructive ideas.
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Educational Shorts
(Eventually) I'll be creating educational shorts reminiscent of workbook chapters.
2. The Workbook
If the bulk of published self-harm books are for the psychologist’s bookshelf, THIS workbook will be for the cutter’s nightstand.
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Chapter topics will include
“The Science Of Self-Harm: You’re Not Crazy, This Is Why It Felt Good.”
“Panic Attacks: When Your Brain Explodes.”
“Trauma: Hurts That May Have Driven You to Self-Harm.”
“Post-Trauma: Becoming Safe for Yourself.”
“Glad, Mad, Sad, Afrad: Driving Emotions and How to Care for them.”
“Sleep: Nightmares, the Sleep Cycle, and Surviving 2am.”
Bonus activities include
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“Asking for help from a friend” templates
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Mood logs
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Coloring pages
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Music playlists
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Recommended reading
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Random pictures of my cats
* Thoughts and insights from other recovering self-harmers??
On occasion prototype chapters will be posted here along with book reflections, school papers, updates, and possibly short stories if I think people may enjoy it.
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I was the first cutter I ever met.
With two failed suicide attempts at 14, an eating disorder at 15, and cutting from 16-19, I’ve put myself through the ringer. My final self-inflicted injury in March 2010 resulted in me needing to use a wheelchair. Three physical therapists later I still limp a little.
During my cutting days, resources were lacking. There were and are plenty of great books for psychologists, but they clearly weren’t talking to me, a scared teenage girl. There are also fiction novels about self-harm, but even 8 years later I’ve often found many of these books highly triggering, unsafe to read, and to be honest rather generic, even romanticizing self-harm.
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What I desperately needed wasn’t someone wistfully suggesting maybe things could change... I needed someone who had walked this road, DID break out of it, and stayed free. I needed someone whose life proved things could get better, and how.
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... I inadvertently became that person.
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Youtube was even worse. I would go online looking for hope, but instead I would come away with ideas for my next harming session. Graphic before and after shots of wounds would flash on the screen captioned with “It Gets Better” and I knew they like me were just trying to make it real, to shock themselves and their viewers awake. But it wasn’t helping. The comment sections were filled with hundreds of people like me who had gone a few days or weeks only to return to their blades and burners, seemingly worse than ever. I don’t know if any of us actually believed there was hope.
About The Orange Lily Project: Origins
Since my final relapse in 2010 the Lord has put countless self-harmers in my path. Some approach me after hearing my testimony; other times I recognize warning signs in a teenager and seek them out. Even before pursuing recovery I spent time online at mental health chat sites to ask questions of others and in turn became someone from whom others sought advice. By the time I graduated college I had formally and informally interviewed well over a hundred self-harmers. Junior year I sent out a plea for recovering self-harmers to sit for a recorded interview, and 3 women agreed to meet for donuts. Their trigger-free videos were uploaded onto Youtube and received several hundred views.
The Orange Lily Project is a continuation of this.​
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