Shira Hassan’s Saving Our Own Lives is not just a book—it’s a reclamation. A reclamation of care work from institutions that have made safety synonymous with surveillance. A reclamation of harm reduction from sanitized nonprofits and state-sanctioned scripts. A reclamation of survival itself, especially for queer, trans, disabled, and BIPOC communities who have always had to create their own safety in a world designed to discard them.

At its heart, this book is a radiant manifesto for liberatory harm reduction—a politic and practice born not in sterile clinics but in syringe exchanges, hormone sharing, sex worker drop-ins, and whispered community care networks. Hassan reminds us again and again: harm reduction did not originate in academic journals or white-led recovery centers. It emerged from the wisdom of trans women of color, sex workers, drug users, and disabled folks who dared to believe they were worth saving on their own terms.

Through essays, interviews, and deeply rooted political analysis, Saving Our Own Lives invites us to look beyond behavior modification and into the soil of systemic harm: criminalization, white supremacy, carceral psychiatry, and structural abandonment. Shira does not flinch from complexity—she names how the state profits off our pain, how public health has co-opted care, how even our own protective instincts can edge into coercion. And yet, every page pulses with love. Not the kind that demands change before safety, but the kind that says: you deserve care exactly as you are.

What struck me most was the expansiveness of harm reduction here. This isn’t just about drugs—though Shira powerfully debunks the punitive failures of carceral “treatment.” It’s about how we treat hormone use, abortion access, mental illness, sex work, food justice, housing instability. It’s about what happens when we believe each other capable of change, but don’t make that belief a prerequisite for love. Harm reduction becomes a framework for self and community liberation—one that rejects high-risk rhetoric and instead asks: what unmet need is driving this pain? And how can we meet that need, together?

Standout contributions like Kelly McGowan’s essay on carceral psychiatry and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network’s reflections on food sovereignty and Indigenous wisdom broaden the scope even further. There’s no top-down expertise here, only peer knowledge, shared tools, and collective survival.

Saving Our Own Lives refuses disposability. It whispers: we are not our worst day. It insists that every one of us is worthy of care, rest, and interdependence. This is harm reduction as transformation, not transaction. As community, not compliance. As liberation, not leniency.

Shira Hassan has given us a blueprint for loving each other better, not in spite of our struggles, but precisely through them. This book is a lifeline. I’m so grateful it exists.

📖 Read this if you love: abolitionist praxis, radical community care, and the works of Mariame Kaba, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and adrienne maree brown.

🔑 Key Themes: Liberatory Harm Reduction, Bodily Autonomy and Agency, Anti-Criminalization, Queer and Trans Survival, Community-Based Healing and Mutual Aid.