Thanks to a comment she left here today, I saw this post on Survivors can Thrive about creating an event to raise money and awareness for survivors or sexual abuse and rape. It’s certainly a big idea, but why not? Why can’t we get all these folks together to raise awareness and funds to help victims of rape and sexual abuse? It’s certainly worth thinking about.
You may have noticed things have been a little quiet around here. I’ve been pretty busy with work, which is taking me away from my normal blogging patterns. Given how much travel I’m going to be doing as part of my job, it’s becoming more and more obvious that I’ll need to find some way…
Pin It was the stories. It was all of those people doing this in memory of someone they lost. Or, like me, in memory of the fact that we are still here instead of leaving others to tell our stories. In our day to day lives, it’s too easy to forget how many people are impacted by suicide each and every year across the country, and the world. The further in time I get away from that time in my own life, the easier it can be to put it behind me and forget about it. But, that is something I never want to do. As painful as it is, I want to remember what it was like to no longer want to be alive. When someone is in that place, I want to be able to say, “I’ve been where you are”, to recall all of the details, and be able to sit and understand. Because that is how we save people. Not by talking in hushed tones about depression, or mental illness, but by sharing the stories of people who survived and healed, and of those we’ve lost.
Let’s face it, if you spend much time considering those losses, and listening to those stories, it is impossible to walk away without realizing that we have lost a devastating number of people to this disease. Many more than some of the diseases we all gladly talk openly about every day. Yet somehow, maybe because we don’t understand it, or are afraid of it, we keep silent. After all, it might make someone uncomfortable. Even I have, at times, kept the details to myself in fear of making other people uncomfortable, or risk having them worry about me. The more I read and heard these stories though, the more I realized that I needed to share my story, if only so that anyone who reads it would know, and maybe even understand a little bit, what it’s like to be so far down into the darkness of depression, that you don’t want to live any longer. So, with that said, let me share my experience with you, now that it’s been some 25 years, and maybe now people won’t worry so much about me. (Warning, this is about to get dark, and we will talk a bit about suicide, though I will keep those exact details out)
Today, as we were walking around Savannah, my wife and I came across a lovely Presbyterian Church and noticed that they had a sign out about a Compline service that evening starting at 9:00PM. It sounded pretty interesting, and as we are always on the lookout for new and interesting things when we are traveling,…
Pin The question isn’t about sharing or not sharing, it’s about why we, as a society, tolerate the haters. Why, in a stadium full of tens of thousands of fans, did he have to take that on by himself? How many people heard someone tell a fellow human being to kill themselves and laughed?Â
How many people heard it or read about it and decided against asking for help? How many of them will we lose?Â
Pin Earlier this week, I wrote a post on what I refer to as my “day job” blog about how admission offices do actually look at the social media profiles of prospective students. I went on to talk about something that I write about often: using social media to put your best professional image out so…
I finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers yesterday, and while I’m not going to get into a full review of the book on this site, I did want to talk about one particular section that, I think, is significant for child abuse survivors. If you’re not familiar with the book, Gladwell spends a great deal of…
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Wow! Thanks for the link! I appreciate your support. Hopefully, when this big idea actually gets off the ground, I can say a big “We” appreciate your support!