PinIf you’re a regular Tumblr user, you can now follow this blog, including all of our posts, on our tumblr blog. Right now it just has a link to the latest posts up, but eventually I’d like to start getting involved with other survivors over there, the same way that we do on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, currently.
If that’s your place to hang out and you want to keep up with the site, by all means, follow us over there – http://childabusesurvivor.tumblr.com/
Pin Over the weekend, I wrote a lengthy piece over on my professional site about how social media, and regular media, are designed to capture, and keep, your attention. In order to do that, they figure out what you like to see, and keep showing you more of it. The piece was inspired by this rather…
I’ve been spending some time coming up with this, and I think it’s finally ready to be unveiled. I’ve created a Social Network just for Survivors, and the folks who are trying to support and love survivors. To quote the “why” from the site: You may be asking yourself why create another social networking site?…
On a recent Saturday afternoon, my wife and I went for a country drive to one of the cute small towns in our area of the country. We stopped in a little coffee shop and were greeted warmly by the elderly mother of the shop’s owner. Unfortunately, this woman, while very sweet, may be dealing…
As I’ve discussed before, I’ve spent years working on simply being better instead of making new year’s resolutions. I figure that’s it’s better to concentrate on the goal of being a better person every day than it is to make resolutions that go away after a few weeks. I’ve worked, with some success, and continue…
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)
I was reminded this evening about a site that an online friend of mine had put up to help tell his story and support other abuse survivors. I hadn’t been there in a while and it was nice to see the forum and everything else still going strong. You can take a look at it…
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