Pin Yesterday, I was a guest again on my friend Tiffany Werhner’s radio show/podcast Moments of Clarity. We chatted about my story of child abuse, dissociation, major depression, and eventually, my experiences with therapy and more. If you are a survivor or know someone who is who could use a reminder that the abuse does not define them, and wasn’t their fault, please share this with them.
Well it’s after midnight, so I guess that means this is now officially the 4th of July, and, my 34th birthday. It means that we get to wake up in the morning and prepare for the annual McBride family gathering at our house, which isn’t too bad. With that being an annual tradition, the 3rd…
Is any one else troubled by the idea that what happened in the Iraqi prisons is, rightfully, condemned far and wide as a human right’s abuse, while prison rape in our country is widespread and completely accepted, even joked about?
Someone sent me this link to back issues of Moving Forward Online, which was a newsletter published for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there, I hope to find some free time to read through it all soon. Speaking of free time, I have this wierd thing going…
I was having a conversation recently about relationships with someone who travels as part of their job, like I do. One of the big things that we agreed upon is that being in a relationship with someone who you will wind up spending a lot of time apart from, requires more trust than many people…
I’m thinking today about what really excites me. What really makes me feel alive. Two things leap to mind, one the love of my wife, and the other learning something new. I get totally jazzed and excited when I start to talk to people and share ideas and learn from our conversations. I really feel…
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)
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