Surviving

  • Sexual assault has happened to this many other guys, and almost nobody talks about it?

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    It pains me to know that so many survivors spend their adult lives in isolation and shame because they don’t know other survivors around them. This is why telling our stories when we can, is so important. No one should spend most of their adult life ashamed of surviving abuse. Those of us who are in a position to share our story and the statistics about abuse can change that. You can change that by sharing those stories and those statistics, shedding light on a subject we spend too much time trying to avoid. That light saves lives.

  • Still Here, 2020 Edition

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Recently, a friend on Facebook decided to ask us all to share one thing that happened this year that was a positive, to try and collect any and all good news in one place. It was a good idea, and as I thought about how I would respond to something like that, I thought of some of the good things that have happened this year. I’ve had some pretty nice successes at work. I’ve connected on a deeper level with my wife, and managed to stay connected to a close group of friends and family. Those were good things, but at the end of it all, I kept coming back to something I talked about at the end of 2019 on the Find Your Voice Podcast, and then again on this very blog on January 1 of 2020.

    “I’m Still Here”

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    The Extreme Things Toxic Positivity Forces You To Believe

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    I feel fairly certain I have never read a worse example of how certain worldviews will have to end up blaming the victim for their own suffering than this quote from an article about how we can fetishize “surviving” during difficult times, often taking more interest in things like the Holocaust:

    Recently, a textbook required for the UNC minicourse “21st Century Wellness” was skewered for suggesting—as a headline read—“Holocaust victims who died failed to find their inner strength.” The actual text included: “The people in the camps who did not tap into the strength that comes from their intrinsic worth succumbed to the brutality to which they were subjected.”

    I realize that this seems shocking that anyone would believe this, but I have a different take on it. Why wouldn’t some people believe this?

  • Daisy Coleman Found Her Voice, But Her Struggle Didn’t Stop

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Which brings us to Daisy. She did not get her justice from the court system, quite the opposite. But, she did something else that many assume is a sign of “being healed”, she found her voice. She told her story, she had a movie made where she could speak her truth to the whole world. Surely, that is healed, right?

    As we now know, that probably wasn’t the case. I assume that many people who watched that documentary went on to become fans of Daisy, admiring her for having the courage to tell her story, happy for her that she was able to overcome, but that had nothing to do with the reality of what surviving actually is.

    The coincidence that I spoke of came this morning, when I popped over to Twitter during a quick coffee break, and saw Rachel Denhollander, another survivor who’s made an appearance in a documentary, Athlete A, on her involvement with the Larry Nasser case, talking about this article:

    Daisy Coleman’s Death Lays Bare the Myth of ‘Surviving

  • The Business Community Should Care About Child Abuse Too

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    What if I told you, that all those businesses that are struggling to find good workers in the current labor market, or who are losing workdays due to various mental or physical health issues, should be thinking about long term solutions to the problem? What if I also told you that many of these issues,…