SAMHSA, the federal mental health and substance abuse agency, describes individual trauma as an event or circumstance causing physical, emotional, or life-threatening harm while , according to Google’s AI overview, trauma is  an emotional response to intensely distressing events such as violence, abuse, and disasters .   Weird, but AI is, as far as I’m concerned, closer to the mark than the Feds. The Feds are saying that trauma is bad stuff that happens to us, outside events.

It’s been hard for me to accept that moment-by-moment I’ve been doing my best. Not that I can’t to do better in the future. If I keep writing, there’s a chance my writing will improve. But right now, at this moment, I am writing my best blog. I’m doing my best as much as I wish I was doing better.   There is peace in this moment of self-acceptance. It’s an elusive moment, but with practice I can keep coming back to it. But what about everyone else. What about the people who d

For a while it seemed that people were dying all around me, but we’ve had a break from funerals this year. Jishu is still an anomaly for me. I’m coming up on the anniversary of Jishu’s passing – it will be twenty-eight years – and she stands alone.   For a long time, funerals were things that happened to older people, grandparents originally, although in high school, the mothers of two girlfriends died. I went to the funerals, but I had no idea what to say. Then in college, t