1, 2, 3, 4, ABC: The Trauma in Me (And the Tree Still Fell)
Yeah. It does. And the magnitude of that fall—the weight, the impact, the structural damage left behind—doesn't vanish just because someone tried to delete the files, wipe the listings, or pretend the house was never condemned by the fire chief himself. I’ve been doing a lot of looking back lately. Digging through the glitch, the static, the playback of a life that got turned upside down. When you go through something heavy—when you're dealing with calculated deception, bad-faith actions, and people trying to separate you from your service dog and your safety—your body tries to shut it down. Numbness creeps in. The speech gets caught. The stutter or the lisp comes back from the days when you were just a kid sitting on the floor in a circle. I remember reading The Giving Tree in first grade with Ms. Gothard. Back then, it was just a story. But reading it as an adult? Oh man, I was pissed off. What the fuck? Do I love this book or do I hate it? It’s confusing. Just like The Lor...