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	<title>WIRL Project &#187; Trust</title>
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	<description>What It&#039;s Really Like.</description>
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		<title>An Old Man in a Music Video Once Said&#8230;</title>
		<link>http://www.wirlproject.com/an-old-man-in-a-music-video-once-said/</link>
		<comments>http://www.wirlproject.com/an-old-man-in-a-music-video-once-said/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Jun 2015 18:00:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kassidy Everard]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Life/Leisure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Love/Relationships]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brother]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Craig Morgan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Deep]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Died]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[happiness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Loss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[love]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Memories]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Money]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Old Man]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[respect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[This Ain't Nothing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trust]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Twister]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Value]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wife]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wirlproject.com/?p=7101</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This afternoon I was listening to music on YouTube for the first time in a while. I usually have my music on my phone, that way I can listen to it on the go. I didn&#8217;t realize how much I missed watching videos on YouTube until I stumbled across Craig Morgan&#8217;s &#8220;This Ain&#8217;t Nothing&#8221; music video. I remember listening to this song when I was younger when it came on the radio. I don&#8217;t even think I liked it when I was that young, because I didn&#8217;t put the deeper meaning with it. In fact, I didn&#8217;t truly put the deeper meaning in it until last year, the most recent time I heard it before today. I feel like Craig Morgan has a lot going for him. He is a respectable person, he is a talented musician, and he manages to stay away from the drama of what seems to be the life of being famous. Not only that, but he is also a pretty good-looking man. With that being said, I think we can all agree than I&#8217;ve made you wait long enough to see what old man I am talking about. In the music video, Craig sings about a reporter who interviews an elderly man after a twister passes through Birmingham where he lives. The twister destroyed his home and everything in it. The reporter asks the man: Tell the folks please mister, what are you gonna do, now that this twister has taken all that&#8217;s dear to you? But the reporter got an answer that he never expected&#8230; The old man just smiled and said, Boy let me tell you something, this ain&#8217;t nothing&#8230; This old man, you know, seems pretty tough. He didn&#8217;t cry like the audience would have thought. He didn&#8217;t ignore the question like some would have thought. He just answered honestly, in his purest form. Most of us would cry, knowing that we just lost everything we have ever worked for. Knowing that every single penny we put into building a foundation is now gone. But some people always decide to see the good in every single situation that is horrific. The old man explains why he thinks that the twister that hit his house is nothing. He said: I lost my daddy, when I was eight years old, That cave-in at the Kincaid mine left a big old hole, And I lost my baby brother, my best friend and my left hand In a no win situation in a place called Vietnam And last year I watched my loving wife, of fifty years waste away and die And I held her hand til her heart of gold stopped pumping, So this ain&#8217;t nothing. This old man lost just about everything he had. His wife, his brother, his dad, his left hand, and his best friend. Little do we realize that when we lose even one person in our life we think that it is the end of the world. Losing anyone, no matter what way, has a toll on our minds forever. This old man stuck through everything and kept going. Even the hardest things to deal with didn&#8217;t keep him from living his life even if there wasn&#8217;t much of it left to live or wasn&#8217;t anyone else to live for. But why would you need someone to live for? Why did living for yourself and your own benefit become almost unrealistic? Toward the end of the song is when I started to tear up. Not because I realized what was said in the beginning of the song, but because I realized how much truth was in the words that this man was saying. This man was on his own because everyone he had in his life had died. As did his wife, just the year before. When he looked down on the ground, He reached down in the rubble and picked up a photograph Wiped the dirt off of it with the hand that he still had He put it to his lips and said man she was something But this ain&#8217;t nothing This man, he knew. He knew what it was like to want for something that he couldn&#8217;t have. He knew how it was to have a love that money couldn&#8217;t buy. This man saw the difference between something that truly mattered and something that really didn&#8217;t. The old man&#8217;s last words in the song are what truly got to me. He said, This ain&#8217;t nothin&#8217; time won&#8217;t erase And this ain&#8217;t nothin&#8217; money can&#8217;t replace Money. We all think money is what runs the world. As that is true, there are many things that money cannot buy &#8211; here are a few&#8230; 1. Love 2. Happiness 3. Respect 4. Trust 5. Value 6. Memories 7. Life So that should leave you with the thought, &#8220;Well, what can money buy?&#8221; Money can buy almost everything that isn&#8217;t a necessary tool for healthy relationships or a healthy life. This man knows what the genuine value of something is. He knows that it will just take money to bring back his house, but that no amount of money in the world will bring back his wife or his brother or his father and his best friend. Money never brought this man happiness. And little by little his happiness was taken away from him throughout life. Not by things money could buy, but by things it couldn&#8217;t. It is sad to believe that we rely on money to control any part of our happiness. How about we try to think like this man for a day in our lives. Oh, what difference it would make! &#160;]]></description>
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		<title>Living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder</title>
		<link>http://www.wirlproject.com/living-with-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/</link>
		<comments>http://www.wirlproject.com/living-with-post-traumatic-stress-disorder/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2015 09:00:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephanie Volkert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health/Fitness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Life/Leisure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abuse]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anxiety]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Emotions]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medication]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mental illness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PTSD]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Synthetic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Trust]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.wirlproject.com/?p=6297</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When most people hear “PTSD,” they envision war veterans, assault victims, and survivors from a catastrophic accident. Those are the people who make the news, the people that are used online as click-bait. They are attractions in a world of people who experience trauma by proxy. I will not be one of those people, but I will tell what I can comfortably share of my story. PTSD, like any other mental illness, has it&#8217;s share of naysayers and unbelievers. The thing is though, the only ingredient needed for developing PTSD is trauma. Everyone responds to traumatic events in different ways. Your “no big deal” could be my traumatic event, and vice versa. There&#8217;s no defining criteria for what makes a traumatic event so, well, traumatic. Let&#8217;s get this straight: If I say it was traumatic, it was. There are no “buts” or caveats. It is solely my decision, based on how I was effected. It is not about you. It never was, and it never will be. PTSD, like any other mental illness, has it&#8217;s share of naysayers and unbelievers. My own PTSD manifested due to childhood abandonment, emotional neglect, immersion in the drug culture when I was too young to have a say in where I went and with whom, and acts I witnessed that are so staggeringly awful that I refuse to speak of them anymore. I became a stereotype; a statistic. Girl from broken home marries abusive man. It&#8217;s a tired, ancient story that has played out over centuries, in homes the world over, no matter race, culture, social status, or intelligence. Perhaps I could have healed sooner if I hadn&#8217;t married my ex. Perhaps without the years of emotional sabotage he inflicted, I would not be as scarred and scared as I am today. The past cannot be changed though, and no one is immune to what life throws at them. My PTSD manifests itself in a way that looks outwardly similar to Borderline Personality Disorder. I hurt myself; I hit myself about the head with closed fists because I feel deep down that I deserve it. I punish myself for having feelings, because those were not allowed, unless they were feelings that made someone else feel good. My own negative feelings had consequences that were, to say the least, unpleasant. I can go from calm and collected to screaming with fear-parading-as-rage in less than one second. That is not an exaggeration. I never learned to self soothe. I never learned to regulate painful emotions. Every hurt feeling is an avalanche barreling towards me and I am terrified. I can go from calm and collected to screaming with fear-parading-as-rage in less than one second. That is not an exaggeration. I trust no one. Not even myself. I have not personally known a man, with the exception of two, who did not betray their partner. The women in my life have not had a better track record. I was dragged along through the twisted dramas of affair after affair. I was there the night my uncle found his wife in bed with another man and burned every article of clothing she owned right there in their front yard. I stood in my grandma&#8217;s kitchen as my aunt and her lover, her in just a robe and him in just boxers, pleaded for a car and a credit card to escape the 160+ miles to El Paso. The only reason the police weren&#8217;t involved is because we all lived so far out of town that there were no neighbors or passers-by to witness the flames. There was no one to keep me sheltered from The Bad Stuff that night, nor countless other nights. The adults would try to tell me half-hearted lies so that I wouldn&#8217;t ask questions, but I saw right through them. Kids are a lot smarter than you think. There are days I am absolutely convinced that my existence is a mistake. Surely the universe has sent me a message: “You weren&#8217;t suppose to be here, and now look at the havoc you have caused. You need to rectify this.” I have felt suicidal since I was 15. The only reason I am still alive is my absolute stubbornness to keep going, and my daughter. I would never intentionally hurt her, so no matter how I feel, I put her first. I put one foot forward, hour after hour, and do my best to be the kind of parent I should have had. There are days I am absolutely convinced that my existence is a mistake. Surely the universe has sent me a message: “You weren&#8217;t suppose to be here, and now look at the havoc you have caused. You need to rectify this.” I live with PTSD every second of every day. It colors my world a timorous gray. It touches every corner of my mind like ants swarming on a carcass. I&#8217;ve always gravitated towards hobbies and interests that other people find repulsive and frightening, like insects and reptiles, or which can be achieved solo, like photography and writing. It&#8217;s been questioned if I chose hobbies that required no one else, so that I would not have to interact with others. I suppose that&#8217;s partially right; I&#8217;ve always been a complex mixture of intensely personable and comfortably introverted. I was never going to be a cheerleader anyway. This kind of PTSD takes years to recover from, because it took 29 years to develop it. I am 33 now. I&#8217;m remarried, in a drastically different environment in so many ways, and I do see improvement. My husband sees improvement. I rejected medication for so long, because I am very sensitive to anything synthetic, but I now take 50mg of Zoloft each day. I don&#8217;t like that I feel dulled, I don&#8217;t like that my libido has tanked, but I do appreciate the edge it takes off of my anger and anxiety. I have gained much-needed weight because I am no longer too anxious to eat, and I have insomnia less often. I rejected medication for so long, because I am very sensitive to anything synthetic&#8230; I don&#8217;t like that I feel dulled&#8230; but I do appreciate the edge it takes off of my anger and anxiety. My friends and family find me more tolerable, which is conflicting for me. On one hand, I don&#8217;t want to have to chemically alter myself in order to be loved. I resent it. I resent them for it. On the other hand, I am terrified of abandonment so stopping the medication feels like voluntarily drowning. I can put myself in quite the quagmire sometimes. Every person with a mental illness has their own version of it. There is no right or wrong way to be sick. There is no right or wrong way to be traumatized. Next time you are confronted with someone else&#8217;s mental illness, just remember: It is not your story, so just let them tell it, and resist the urge to critique it.]]></description>
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