I Urge You to Care

Well, June is PTSD Awareness month. As many of you know, I suffer from PTSD and I am not alone. Many fear the stigma and never seek help or support. It can be a debilitating condition and still misunderstood by the medical community, not to mention our families and friends. The result . . . we are losing lives at record numbers. Military alone, we are losing one of our heroes every 18 hours. 

PTSD is a scientifically proven brain injury that is the result of trauma (sometimes multiple traumas). It creates physiological symptoms that are too numerous to mention here, chronic systematic inflammation, heart disease, and significantly raises the risk of early death. There is very serious burden of illness that accompanies living with this condition.

So I urge you to care . . . not for me but because suicide should never be an option for anyone to gain peace and revive hope in their lives. I urge you to care because every day we struggle, because everyone matters, because you can save a life just by caring!

Using Personal Bar Codes

My bar code can actually be scanned but does not reveal my self-worth.

Instead of truly valuing our souls, our hearts, the hearts of others, and letting our compassion rule our actions, we tend to measure our value on the external. We place too much value on possessions, success, IQ, comparing our appearance to those depicted in media, social action based upon social perception (needing to be noticed that we are doing good rather than doing good because it is the right thing to do). Maybe we should all just assign ourselves "bar codes" to determine our worth, eh?