You verbalized exactly what I am thinking of, still working on. Thank you dear, and keep on!

that's a really smart comment. You don't "get over" some things even if you do learn to carry on with certain aspects of your life. Barring amnesia...I used to work with older people who could and would still cry when they remembered emotional events from decades before. Telling trauma victims to get over it is similar to saying to someone who is in extreme anxiety to "calm down." It tends to exacerbate the symptoms.

We live in a society where people seem to expect to live trauma-free lives or to get over every tragedy on a socially acceptable time scale. This will only make it harder for those coming back from war and combat zones to integrate their experiences with life at home. In some of my writing classes writers would write stories based on their own experiences with incest or rape or prostitution, and in my writing program no less than two teachers advised to steer away from such stories because "it's been done."

The one thing about some poorer countries is that whole communities experience tragedy together and so they can support one another through painful times. They don't expect pain free, anestetized lives. In this privileged country, people who are in pain too often suffer alone, and go through all the "why me" questions that they wouldn't have to if we just realized that suffering is not outside of normal for most humans on this planet.

That's so sad about your friends.

Oh God, thank you. I completely agree with your insights.

I don't even know what to say about the comments other teachers have made to you -- and two of them, no less! (Where do these people come from, anyway? And why are they all the same?) I'm speechless.

How wonderful that your students have you. How easy it would have been (a change in work schedule, a time conflict with a required class) for them to have missed out.

"When I was 20, I met a man. In the first 5 minutes of talking with him, I learned that he was a veteran of World War II, and had been a prisoner of war held by the Nazis. Everyone who knew him knew the story within 5 minutes of meeting him. He defined himself by that one event in his life, 40 years later.

You can choose to define yourself by one event in your life, or you can choose to reframe your life."

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"One event," huh? Buddy, you've got a LOT of nerve.

BLECH.

(As for me, the sooner I know I am in the presence of someone who may indeed be a true hero, the better I like it. It matters, TO ME.)