At age 20, Gabrielle Pelicci returned from her modeling career in NYC to her hometown of Scranton, PA where her mother suddenly passed away. At her mother's funeral, Gabrielle had a spiritual experience that left her reeling and set her on a heroine's journey to learn about both the scientific and mystical explanations of human consciousness. Gabrielle studied a dozen healing practices, from alternative medicine to yoga, including travel immersions in Europe, Asia and Africa. Over the next 10 years, her complex PTSD symptoms persisted. Little by little, Gabrielle's childhood experiences of domestic violence, and her parents' mental illnesses and addictions are revealed. At age 30, still grieving the loss of her mother and disgusted with the fact that she can't overcome her anxiety and depression, Gabrielle attempted to take her own life. Luckily, she survived and continued on her journey of healing and trauma recovery, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a professor of Holistic Medicine, with a dissertation on Women Healers. In this deeply personal and vulnerable account, Gabrielle reveals how childhood trauma impacts our physical and mental health - as well as our adult relationships. She explores how you are only as sick as your secrets and telling your story is the medicine that can save your life. All This Healing is Killing Me is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body and celebrates one woman's ability to write herself a happy ending.

A powerful exploration of grief and resilience following the death of the author's son that combines memoir, reportage, and lessons in how to heal Everyone deals with grief in their own way. Helen Macdonald found solace in training a wild gos­hawk. Cheryl Strayed found strength in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. For Carol Smith, a Pulitzer Prize­ nominated journalist struggling with the sudden death of her seven-year-old son, Christopher, the way to cross the river of sorrow was through work. In Crossing the River, Smith recounts how she faced down her crippling loss through reporting a series of profiles of people coping with their own intense chal­lenges, whether a life-altering accident, injury, or diag­nosis. These were stories of survival and transformation, of people facing devastating situations that changed them in unexpected ways. Smith deftly mixes the stories of these individuals and their families with her own account of how they helped her heal. General John Shalikashvili, once the most powerful member of the American military, taught Carol how to face fear with discipline and endurance. Seth, a young boy with a rare and incurable illness, shed light on the totality of her son's experiences, and in turn helps readers see that the value of a life is not measured in days. Crossing the River is a beautiful and profoundly moving book, an unforgettable journey through grief toward hope, and a valuable, illuminating read for anyone coping with loss.

Your Healing is Killing Me is a performance manifesto based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists. One artist's reflections on living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and crowd-funded self-care.

Jason Schmidt wasn't surprised when he came home one day during his junior year of high school and found his father, Mark, crawling around in a giant pool of blood. Things like that had been happening a lot since Mark had been diagnosed with HIV, three years earlier. Jason's life with Mark was full of secrets—about drugs, crime, and sex. If the straights—people with normal lives—ever found out any of those secrets, the police would come. Jason's home would be torn apart. So the rule, since Jason had been in preschool, was never to tell the straights anything. A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me is a funny, disturbing memoir full of brutal insights and unexpected wit that explores the question: How do you find your moral center in a world that doesn't seem to have one?

The human body has been depicted in a variety of ways across a range of cultural and historical locations. It has been described, variously, as a biological entity, clothing for the soul, a site of cultural production, a psychosexual construct, and a material encumbrance. Each of these different approaches brings with it a range of anthropological, political, theological, and psychological discourses that explore and construct identities and subject positions. This Companion examines connections between American literature and bodies from the eighteenth century through the present. It reveals the singular way that literature can help us understand the body's entanglement within social and biological influences, and it traces the body's existence within histories of race, gender, and ability. This volume details the genres, critical fields, and interpretive practices that best facilitate the analysis of bodies in the full span of American literary imaginings.

In his memoir All-American Boy, Scott Peck poignantly relives the pain and isolation of growing up gay in a Christian Southern community. In this touching memoir, Peck finds a way through the pain from his childhood, growing up gay without acceptance in the Christian South, and through this emotional journey he learns to heal from those wounds. He doesn't hold back while reliving the time when his father, Marine Col. Fred Peck, testified before Congress that there was no place for his gay son in the military. This is merely one of the many big moments shaping the book and the author's life, on top of the religious influences that surrounded him since he was born. This is a "survivor's tale that in its universal appeal brings to mind the most compelling aspects of Gal and Shot in the Heart. Through the course of these scathing, inspiring, instructive pages, Scott Peck, writer and human being, grows into one hell of a terrific man" (Michael Dorris).

When veteran flight attendant Steven Slater told off his startled passengers and slid down the emergency escape slide of a JetBlue airplane on a sunny summer's day at New York's Kennedy Airport in 2010, he said goodbye to the world as he knew it. Overnight, Slater became a media sensation and working class hero. Now, for the first time, Slater writes in his own words about what really happened that fateful day at JFK and shares his experiences of the surreal whirlwind that is overnight celebrity. But behind the splashy headlines, Slater fought battles no one knew anything about. In Wingwalking, Slater shares his lifelong journey through bipolar disorder, suicidal idealization, and a powerful addiction that brought him to his knees. In Wingwalking, Slater recounts treasured memories of a privileged childhood as the son of an airline pilot and the gift of exotic travel his intrepid parents bestowed upon him growing up. He invites the reader into his younger years and arduous and painstaking process of self discovery as a gay man stifled by a small town and his great escape to the big city and a career as a flight attendant that spanned the globe with some of the world’s leading airlines. Sidelined by trauma and harrowing PTSD, Slater sought refuge in drugs and alcohol and found himself homeless on the streets of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, lost in virtual obscurity and hopelessness. Slater fell into an underworld of danger and violence, barely escaping with his life. He lost his mind and was locked away from society in a succession of hospitals and psych wards. Yet, Slater is a born survivor, and fought valiantly for his safety and his sanity, prevailing over both his abusers and a mental health system that rendered him voiceless and powerless. At times hilarious and sometimes heart-wrenching, Wingwalking introduces the reader to the man behind the myth. Slater writes with startling candor and brilliant authenticity about what many face, but few speak of. Ultimately, Wingwalking is a story of resilience and transcendence and offers the reader hope and encouragement. Slater’s story is a true testament to the human spirit.

In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life. In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous. In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at we expect from writers, and from each other. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

The life of an abused child is filled with pain and self-blame. And there is the never-ending question of why one of the people who is supposed to love you is also responsible for hurting you. Millions of children experience abuse and neglect every day. For most, their stories go untold. In author Jack Flynn’s memoir, Smash-Mouth Jesus—A Memoir: God’s Answer to Violence, he takes you on a journey of redemption through the nightmare of helplessness and self-hatred associated with child abuse. Flynn illustrates the challenges an abandoned and abused child faces when thrown into a cruel world with no direction. He shares his journey of coming to terms with a God he fears—a God who seems to be cruel and all-powerful. Each day Flynn faced the challenge to trust the God who seemed to be destroying him. Smash-Mouth Jesus—A Memoir: God’s Answer to Violence is a story of working through the past and not letting it define you. As Flynn shows, that journey is long and difficult, and the temptation to give up can be great. But if one perseveres, the rewards and love are tremendous.

THE BOOK YOU ARE HOLDING IN YOUR HANDS IS NOTHING SHORT OF A TRIUMPH. It is the true account of the struggles, heartbreaks, failures, but ultimate victory of a life salvaged against all odds.