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Understanding PTSD: What It Is. What It Costs. What Healing Can Look Like.

There is a word for what a lot of people are carrying.

Not everyone who has it knows the name. Not everyone who knows the name believes it applies to them. But the weight is real — the body on alert when the room is safe. The past arriving without permission. The anger that doesn’t match the moment. The exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.

Post-traumatic stress disorder — PTSD — is not a sign that something is wrong with you.

Each One, Teach One

You already know something worth giving.

You may not believe that yet.

But by the time you finish reading this — you will.

Where This Began

There was a time in this country when teaching a Black person to read was a crime.

Not a suggestion. Not frowned upon.

A crime.

South Carolina passed a law in 1740 making it illegal to teach enslaved people to write. Alabama’s 1833 slave code fined anyone who tried to teach a Black person to read between $250 and $500 — an enormous sum at the time. State after state made the same decision: Black people with knowledge were dangerous. Black people who could read could organize, resist, and refuse.

It Takes A Village To Raise A Child — And It's Time To Bring The Village Back

There was a time when every adult on the block had permission.

Permission to speak to a child who was out of line. Permission to guide a young person who was heading the wrong way. Permission to love a child who was not their own — because the understanding was clear and shared and unspoken: these children belong to all of us.

That was not a program. It was not a policy. It was a way of living together that stretched back further than any of us can remember — through the Great Migration, through Jim Crow, through slavery itself — all the way back to the African societies that gave us the proverb in the first place.