Practitioner of Bibliotherapy

This is me. This has been me since February 2020 when I realized I needed to act, to do something different in order to survive my suicide-adled family.

I dove deep into bibliotherapy and, truthfully, I haven’t stopped.

I turned to books. I looked for stories. Books and grief narratives and trauma research and other types of books—these all are the reasons why I am still here. Why I am still learning and healing and growing despite all the trauma.

It is also true that I am often lonely. I am an extreme extrovert. Yet, I live alone. I have little family, no children, or partner in my home. I don’t interact with a lot of people regularly and that is challenging for someone like me.

So books are often my companions. The stories and voices and narratives fill my head when the apartment echoes and is empty.

They fill a bit of the need I have for extreme socializing.

Books are a lovely form of escapism from your reality, to escape into another person’s realm or world.

I learned indigenous ways of knowing (epistemologies) in my doctoral program, to become a “Cultural Rhetorician.”

And it never ceases to amaze me how right Native American cultures are…how right they got it from the beginning…and how fucked up it is that we settlers call[ed] them primitive.

But, truly—

“Stories are all that we really are.” ~Thomas King

Stories are the heart of humanity.

Stories are why and how I survive.