Category Archives: Uncategorized

[Trigger warnings: (gun) violence; discrimination] Yesterday, as every 20th of November, was the “Transgender Day of Remembrance”. And a particularly sad one this year, given the mass shooting in a nightclub frequented by many people of the LGBTQ community in Colorado Springs and continuous attacks to transgender rights at the political level.

[Trigger warning: Trauma] ‘Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them isContinue reading ““The body keeps the score” — 2“

[Trigger warning: Trauma] ‘Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear” the reality of life — with all its pleasures and heartbreak.’ [From Chapter 2 of the book “The body keeps the score” by Bessel a.Continue reading ““The body keeps the score” — 1″

Sometimes you just wake up and can’t get back to sleep, no matter how early in the morning. You wake up, suddenly knowing — knowing not only with your mind but also with your heart, deep inside at last. Somehow overnight something suddenly, finally, became so obviously clear to you that you just cannot go backContinue reading ““Fistfight””

In the end, this year I’ll be spending my birthday (my first birthday in Colorado) in quarantine, isolating at home sick with COVID.  Of course, I feel a lot of disappointment and even anger — the anger was particularly intense on Thursday when I got my first strong symptoms and positive test result. But IContinue reading

“Let everything happen to you:  beauty and terror.  Just keep going.  No feeling lasts forever.” [Rainer Maria Rilke] I experience emotions very intensely and often in a roller-coaster pattern. And often I can still get overwhelmed by them. But I have learned to be with them in the moment, to just be in the moment. Continue reading “The joy of the moment”

I am happy. And extremely relieved. My pet snake made it alive from California and is now with me here in Colorado: the last (but not least!!!) piece of my “Californian life” is now with me here, in my “new home”.  Of course, this has a huge symbolical meaning, at least for someone like meContinue reading “Today’s joy!”

The other event that has made today an intense day was an extremely vivid dream I had a couple nights ago but didn’t have time to process and share (with my counselor) until today.  I often remember my dreams and sometimes I have dreams that are particularly realistic and vivid, that when I wake upContinue reading “The sweetest dream…?”

It’s been one of those BIG days. An intense day and in some ways a day to celebrate.  Today I cast my first Coloradan vote! Which to me feels like a HUGE step towards making Colorado my new “real home”, at least for the time being.  Since moving to the U.S. from Europe in 2016,Continue reading “First times in Colorado”

Was is Coleridge who compared grief (or guilt?) to a dead albatross hanging around his neck?  In the past couple weeks at my new place I’ve been experiencing renewed asthma symptoms probably triggered by allergens (NOTE: I had never had asthma in my life until after getting sick with COVID in 2020 — I wasContinue reading “Heavy on my chest”