#trauma

#trauma

Carefully stored away in Jesse Holland's condo in East Brunswick, New Jersey, are the totems of a culture that nearly killed him. When I visited his place on a cold afternoon in December of 2023, it had been nearly four decades since Jesse first donned his dress blues as a first-year, or “plebe,” at the Valley Forge Military Academy, just north of Philadelphia. He showed me the uniform he was given at age 14, neatly folded, still hanging in his closet. Jesse's old textbooks and academic records from the Forge were tucked away, too, as was a towel and laundry basket the school had issued him. Also, a brass badge depicting Gen. George Washington praying on the Pennsylvania Revolutionary War battleground for which the Forge is named.

Dina realized, in that moment, that her daughter had every reason to think that. They came to kill all of us, we just weren't there.

"When we were little, we played 'name the caliber of this bomb.' It sounds odd, but when you grow up in a war-torn zone, those are your games that you play as a kid."

The first half of the movie plays out as an intimate chamber piece between Mary and Sam, the two of them rehashing long-buried grudges and betrayals, as we get occasional flashes to Mary's extravagant concert performances.

Misha had survived the destruction of Mariupol. He had lost friends, relatives, his home, his school, the nearby public park where he used to hang out with his friends. Almost everything that had once made life feel solid and knowable had been taken from him.

Emma's first shift in the ER is marked by chaotic and traumatic cases, including maggots in a cast and a drug overdose, testing her emotional resilience.

For years, I had absorbed the chaos. I had made myself smaller, quieter, more accommodating. I had convinced myself that if I could just love harder, be better, try more, something would change. But in that moment, watching my child suffer at the hands of the man who was supposed to protect him, I understood with absolute clarity that nothing I did would ever be enough to fix this.

In the opening sequence, Laura encounters a paddleboarder clad entirely in black who turns a covered face silently in her direction as he passes by - death as an urban hobbyist.

Martha carries her son Aaron, who is unable to walk or talk, while she works in the fields. She states, 'Aaron is so weak, so I have to carry him from the house and lay him somewhere so I can work.' This highlights the daily struggles she faces in balancing her responsibilities as a mother and a worker.

I used to think I was over my startup failure. That was three years ago, ancient history, right? Yet every time I pitched a new idea to someone, my hands would shake. Every investor meeting felt like walking into that same room where I had to tell my team we were shutting down. My body remembered what my mind tried to forget. That's when Bruce Springsteen's words hit me like a freight train: "The past is never the past. It is always present. And you'd better reckon with it in your life and in your daily experience, or it will get you. It will get you really bad."

"I had ears that stuck out, and I'm sure I was teased about it," Trocino, now 36, tells TODAY.com. "But it wasn't something that I remember being so impactful that I was begging my parents for it. I didn't even know that this was something you could do to your body."