There is a great battle that rages inside me.
One side is the soaring eagle. Everything the eagle stands for is good and true and beautiful, and it soars above the clouds. Even though it dips down into the valleys, it lays it’s eggs on the mountaintops.

The other side of me is the howling wolf. And the raging, howling wolf represents the worst that’s in me. He eats upon my downfalls and justifies himself by his presence in the pack.

Who wins this great battle? The one I feed.
~Author unknown

APA: Simple Screen Improves Suicide Risk Assessment
Neil Osterweil | Reviewed by Robert Jasmer, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco^[1]

SAN DIEGO, May 25 — Emergency department patients who may be suicidal can be identified with a simple tool designed for use by health professionals without a mental health background.

The risk-assessment tool, which goes by the tortuous acronym SAD PERSONS, assigns one point to each of 10 items on a risk-factor scale, reported Brian P. Miller, M.D. and Roseann Giordano, R.N., M.S., both of Grossmont Hospital in Costa Mesa, Calif. A score on the scale from seven to 10 indicates that the patient is at high risk for attempting suicide. Continue reading »

1. (SOURCE - updated 5/08) The study was internally funded, and the authors had no conflicts of interest. Primary source: American Psychiatric Association 2007 Annual Meeting. Source reference: Miller BP and Giordano R. “Creating a Suicide Risk Assessment Tool for use in the Emergency Department.” Abstract NR391, presented May 21. (C) 2006 MedPage Today LLC. All Rights Reserved. [⇧]

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

Joss Whedon

You want me to be kind to the eight year old.
You want me to nurture her.
You want me to give her a voice.

I cannot be kind to her. I cannot nurture her. I must not give her a voice.

She is Rage.
She is dark and filled with suffocating anger.
Rage cannot understand kindness or nurturing, she only understands pain.

Give her a voice and she will destroy without discernment.
She’s blind to beauty and knows that joy is a myth.
Love was squeezed out a million years ago - not one drop remains.
She knows that Tears, Sorrow, and Pain are weak.
Rage will consume everything until nothing exists but her blackness.

Rage is alone. Rage is destruction. Rage is suffocation. Rage is hell.