What is YOUR War Story?
Vax Injured? Family Betrayal? Nurses and Doctors Seeing Your Profession Destroyed? Your "Aha" Moment That Shit Became Real?
Stories define us, both as individuals and as a society.
We’re CONSTANTLY telling stories. We tell ourselves more stories in one day than anyone else in our lifetime ever will. Our self-talk is the narrative that charts our course, and it’s all based on the stories we hear, accept, or reject.
In this age, we’re pummeled. Movies, social media, the news, work conversations - it’s all a raging din of stories, all competing for space between your ears.
I think it’s important to compile a collection of stories of our time. I want you to share your Covid stories, your personal triumph or losses, your “come to Jesus moments”. It’s therapeutic, and it’s inspiring.
Most importantly, it reminds the rest of us we’re not alone. We’re not freaks or outliers. There’s pain and glory all around us.
I’ll go first, and you can comment what you so feel lead to share in the comments below.
I was born in the late 70s outside of Pittsburgh PA. Good church boy. In high school I started to follow the jam band Phish, doing all the things that one does in that crowd - psychedelics, copious amounts of pot, camping, living simply, going with the flow.
After that got old, I went to art school and got a degree in graphic arts while bartending. I still think my bartending job was one of the favorite moments of my life. It was real, unpredictable, and so much fun.
I met an amazing lady through divine intervention, settled down, have two kids, a pit bull named Chalupa, a cat named Hiccup, and work from home.
Until March 2020, I was pretty certain life was going to be awesome. My wife and I were making more money than we ever had, working in jobs we enjoyed, from home. My kids were healthy and crushing life. We had just been to Los Angeles and Vegas on an epic family trip. For the first time in my life, I could see a bright, stable future that I was REALLY excited about.
Then my son called me from school on a Thursday afternoon in early March 2020, telling me that my wife and I needed to get up to the school if we wanted to see the musical he’d been working so hard for months to be a part of. There were rumors the school was going to shut down for a few days because of this crazy China virus.
As the lockdowns settled into place, I initially had some reservations but thought it might be a little fun too. It was a bit of a chance to reset, and maybe society, with this pause, could come out different, better, more focused and in harmony.
I was a bit…off the mark, wasn’t I?
The clear ringing of the bell for me in this entire Covid narrative was when I saw the video from the news conference of the California doctors who own their own network of urgent care facilities.
These guys knew almost right from the beginning that what we were being told was clearly not what was happening in the real world. It was, again, the best way I can describe it, that clear ringing of a bell in a quiet, dark night.
The day after I watched it, it was taken off YouTube.
THAT, right there, was the moment of pure dread. I’ve never felt a cold shoot through my body like I did in that moment.
A few weeks later I traveled to Richmond, Virginia for work. The first night I was there, the George Floyd riots began, right down the road from where I was. The governor of VA began shutting things down even harder as I was there.
That same horror washed over me one of those lonely nights in my hotel as I realize for the first time in my life, true authoritarianism was becoming manifest. All of the horrors that I’d only read about, that only happened to other people in different countries, was happening right here, right now.
I’m not a fearful person at all. The emotional need I’m the absolute lowest on is the need for security. Yet in that moment, raw, visceral fear grabbed me in ways that have only happened once or twice before.
Over the course of 2020, I became INCREDIBLY angry. The banshees were through the gates, storming the city. The fog of war was real. The world officially lost it’s shit. It lead me to become someone that I have worked hard to change. I don’t want to be angry. I want to be motivated, focused, and on purpose with each of my days now.
It’s taken quite a while to get here, however. I have great scars from the past two + years, and I know you do too.
So if you’re up for it, if you need to get it off your chest, please, I’d love to hear your story. Joining each other by being open, honest, and vulnerable is one of the first ways we can move forward.
I believed it at first. Got laid off for two months but my husband was working from home and financially we were fine. Elective surgeries were cancelled for the surge that never came. I do anesthesia. I was reading a lot of research coming out of other countries, I remember reading papers out of South Korea where they were treating with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. One day when trump mentioned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as potential treatments for Covid, everything just went bat 💩 crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that before. Who on earth would take a politicians healthcare advice seriously? I had no idea what that was all about, but soon would.
I’ve gotten tons of vaccines and would’ve never thought anything of this one until the social media giants got involved and started saying they would ‘censor’ any misinformation. That made my antenna shoot up. If there’s anyone who I know doesn’t give a 💩 about me, it’s Zuckerberg and Dorsey. So I started doing research and found out more about these vaccines and made a decision that it was not for me.
Now the Supreme Court just sanctioned governmental rape. Forcing something into the bodies of healthcare workers (or anyone) who doesn’t want it is rape.
Although some facilities I work at have allowed exemptions, some haven’t. I shook the dust off my feet of those that haven’t and I fully intend to leave healthcare before I’ll be raped by this mRNA technology.
For me it was the awakening by a thousand cuts.
Having grown up in a family that owned an importing company, and then spending my adult years owning a travel company, I had extensive experience dealing with the Chinese and other authoritarian governments. As soon as I heard that this virus had begun in Wuhan, coincidentally in a city with a virology lab in it, I knew that it was not natural.
When the Chinese clamped down on their people and then reported unnaturally good numbers from their efforts to fight the virus, I knew they were covering up.
When the US, Europe, and Australia were suddenly in lock-step with one another over creating an "us and them" scenario between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, I knew there was global governmental collusion.
When the emergency use order was issued, the pharma companies were exempt from liability, and we weren't allowed to discuss how to treat people with covid, only how to supposedly stop them from getting it in the first place, I knew someone was making big money off the "vaccines".
When any discussion about vaccine ineffectiveness or side effects was effectively censored by the media and social media companies, I knew they weren't as effective and safe as we were being told.
When the data sets for vaccine efficacy got so big and so prevalent that the government could no longer suppress them, I knew they would then begin to smear the scientists who produced them.
When the public finally began to agitate and rebel, when the president's approval numbers tanked, and when the polls started showing a red wave in the mid-term elections, I knew we would suddenly begin to "see a light at the end of the tunnel."
When the red wave crashes over the legislative houses of Congress, I know we will begin the work of dragging the country back from the brink of insanity and authoritarianism.
What I don't know is if we will succeed, and how long it will take if we do.