Laurel's Diary: A Memoir of Trauma, Intimacy, and the Work of Reclamation

  

Laurel's Diary:

A Memoir of Trauma, Intimacy, and the Work of Reclamation

Laurel's Diary is a psychologically rigorous memoir that examines the long aftermath of sexual assault-not as a single event to be overcome, but as an ongoing condition that reshapes perception, intimacy, and moral judgment. Structured through diary entries, emails, and reflective prose, the book preserves the fragmented logic of trauma as it unfolds, resisting retrospective coherence or redemptive framing.

Rather than charting a linear path toward healing, Laurel's Diary documents the work of reclamation as a process marked by negotiation rather than resolution. The narrative traces how agency, trust, and desire are slowly reassembled in the context of intimate relationships, where consent must be relearned in practice and safety is provisional rather than guaranteed. Particular attention is given to post-assault intimacy, illustrating how trauma persists not only in memory but in the body, in language, and in relational misattunements.

The memoir also interrogates contemporary trauma discourse, questioning the limits of validation, the social expectations placed on survivors to perform recovery, and the ethical tensions that arise when injury becomes identity. These reflections emerge organically from lived experience, grounding critique in consequence rather than polemic.

Unsparing yet restrained, Laurel's Diary avoids sentimentality and resists closure. The "work of reclamation" it depicts is incomplete, uneven, and ongoing-less a return to what was than a careful effort to claim what is possible. The result is a case study of trauma's persistence and the moral complexity it introduces into love, friendship, and self-understanding, suited for general readers as well as clinicians, educators, and students seeking an honest account of trauma's impact on individuals and relationships.

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Laurel's Diary: A Memoir of Trauma, Intimacy,

and the Work of Reclamation

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Spaces of Existence Volume Two Understanding Who We Are - Getting to Who We Want to Be

  

Spaces of Existence Volume Two

Understanding Who We Are - Getting to Who We Want to Be

By Dr. Arnold Thompson

The spaces we inhabit do more than surround us—they quietly teach us who we are becoming.

Spaces of Existence Volume Two: Understanding Who We Are – Getting to Who We Want to Be opens as both map and meditation, inviting readers into a world where earth, memory, faith, suffering, choice, history, and human relationships are not separate subjects but interconnected “spaces” pressing in on the soul. Dr. Arnold Thompson frames existence as a series of influences moving from the outside in—what he calls a kind of “gravity”—asking how land, environment, culture, knowledge, pain, family, fear, hope, and belief all help form the inner self. The result is not a linear argument so much as an unfolding landscape of thought, where theology meets lived experience and personal memory expands into a much larger meditation on being human.

The atmosphere of the book is reflective, searching, and deeply personal. Thompson moves from the volcanic mountains and salt pond of his St. Kitts childhood to the raising of pigeons, from nature and place to questions of trauma, identity, and the soul’s formation. A boy watching pigeons always return home becomes a doorway into the idea that human beings, too, never fully escape the places that first formed them. A vanished salt pond becomes more than memory; it becomes a meditation on loss, change, and the way early environments remain alive inside us long after the visible landscape has altered. This is a book that treats memory not as nostalgia, but as evidence of how place continues to shape personhood.

What gives the read its distinct pull is its refusal to separate the spiritual from the practical. Earth is not merely scenery here. It is friend and foe, cradle and warning, beauty and danger. The self is not presented as isolated or self-invented, but as something constantly being formed by forces beyond it—natural, historical, relational, moral, and divine. Thompson’s visual “Model of Spaces of the Universe” reinforces this vision, placing the human self in dynamic relationship with God, creation, family, truth, suffering, faith, time, and choice.

That perspective feels especially rooted in the life of its author. Dr. Arnold Thompson’s long background in ministry, theology, teaching, and public speaking gives the book the sense of a lifetime of thought being gathered into one sustained exploration. For readers drawn to spiritually engaged nonfiction, philosophical reflection, and books that ask not just how to live but how to understand the forces already shaping a life, this volume offers an expansive doorway inward.

Before we can become who we want to be, we must learn to recognize the worlds that have already been shaping us.

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Understanding Who We Are - Getting to Who We Want to Be

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Understanding Who We Are - Getting to Who We Want to Be

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Every Person Has a Story to Tell

   

Every Person Has a Story to Tell

By Dr. Walter R. Hoge

What if a life is not one straight road, but a thousand remembered paths crossing faith, grief, science, ancestry, and wonder?

Every Person Has a Story to Tell opens like a memoir, but it quickly expands into something larger and stranger: a life archive shaped by memory’s unreliability, family legend, spiritual longing, professional reinvention, and the haunting possibility that the most important places we visit may not belong entirely to this world. The book moves through ancestors, frontier histories, veterinary practice, personal losses, philosophical reflections, and a mystical valley that lingers in the author’s soul like an unfinished calling.

At its heart, the book gathers family history, memoir, faith, and reflection into a deeply personal meditation on memory, purpose, and the experiences that shape a life.

Its atmosphere shifts between grounded recollection and visionary experience. One moment, the book is contemplating squirrels, elephants, and the fragile mechanics of human memory; the next, it is standing at the edge of a glowing valley in what feels like a parallel universe, where fear gives way to peace and purpose. That tension gives the book its pulse: the earthly and the eternal, the documented and the imagined, the ordinary life and the life that seems to whisper from just beyond it.

What makes this book stand out is its refusal to separate disciplines that are usually kept apart. Science and religion, memory and myth, family history and personal testimony all occupy the same terrain. The central question is not simply what happened, but what a person does with what happened: how experience becomes meaning, how grief becomes redirection, and how a life can be measured not only by achievement, but by whether it remains open to wonder, service, and a second chance.

Some stories are told to preserve the past; others are told to light the way back to the self.

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Website: www.drwalterhogebooks.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/booksbydrwalterhoge

 

Kind Hearts Farm: A New Beginning

Kind Hearts Farm: A New Beginning is a heartfelt children’s story about healing, kindness, and the power of love. When Jimmy arrives at his grandmother’s farm, his heart is heavy and unsure. Life hasn’t always been easy, and trusting others doesn’t come naturally. But through gentle days, caring moments, and the quiet magic of farm life, something begins to change. With the help of his loving Grandma and a special little lamb he names Clover, Jimmy slowly learns what it means to feel safe, to be cared for, and to open his heart again. Set against the peaceful rhythm of the farm, this story reminds children that kindness can grow in the smallest moments—and that love has the power to help us begin again.

Perfect for children ages 4–8, this beautifully told story encourages compassion, emotional growth, and connection between generations.

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Spaces of Existence Volume One Understanding Life and Living It

    

Spaces of Existence Volume One

Understanding Life and Living It

By Dr. Arnold Thompson

Exploring the Universe Within: A Thought-Provoking Journey Into the Spaces That Define Us

What if understanding the universe wasn’t just about telescopes and physics—but about imagination, inner awareness, and divine truth?

In Spaces of Existence Vol. 1: Understanding Life and Living It, Dr. Arnold O. Thompson offers an extraordinary exploration of the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual “spaces” that shape human experience. With a foundation rooted deeply in biblical truth, this volume dares to answer age-old questions about who we are, who we’re becoming, and how we should live in a universe we barely understand.

Dr. Thompson challenges modern assumptions, urging us to examine not just the world around us, but the profound, often overlooked dimensions within. Drawing from Scripture, science, and four decades of conceptual modeling, he presents a deeply theological and intellectually rich framework—what he calls the “Spaces of the Universe”—designed to help us navigate the complexities of our inner and outer realities.

“The complexities of human existence looked at from within are far more challenging and mysterious than all the universe’s galaxies.”

From the “Elohim Space” to the space of imagination, from the shadows cast by light to the humanness machines can never replicate, Thompson’s essays blend revelation with reason, poetry with philosophy, and science with Scripture.

Whether you are a theologian, a seeker, or someone standing at the intersection of faith and thought, this book invites you to dig deeper—not just into the Word, but into the very spaces of your being.

Discover the model. Explore the message. Reflect on your own space of existence.

"Don’t Big Bang Me—I Am More Than That!"

—Dr. Arnold Thompson, Spaces of Existence Vol. 1

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Spaces of Existence Volume One

Understanding Life and Living It

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One Understanding Life and Living It

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TOO AUTHENTIC: 25 Years of Not Fitting In

   

TOO AUTHENTIC: 25 Years of Not Fitting In

This memoir follows 25 years of dancing in spaces that wanted me smaller—and my refusal to shrink.

What's inside:

Chapter 1: Go-Go Dancing - Stories from village discos and city clubs where creativity was treated like rebellion. From the DJ who couldn't handle a woman who initiated, to the boss who wanted decoration instead of artistry, to discovering that "too sexual" really meant "too free."

Chapter 2: Belly Dance - Stories from the world of traditional belly dance, where innovation was viewed as vandalism. Teachers who needed obedience, schools that rejected fusion, and the realization that authentic expression threatens those who police tradition.

Chapter 3: Walked Away - Five turning points, including Slovenia's Got Talent (where the national TV audience humiliated me for having body hair), confronting a teacher who wanted devotion over sovereignty, and the moment I stopped trying to fit into spaces not designed for authentic people.

Plus: An epilogue about what I was doing till now, and the declaration I wrote in 2011 that predicted everything: "I Don't Wanna Fit In."

Each story is told with honesty, just what actually happened when I kept choosing authenticity over acceptance.

This book is for anyone who's been repeatedly rejected and has started to doubt themselves. Because after the third rejection, that voice in your head starts to whisper: "Maybe they're right. Maybe you are too much, not good enough. Maybe you should tone it down. Why can’t you just be normal? Your body should be hidden. Your sexuality is inappropriate." But you know what? Fuck that! Move on with me!

This is what sovereignty looks like in practice: seeing clearly, choosing yourself, and leaving spaces that demand you shrink.

Not perfect. Not healed. Just unapologetically authentic.

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TOO AUTHENTIC: 25 Years of Not Fitting In

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Tech Equity: Freedom Through Enabling Technology: A Dream Officer's Playbook for Tech Equity in Disability and Aging Services

 

Tech Equity: Freedom Through Enabling Technology:

A Dream Officer's Playbook for Tech Equity in Disability and Aging Services

by Precious "Preciosa" Myers-Brown

What does freedom actually look like for someone who has been told what they cannot do their whole life?

That question lives at the heart of Tech Equity: Freedom Through Enabling Technology by Precious "Preciosa" Myers-Brown. It is a book about what becomes possible when a whole community -- providers, families, Direct Support Professionals, policymakers, and the people being served -- decides that the way things have always been done is not good enough anymore.

The care system we are working inside was built in the 80s, way before we had the tools we have today. Imagine finding a pager from that era and thinking it still works -- then spending years looking for the payphone you need to go with it. We honor what was built with what we had. And now it is time for all of us to move forward together.

This is not a book about technology replacing people. It is about technology giving people back their time, their dignity, and their choices -- and giving the communities around them the tools to actually support that. DSPs who are burned out. Families who are exhausted. People with disabilities who deserve more than a system running on assumptions from 40 years ago. The blueprint is here. The community that changes this already exists. This book is for all of you.

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Tech Equity: Freedom Through Enabling Technology

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or Visit

https://techequitybook.com/