Just Keep Breathing

A candid, intimate look at teens in crisis: “Heartrending . . . startling . . . a resource for understanding and approaching the life-changing pitfalls of youth.” —Publishers Weekly “I get abused and hurt so much, and no one seems to care . . . ” These are real words written by a real girl. There are thousands more just like her. Her pain is real. Her story is true. But her voice has been hidden . . . until now. The desperate words of a generation have too often been drowned out by the white noise of a culture too busy to care. For those who dare to listen, there are incredible stories to be unearthed, filled with both tragedy and triumph. This book was written in response to thousands of personal letters and messages, meant for both those in crisis and those who share that crisis with them every day. As a sought-after public speaker, Reggie Dabbs has shared his own incredible story with millions of students—and many of them share their stories with him in return. These letters contain those stories, with only names and details changed to protect their anonymity. They are followed by Reggie’s actual response of hope to that individual. John Driver, MS—a former public secondary educator, as well as a longtime community youth advocate and mentor—provides additional insight and “Breathable Moments” for educators, parents, friends, and family. Equipping readers to help those in crisis continue breathing another day, Just Keep Breathing provides both the inspiration and the information needed to respond confidently and appropriately—and see those we care about make it to another sunrise.

Just Keep Breathing is a true story of loss, grief, and hope. It was written in the midst of tragedy and speaks to the difficulty of enduring through unchangeable, heartbreaking circumstances. This story is meant to shed light on the arduous matter of grieving one’s children and being okay with not being okay.

Just as Jeanie decides to leave her job as a horse trainer, deferring to her husband's movie industry career, one of the principals of the race track where she works is murdered and she is thrown back into the maelstrom of racetrack politics and the care of the valuable horses.

"A young drama teacher in the West of Scotland suffers deep psychological problems which affect all areas of her life. She fails to find meaning in anything around her, but in her search she strips situations of their conventional values and sees them in a sharp, new light." --Publisher's description.

My husband has AIDS. I miraculously don’t. How am I going to survive? …I try to keep from screaming, “Dennis, you can’t do this to me now. I left my family, my friends, my job, pulled the kids away from their school and friends—you can’t quit on us. You can’t.” Through clenched teeth, he controls his response, “Scott, I’m tired. I’m dying.” Dennis is walking away and does not sound tired; he sounds angry. “Have you not heard anything I’ve told you for the last twenty-three years? I love you; you are my life. Don’t you dare think I’m not dying here, too. You may be the one who gets buried, but I’m the one who has to figure out how to keep living. I’m dying, Dennis; I’m dying with you.” We stand there, energy spent, emotionally depleted, tears falling. I take him in my arms, and we hold on to each other as if we draw life’s breath from the other—because we do. He sits on the sofa, and I go find the Dallas phone book so I can call Restland, the place where we will bury his body. When Joan Scott Curtis was 43 years old, she found out her husband was dying of AIDS. He had been infected for thirteen years. She tested negative. None of this was possible. It was the mid 1990s. All the prejudices about AIDS are not supposed to exist anymore, but they do. Just Keep Breathing is the remarkable story about finding courage in small victories, on taking solace in helping others, and knowing that even though the major battle will be lost, the ability to live on with grace and dignity is what defines the war.

One of lifes hardest blows is to suffer the loss of a child. How Can I Keep Breathing? offers insight and validation to the initial feelings and behaviours that arise from such a trauma, including the struggle to keep on going and the various ways family members cope with this kind of tragedy. Author Olivia Sunshine also shows, through her personal experience, a way of turning loss and pain into an ongoing opportunity to becoming a more fully developed and integrated human being. It is the silver lining that seems so impossible to find when ones heart has been so badly shattered. The effect of such a loss resonates throughout the rest of each family members life, even for siblings born after such a tragedy, creating a lifelong relationship with the deceased child. How Can I Keep Breathing? goes into detail the struggle with this and the coming to terms with it. Death invites examination of our beliefs about it, asking what, if anything, lies after death. Olivia gives a compassionate view of different ways of handling the death of a child, showing how the spiritual path she chose helped her cope with the loss of her son and how it changed her life for the better in more ways than she could have imagined.

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

Jack is not a normal boy. He can talk to ghosts. In his new home, an aging farmhouse, he meets the Ghost Mother, a grief-stricken spirit who becomes very attached to him...too attached. He learns that the Ghost Mother is preying in the cruelest imaginable way on four child ghosts who are trapped in the house, stealing their energy to sustain her own. Before Jack can figure out how to help them, the Ghost Mother takes possession of his real mother’s body. Jack wants to fight back, but he has severe asthma and risks fatal attacks with any physical exertion. It will take all his resources, and his mother’s as well, to fight off the Ghost Mother and save the ghost children from a horrible fate.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

RIVERBuried deep under a mountain of lies, I'm struggling for air. My life, my choices are being dictated by my father.I was forced to give up the man I love in order to protect him and now I must marry a man who I hate. I thought I had found a way out.I thought my time in this gilded cage was almost over.Then one day Jaxson Holden walks back into my life, flipping it upside down.He's angry, I get it. But he has no idea how much I have to lose-how much he has to lose with him coming back. Now I need to find a way to hold on while I'm gasping for breath as my past and present collide.Just keep breathing, River.Just keep breathing.