halfwaythroughthewoods

The actors are incredible! Natasha Behnam is phenomenal, and the rest of the ensemble is a tour de force. I both believe them and empathize with their stories. Remembering the sacrifice our best journalists offer in service of building a semblance of truth is admirable. Our compassion and respect need to match our demands for daily content, and these stories invite all of us to reconsider the critical role of journalists.

This show tackles the fences we all feel in any situation with friends or family. We all repeat the pundit's talking points and over- indulge on self-righteous pie.

This story has a main theme, where every journalist we disregard or story with a sharp blade of certainty are real people, often sacrificing their own well being in service of ensuring we are well informed about the people, organizations, or corporations that seek to be in power in our country.

Watching characters manage their dignity in a world of cynicism and narcissistic branding is compelling television while not being preachy or simple. The storytelling reflects the pressure our journalists feel to provide us our steady diet of narratives to reinforce our certainty as they operate in a world of complexity. This is no small task, and I'm personally grateful to be reminded the change I hope for must begin with me. Do I see the humanity in the day to day destruction and judgment placed at others' feet, or do I recognize we are all complex, deeply flawed, and still trying to become the union we all imagine ourselves to be as we salute our flag.

This film was one of the hardest and certainly one of the most personal films I've ever watched. I was left feeling that someone is finally honoring the challenge of having a prolonged health issue with chronic pain in a way that made me feel seen. Most medical professionals are trained to blame and shame patients who identify with chronic pain and assert that it is all in your head or even worse, that you are a malingerer. I'm blessed to have a scary MRI that honors my chronic pain issue and the brain malformation, but that journey required almost six years of my life, resulting in me in a hospital bed with my kidneys failing due to using Ibuprofen on a regular basis for so many years. There is a serious consequence for not caring about a person with a serious medical issue, and that is normalizing suffering. In the fight to address the opiate epidemic, the only population being targeted are the chronic pain sufferers and the doctors who serve them. We must find a way to be better than our current policy of fear and judgment.

This film is an invitation to believe it can be better and invites hope back into the lives of so many. This film is nothing less than a prayer for us to be better than we are at seeing the pain in others and using anything in our arsenal to soften the edges of their hardship. How did this approach to opiate addiction become so extreme that we abandoned the very people these drugs were created to serve? History will look back and wonder how we got this so wrong. How did we get so lost that decided to treat every person as having an addiction, including creating a suspect medical diagnosis for billing treatment centers? This film will be a historical testament to the season in our country when we abandoned all reason and betrayed patients and addicts by creating a culture where identifying your pain became as frightening as coming to terms with it.

We must now accept the call and become a warrior for the patients who either have no voice or have given up in the pursuit of believing their pain and experiences will be honored. This film can hopefully begin to educate the public and the politicians about the implications of abandoning patients when they need our compassion and love. "Pain Warrior" should be required viewing for every medical professional who only sees addicts in the eyes of every patient experiencing pain.