Miscellaneous Topics

  Working in the funeral service industry means dedicating your life to helping others during their most vulnerable moments. While this calling brings profound meaning and purpose, it also carries an emotional weight that can accumulate over time, affecting both personal well-being and professional effectiveness.   Funeral directors, embalmers, and other funeral service professionals face a distinctive set of stressors that make self-care not just beneficial, but essential. You're constantly exposed to grief, loss, and human suffering while maintaining the composure and strength that families depend on. This emotional labor, combined with irregular hours, physical demands, and the pressure to provide flawless service during irreplaceable moments, can lead to compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary trauma.   The nature of the work often means absorbing the pain of others while suppressing your own emotional responses. Over time, this can create a cumulative ef...

Earlier I was watching a true crime documentary. And the question was asked  "Do you believe that some people were just born to be cold hearted killers?" My answer to that is "No, I do not."   If you’ve studied true crime for any length of time, you start noticing patterns. One of the most heartbreaking—and consistent—patterns is this: most serial killers didn’t come from happy homes. They came from chaos. Abuse. Neglect. Trauma. Homes that were more war zone than sanctuary. As a historian with a special interest in true crime, I’ve spent years diving into the backgrounds of some of the most infamous killers in American history. The deeper you go, the clearer it becomes—monsters are rarely born; more often, they’re made. Look into the early lives of people like Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Aileen Wuornos, and you’ll find a mess of emotional wounds. Some were beaten. Others were sexually abused. Some bounced from foster home to foster home. Others ...