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I’m a little too broken to do anything too original for my Differently today.  For the record, shingles suck.

But this pain is transitory and temporary and will get better eventually and I will forget about it and move on and I was thinking about that and how kind of selfish it is to be whining about how much shingles sucks when there are lots of other people out there suffering more and longer than I am.  (That run on sentence brought to you by Percoset).

So, to extend my random acts of kindness in a low-impact kind of way, I decided to make a donation to an organization that I have always respected but never actually done anything for. 

I chose the Trevor Project, a crisis intervention and suicide prevention hotline dedicated to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

Did you know that suicide is the leading cause of death for gay youth in the United States?  Approximately 30% of gay youth attempt suicide near the age of 15 and they are 2 to 6 times more likely to commit suicide than heterosexual youth. Conservative estimates say that about 1,500 gay kids kill themselves each year.

The Trevor Projects operates a 24 hour a day phone line (plus text, and chat hotlines) for kids in crisis.  They also have educational material for adults (parents and teachers especially) to help identify at risk kids, arrange education and training for youth and adults, and much more.  It’s a terrific organization and I’m proud that my differently today was to donate a little bit of money to hopefully help someone who is going through something much worse than a nasty case of shingles.

Learn more at TheTrevorProject.org.

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