QUOTE : these severely traumatized patients, people who have been through living nightmares, people who might blamelessly choose death, often emerge from successful treatment by constructing lives for themselves that are freer than most ordinary lives from what Sigmund Freud, a century ago, labeled as “everyday misery.” They become true keepers of the faith and are the most passionately alive people I know. Or maybe it is more necessity than irony. I have been told more than once by the survivors of trauma that it would not be worth the struggle merely to go on surviving. And that is exactly what most of the rest of us do: we do not choose to die, or to live; we go on surviving. We do not choose nonexistence; nor do we choose complete awareness. We slog on, in a kind of foggy cognitive middle-land we call sane, a place where we almost never acknowledge the haze.