I go by "Muji" as an affectionate nickname here at DS PTSD.  But my DS full username is, of course, MujicaPTSD, an homage to the man who from 2010-2015 was President of Uruguay, the country where I grew up as a missionary kid and got PTSD myself, like he did back then. 

Uruguay's a great place, but for a dozen years from 1973-1985, it was ruled by a cruel dictator.  The country's so small that everybody knew everybody.  In fact, the dictator's kids went to my high school and were in my own homeroom class.

Donnawanda from here at DS PTSD just let me know that a good movie just came out about Mujica and that period, and instead of being stigmatizing about people with PTSD it is uplifting.  I never met Mujica, but I knew his best friend Huidobro, who went through that whole ordeal with him. 

Huidobro helped me write my own book published on the ordeal, Utopia Undone.  As the LA Times review said of the movie this week,

"Any movie that begins with a Franz Kafka passage about torture isn’t likely to have uplift on its mind. But Uruguayan filmmaker Álvaro Brechner’s “A Twelve Year Night,” about the debasing incarceration of three political prisoners during the country’s years under reactionary military dictatorship in the 1970s, isn’t some superficial wallow in the art of cruelty....  

“A Twelve Year Night” is driven less by the violence of its situation — the men’s captors’ best weapon was the steady drip of solitary confinement — than how people endure such a disorienting assault....as the men were clearly expected to be driven crazy by their treatment.  ...Brechner’s message, rather, is how even in the most abused among us, the taste for survival is an abiding, nourishable quality. 

....“A Twelve Year Night” avoids the easy trappings of triumph-of-the-human-spirit narratives. Sometimes a human simply withstands what it’s subjected to, and that’s enough...."

Don't we at DS PTSD ever know it!  When they were political prisoners for 12 years, as the  poster says, "their knuckles were raw from tapping code through prison walls" as they bonded together and got each other threw it all--like we bond together here on DS PTSD with our posts for each other.  

I interviewed Huidobro for my book immediately upon his release in 1985, and then we stayed in touch until he died in 2016.  I went back to see him when he became Minister of Defense after Mujica became President, a really miraculous ending. 

Mujica's still with us.  He was a great president who cleaned up corruption, starting with his own example--he gave 90% of his presidential salary to the poor and instead of riding in a limo as president he used his own 1989 VW Beetle.

It's very uplifting to know after Mujica and Huidobro went through all of those years of trauma that they turned their own suffering into such powerful forces for good.  During those 12 years I was arrested, tortured, but released the same day, so their example helped me cope with mine. 

It's why I use Mujica's username as my own here, "Mujicaptsd."

Thanks, Donnawanda, I really recommend this movie you clued me in on about the original Muji. 

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-a-twelve-year-night-review-20181227-story.html

It's on Netflix.