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Transcription of Speech "Survivor to Storyteller"

 

This is an edited transcript of a speech I gave at the Brain Injury Services Online conference, October 29, 2020 with the topic “Telling Your Story After Brain Injury.”  This speech expands on many of the ideas that I present in my book, “Who Am I, Now?” and presents a more complete argument for why storytelling is a useful tool in rehabilitation after brain injury.  I feel the book presents much of the theory behind my ideas and this speech shares real examples of how I believe my ideas will work.  Please read, comment, share and enjoy.

Hello, I am Lethan.

When I learned the general topic for this conference, “Telling your story after brain injury”, I was thrilled -- I am a survivor of traumatic brain injury, I have a Master of Arts degree in Storytelling, and I recently finished a book about the importance of storytelling after brain injury.  This topic is kinda exactly “my thing”, so I’m honoured to be able to share some of my thoughts on the subject with you.

I’m going to start with a quote by Maya Angelou — “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Hold on to that quote, because we’re going to come back to it, but I open with it because, when it comes to brain injury, everyone at this conference has stories. It could be you’re like me, a survivor, and you have stories about almost dying, rehabilitation, and the painful long return after brain injury. Or maybe you’re a caregiver and you’ve got stories about someone you love — a child, spouse, parent — and the difficulties of providing seemingly endless support that is not always appropriately appreciated. Or maybe you’re a doctor, nurse, lawyer, friend, colleague — whatever the case, we’ve all got stories, but most times these stories are never shared, and we keep them inside for a bunch of reasons. 

For one, these are difficult stories. Medically and emotionally complicated, confusing — we probably don’t fully understand everything that happened or is still happening.  And second, it’s hard to find someone who’s able to listen — it’s not the sort of thing you use to start off a conversation on the street — “Hey, how you doing? Good? That’s great! Let me tell you about my brain injury” — that’s not done.  To tell these stories you’ve got to find the right time, place, and it takes work.

Furthermore, these stories do not show you in your best light — I don’t care if you’re a survivor or caregiver or whatever, the stories get dark, and I’m certain there are some times when you acted in a manner that you’re probably not particularly proud of.  No shame for whatever happened, but it does make the story harder to tell.

And then there are all the other reasons to avoid storytelling in general — fear of public speaking, not being sure of “How do I tell a story”, respecting confidentiality.  There are a lot of reasons we don’t tell stories about brain injury, but these stories of survival are stories that Must be Told.

I have this idea, and I call it my Big Idea, because I’ve been dedicated to reading, writing, and philosophizing about it for the past six years, and five years before that I started with a master’s thesis performance project about TBI, so I’ve been mulling this idea over for quite some time. 

But this Big Idea is – Storytelling should be used as a tool in rehabilitation after traumatic brain injury for three reasons:
1) Storytelling provides inspiration for survivors;
2) Assists with the process of reintegration into a community after the initial hospital rehabilitation;
3) and Helps with the acceptance and appreciation of self-identity after brain injury.

In this speech, I’m going to explain my Big Idea by telling the story of what inspired it, and elaborating on each of those three points along the way; this will then be followed by suggestions of how you can prepare and tell your story about brain injury.

That said, this is a story, so...

Once upon a time...

In 2008 I was in graduate school, studying storytelling, and getting ready to begin work on my master’s thesis performance project when I was introduced to the Crumley House Brain Injury Rehabilitation and Living Center. Already a survivor of brain injury, I had entered the storytelling graduate program with the intention of creating a piece about my brain injury for the required performance thesis project, but at the time it was just an idea.  My thought process was something akin to, “Oh, I had a brain injury and I survived — that’s probably a pretty good story...” but I had nothing more than that. So, when fate introduced me to the Crumley House, I thought this could be a good opportunity to learn more about brain injury, maybe find some inspiration for the piece, and get to know other survivors.

I began to visit the rehabilitation and living center two or three times a month — about every other week — volunteering as a storyteller to share some fun folktale performances and, more importantly, to talk about my experience as a survivor.  It was through sharing my experiences of recovery that I began to see the healing power of storytelling.

These were unrehearsed, unprepared stories that were pulled from choppy memories that were lodged deep in recesses of my mind, but by returning to these stories in the company of fellow survivors, I was able to recall some deeply filed events and emotions with new clarity.  Furthermore, what I found amazing was that the residents at the Crumley House understood what I was talking about and we began to have conversations that shared similar emotional experiences. Up until that point, I hadn’t interacted with many other brain injury survivors – not as a conscious avoidance, but because I hadn’t been aware of any opportunities and hadn’t actively sought out fellow survivors – and to have people understand these events, and share stories of similar experiences that, until then, I had thought were unique was amazing!

We’re talking about emotional experiences that a lot of survivors will probably understand, but are unknown to people not familiar with brain injury. For example:

- Having a stew of emotions mish-mashed and constantly simmering in your head — and it’s a stew of exuberance and joyful celebration for the fact that you are alive, mixed with disgust and rage for the fact that you’re still living, stirred with appreciation and love for all the people who are caring for you, and the spite toward every aspect of the universe for leaving you stuck in this oppressively solipsistic situation, and then there is this huge chunk of pure apathy plopped on top that coats the whole thing. And trying to explain this stew is the only honest answer you could give if a caregiver asks, “Hey, how you doing today?”  but being unable to coherently express this mess, when you’re asked the question, you say, “Me? I’m fine, I guess.”

- Or the frustration at having to relearn things I knew I should know how to do. Like walking.  I remember, walking technique — heal, toe, heal, toe — yet how hard this simple task was. And then there’s this shameful sense of accomplishment when being congratulated for successfully completing this rudimentary task.

- And the embarrassment at the over expression of emotions. Any emotion — joy, anger, sorrow, excitement — it’s this volcano with a lava flow of emotion erupting, making everyone around uncomfortable and meanwhile, there’s this reason, this rationality that’s aware and watching from back of your mind going, “No, no, no — this is too much — no, that’s not right.”

And the survivors at the Crumley House would hear me describe these experiences, understand what I’m talking about, and then tell about their own experiences — things I could relate to and understand.  We had this conversation, a conversation where we share the fact that we’re on this journey together.

And that brings me to the first point of my Big Idea — that storytelling inspires survivors. And this idea works in two ways.

First, and I think this is the most obvious way that storytelling can be used as a tool, there’s the inspiration that comes from a survivor who’s had a good recovery experience sharing his or her story.  And this is important – it is why speakers are invited to conferences such as this – to share the experience of someone who has been through parts of recovery and who has worked through challenges that other survivors might be experiencing.  Someone who’s not a therapist, not a teacher, not a friend saying, “It’s going to be alright,” — but someone who can say, “No, this sucks. It’s not going to magically ‘go away’ when you get all better.  Brain injury is a part of you now, but know that this new part is okay.” We need inspirational storytellers to show that brain injury is not an ending of anything.  As I said before, this is actually one of the main reasons I was first invited to visit the Crumley House, the staff and residents hoped I could help to provide inspiration, but what we didn’t realize is that this is only part of how sharing stories works.

You’ll remember that I said that the conversation went both ways? When visiting, I would share what I remembered of my experience, and then a resident would be reminded of his or her experience, and this might remind another resident of an experience, and then another resident, or me...and whenever I would share my stories of recovery it was the stories that were shared in response that I found the most rewarding.  And since I’ve begun to speak at some brain injury survivor’s conferences, the experience has been the same – it’s the stories heard from fellow survivors that continue to teach me about my own healing process.

For years after my injury, I thought that my story was unique. I remember hearing time and time again how the experience of recovery after brain injury is different for every person and there can be no timeline for how long it will take or what the healing will actually be, and this information is true, but what I don’t remember hearing — and I don’t know if I wasn’t told or if I just didn’t listen — but what I didn’t hear was that there are events and emotional experiences that, while maybe not universal, are at the very least not uncommon. Similar vents in recovery that may seem unique actually happen to many people.

By sharing stories with fellow survivors — that’s telling stories and hearing stories — I learned that navigating the experience of recovery after brain injury isn’t so much like you’re trekking through a jungle of unknowns, but more like you’re on a path that’s been travelled before — treacherous and you’ve got jungle on either side, but people have used it before, and if you’re careful, you should make it through just fine.

So in terms of my graduation project, this is good.  I’m gathering stories and getting a start on my performance thesis’s project. The stories I hear from residents are stories I relate to and understand, and I’ve begun sorting through memories from my own experience.  These are not composed stories, but are mostly told off the cuff as they spill out in story sharing conversations – vague, emotional, half-memories – and I realize I should write them down.  This would be material the performance project —it is, after all, going to be a storytelling about my injury.

And I get a notepad and start scribbling thoughts, phrases – figuring out what sort of storyline I can put pull from this process – and I realize that there is a lot about my accident, especially early recovery, that I don’t know.  I guess it makes sense that I don’t know what happened, I was in a coma after all, and after that my memory wasn’t too hot, so I decided I needed to talk to the people who were there — family and friends who were a part of that time in my life.  I figured they could help to tell me my story.

During the holiday semester break, I went back to my hometown and scheduled times to talk with family and friends, and a lot of people were very generous in sharing their time, but no one could tell my story. Not-a-one.  Turns out, when I asked them about what was happening at this time, everyone told me their own story.  It’s funny to say that now, but I had been so focused on My story and My accident, that it hadn’t occurred to me that, Of Course everyone had other things going on.  Everyone had their own set of challenges in dealing with my recovery once I left the rehabilitation hospital, like:

 - My parents having to drive me everywhere and make sure I got to all the doctors’ appointments and check-ups that were still going, while also dealing with their own careers, and making sure my younger sister was alright and taken care of…

- and my Sister, needing to find ways to not feel like she’s being forgotten amid the drama. It seemed like everyone was focused on her brother, but she was thirteen at the time, just becoming a teenager and trying to find groups that are safe and can support her with healthy friendships

- and my Friends, I mean, here’s this person they’ve known for years, and now he’s out of the hospital, but acting all weird and behaving in a way that’s just not right some of the time, or a lot of the time, and they don’t understand what’s going on.

And then, turns out, everyone also had difficulties that had nothing to do with me. Jobs, school, family, romance — Life Happened, and it turns out that, for most people, I wasn’t the center of everything.

Along with this, I realized how much other people didn’t know about my story — how many people didn’t understand that rehabilitation goes on for years after brain injury. Truth is, the people around me were looking at someone whom they had known and loved for years, but now this person was acting really different.  Yeah, they figured it had something to do with brain injury, but they didn’t know why or how.  For me, as the survivor, I was just trying to act normally, but it didn’t seem “normal” to everyone around me, and it could get really uncomfortable.  So, when I asked my family and friends what happened from their perspective, turns out they viewed everything in a manner that was completely different from how I viewed myself. It’s silly how obvious this is now, but turns out we all had different stories.

And that brings me to the second point of my Big Idea — that storytelling can help with reintegration into the community after brain injury. Now, much like providing inspiration for fellow survivors, this is also about the conversation that stems from storytelling and works in two ways.

First, there’s the storyteller-survivor telling his or her story to the community to inform the community about the experience of recovery after TBI.  This is important because people need to understand that recovery takes months or years of focused rehabilitation after a survivor leaves the hospital or rehabilitation clinic; also, community members should be made aware that a survivor will never return to being “the same as before” – most people simply do not know either of these facts.  And it is not the communities fault that there is so little understanding of the realities of recovery because the idea of a complete recovery is something that is consistently fed to us by the media — TV and movies almost always show a hero surviving this huge, massive explosion-collision-calamity, and they’re knocked unconscious — head trauma —go to the hospital, and the hero wakes up a few days or weeks later and everyone’s gathered around — “Oh my God, you’re Alive! You pulled through! How do you feel?”

“Me, I’m…uh, I don’t remember what happened...everything’s kinda a blur...wait, wait, hold on...okay, now I’m ready to go and Save the World.”

And often in the news, when there’s a story about head trauma the focus of the coverage is on whether the person lives.  Living is most important, no doubt, but the story about the long gruelling recovery process is generally passed over and just ignored.  As an entertainer, I sort of understand why this is done, because the story rehabilitation after brain injury doesn’t make for good TV — it’s a slow, arduous process that usually doesn’t have the “Big Show Event”, finale, or grand conclusion.  Instead, recovery just keeps happening, getting a little bit better, day by day, week by week, year by year — and it’s not good TV.

But, again, this is why stories about recovery after brain injury must be told, so that communities can have a better understanding of the extended process of rehabilitation after TBI. With this knowledge a community can better prepare for and adapt to the needs of a survivor.  People can understand more about the long process after leaving the hospital and be more prepared to accept and support a survivor in his or her journey

Now, to be clear, I do not view this part of my Bit Idea of using storytelling as an immediate solution for any one person — it’s not as though a survivor can emerge from the hospital, become a storyteller, immediately tell the story as part of rehabilitation, and then everyone in the community will say, “Oh yeah, you know, I get it, let’s all behave differently,” – that’s not going to happen.  But if more survivors share stories of recovery, it provides more reference points in the world that people can look to for information.  It makes information about the extended process of recovery something people in a community might have already heard about. 

So that’s an extended hope for the future, a way that using storytelling to gather more examples of recovery can help a larger community, but like I said, this part of my Big Idea is about the conversation.  The other way storytelling helps with reintegration into a community is when a storyteller-survivor is preparing the storytelling piece.  During this preparation, if done in the most fulfilling manner, the storyteller will talk to friends and family who were part of the experience, and this will help the survivor hear new perspectives on his or her own story.

It’s easy for the story of recovery to seem to be all about the survivor.  Especially for a survivor, it can easily seem as if everyone in the world is focused on your recovery.  This can cause an ego-centric focus to develop, where the thought process becomes, “This is what I did, this is what I went through, and everyone else was just around me.”  The struggles of countless other people who are affected by the injury are forgotten.  Taking the time to speak with and acknowledge the journey of other people can make it easier for a survivor to find new ways to return to the community.

Before brain injury, a person generally had a way of “gelling with” or interacting with a community that was just known, but when brain injury happens this unconsciously understood way of working together comes apart.  After the injury, a lot of times all the different sides are trying to fit things back together in the same way as before, but the pieces have changed, and this can cause clashes and discomfort – no one is happy. When preparing for a storytelling, the survivor is able to look at the events with a new perspective and listening to people who were part of the recovery process, allowing the recovery to be seen from a new angle.  This can help to show the new ways in which the survivor needs to interact with a community and can allow people to come together and find more inclusive ways to support healing.  It’s important to remember that brain injury doesn’t just happen to a person, but it happens to a community.

Back to the story of my graduate thesis – now I have three piles of stories: those from fellow survivors that I relate to, but stories that I’m not in at all; from friends and family that I was a part of, but I don’t really understand the experiences in the same way; and personal half-memories from the time in rehabilitation and returning to the community.   It’s a lot of information, but it didn’t all make sense to me yet, and I needed to put it all together to make a unified performance piece.

I decide to lay out narratives I had.  Literally. I write a short script for each story-memory — those collected and the stories I remembered, and then worked to split the longer memories into even smaller moments by trimming each memory and shaping it as a short anecdote depicting an incident in recovery.  Once I the stories had been documented, I took each snippet and tried piecing them together with the goal of discovering a way in which they can be combined to create a fuller storytelling piece. It’s like having a table puzzle spread out before me, and I’m trying to put all the edge pieces together so that I can see the beginning a structure of what’s eventually going to be the larger picture.  And this worked, as I found a way to arrange an outline, and then took all the pieces left and started inserting them in a way that filled in some of the empty space.  This worked, and the story began to form, but there were still big chunks of the puzzle where I still couldn’t see the picture — parts where I still don’t understand what happened, but decided that I would come back to that later.

Reflecting on what I did have, I started to see that my storytelling piece needed to be about change — especially after talking with my family and friends who witnessed big changes in my attitude – and I saw that this storytelling needed to address who I was before the injury and then who I am now, so I made the goal of the piece to provide an explanation of how I made that transformation. But this had the side-effect of causing me to ponder, “Well, okay but Who am I?

And to have this question come up was hard, because it took me back to the memory of how variations of the question pounding on me when I was in early recovery — questions of self-identity — questions that I had never really dealt with but that I had stuffed into one of the closets of my mind, one of those closets where you shove everything that you just don’t want to deal with — but now, as part of my thesis project and by looking at all the gaps in the story, turns out I had to open up that closet and all those questions just came crashing down on me again.  I had to deal with what fell out by picking apart each question so that I could successfully fill in the gaps of the story.  It was hard, but I figure, “Hey, I’m a storyteller, this is what I do.”  The requirement for my master’s thesis project was to create a performance that an audience can follow and understand, and as part of that, I had to create a story I understand.

With this mind, I began to construct a story that filled in what I didn’t understand.  The story had elements of fiction, because I had to invent some events to fill in the gaps, but it was in no a fantasy.  Instead, I did my research and learned events that could have happened and logically explained the story segments that I didn’t have enough information to understand.  Then, with these options, I made choices about what would fit with my situation and created a plausible story about the events of my injury and recovery that answered any questions in my head.  With the intention of creating a storytelling piece that an audience could understand, I first had to answer any questions of self-identity for myself. I had to acknowledge and accept who I became after my brain injury, and more importantly, appreciate who I am now.

Which brings me to the third part of my Big Idea — that storytelling can help with the acceptance and appreciation of self-identity after brain injury.

Getting into this claim, we first need to establish what is self-identity, because that’s a pretty heady concept. I mean, when we look at pictures of ourselves, we can say that is a picture of me. I see pictures of myself as a young child, a teenager, a young adult, a married man, and the persons in all of these pictures are nothing alike — different looks, different attitudes, different abilities, different preferences — but I know that all those people are me and I have no problem defending such a claim. That’s amazing, but how does that work? How is it easily accepted that all these strikingly different people have the same identity.?

I hold that it is a person’s story that is his or her self-identity. The changes that happen in a person over time can be accounted for because there is a consistent storyline that accounts for these changes happening in a gradual manner.  In some cases there may even be a specific event that leaves a mark on the storyline of a person and accounts for a definite, somewhat monumental change, but it is something that can be defined, can be recognized, can be pointed to and you can say this the moment when that change happened.

With changes after brain injury, there is no real moment like that. A person is usually going about a pretty normal day, a lot of times there is nothing really exceptional happening, then ....Whish... the person starts getting awareness again in a completely different place.

And it is not a matter of opening your eyes and wondering where you are — we talked about this earlier — but whatever they show in the movies is not how it happens for most people. It’s a matter of already being awake and slowly memories begin to stick again — for me, I was awake for almost three weeks before any memories decided to actually remain in my brain. And when my memories began to stick there wasn’t a shock to learn I had received brain injury – I assume I had already learned this even though I have no memory of the injury or of learning about the injury.  That was simply the condition in which I came to awareness, but there was no event I could pick out that explained how I got there. Yes, I knew I had been in an accident and I knew there was brain injury, but those were things I was told about — there was no memory in my mind that I could point to and say, “This is what caused the changes that put me in my current condition.”

Now, that’s how it happened for me, and from my research and interactions, I suspect that’s how it happens for a lot of survivors — you don’t sudden learn, “Oh my God, I have brain injury!” but you come back to awareness with your brain injury being an understood condition.  However, as I was working on this speech, I realized I don’t actually know the facts about that — there’s nothing I can cite with that information — so I am curious what the experience is for other survivors. So, to all the survivors I ask, was there any moment of revelation for you when you came back after brain injury? Or was it more like I described — where your awareness returned slowly and your condition was already understood.  Please feel free to leave a comment about this, as I am very curious.

But returning to the topic, regardless of how the awareness returned, when it returns, changes have happened.  To add to the confusion, a lot of times these changes won’t be recognized at first — everyone is focused on the survivor being alive, so that any changes that do come out may simply be overlooked or marked off as something that will go away soon. And then the survivor continues to heal, eventually returns back to his or her home community, begins the return to a normal life, and the survivor is trying to act normal but...

I think about it like this — imagine you have this bag labelled “normal behaviours” that you always reach into when deciding how to behave. These are behaviours that have been developed over years of actions and habits and gradual changes that occur as a result of life events. Then, when brain injury happens, all the behaviours in this “bag” are swapped out for a different set of behaviours there are new behaviours similar to your previous set, but more extreme and less filtered. As a survivor, you don’t know that this switch happened. You’re reaching into the same place to grab a response or a reaction, but instead of the action that everyone is familiar with, you pull out one of these new, unfiltered behaviours. And friends and family might not be comfortable with these new behaviours, or may even be downright offended. This new set can even cause the people to comment on how you’ve changed and you’re not like you “used to be”, yet you’re reaching into the same bag for “normal behaviours” and they are not coming out in correct manner.  You ask the people you know, “Hey, so what about me is different?” And they might respond, “I don’t know, it’s just you — I mean, you just act and do things differently. It just doesn’t seem like you. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s just you’re not like — You.”

And this is hell: being told by people you love and trust that You are not like You.

There’s been a change — the brain injury has caused a change in temperament and attitudes and physical ability and...and there is no series of events on the personal timeline, no moment in the memory, that explains these changes. No wonder there’s identity confusion after brain injury. And this is how storytelling can help. By creating an organized, logical story, a survivor is able to have an understanding of what happened — is able to fill in that big empty gap of memory and to create an understanding of what happened.  While it is better to do research by interviewing people who witnessed the accident and recovery, there will still be parts that no one tells you about, parts that the storyteller/survivor must create and fill in with an imaginary, but plausible explanation.  When you’re making a storytelling piece, you’re creating an understanding of what happened that allows you to be who you are now.

In my experience, when I was working on my storytelling piece it was a powerful transformation to come to this understanding. Brain injury was no longer an event that just happened to me, but by turning it into a story, I was able make brain injury something that I had experienced, recovery something that I am still experiencing, and all of it a part of Who I am Now.

Now I’ve laid out this Big Idea — how storytelling can be a beneficial tool for rehabilitation after brain injury and I hope I’ve given you an idea of what my thoughts are and what I hope to continue to study in my life.

All that said, I’m going to return to the quote I told you hang on to at the beginning of this speech — by Maya Angelou,

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

As a survivor, this quote speaks to me in many ways.

Because there’s the agony of keeping your story inside you because you think no one will understand it — how alone that makes you feel. And how freeing it is when you finally share that story with other survivors — people who have experienced the same thing.

Then there’s the agony of trying to return to a community where every person has a different story and is looking at you differently, and your trying to put these stories together but nothing is fitting right.  Then getting the chance to hear the stories of the people around you, and perhaps letting them hear more of your story, and how this leads to a happier and healthier return.

And there’s the agony of not having the complete story — not having Your complete story — not knowing who you are. But then there’s the release when you take the time to put your story together in a way that lets you understand your injury as something that experienced and as part of what makes you — You.

To finish up the story of my thesis project, the piece I finally composed and performed became titled, Who Am I, Again? a verbal collage of stories about severe traumatic brain injury.  For this piece I used parts of the story of my recovery as a frame and then pulled in stories from fellow survivors, family, and friends to highlight shared experiences of recovery that occur after brain injury. And the performance was a success. Not only did I graduate, but for the initial performance I was able to invite the residents at the Crumley House and share my interpretation of their stories, and everyone seem to love it. To be able to share that experience was a powerful honour.

And it turns out that the performance was just a step in a larger story — because I continued to perform about brain injury at several locations around the US for a couple of years, which led to me writing a blog, which eventually led to my book that has brought me to where I am now, continuing to write and refine my thoughts about storytelling as a tool for rehabilitation.  It’s all part of a big story, and it makes me think of something my first storytelling mentor told me:

His name is Karl and he has a storytelling company that I worked for in the summers as a student, and one day he called me onto the porch of the theatre where we performed, and Karl said, “Lethan, you know, storytelling is looking at a moment from a story, and deciding why it is beautiful.”

So, I hope this talk inspires you to look at your story — the story of recovery from brain injury or the story of a caring for someone you love — and I hope you look at some of those moments, maybe even the hardest moments, and decide why they are beautiful.

Okay, now we’ve gone through the theoretical, philosophical part of the speech — explaining the Big Idea — and you may be thinking, “Those ideas make a lot of sense and storytelling could be a really helpful part of my recovery — but how do I do that?” For this final part of my speech, I’m going to lay out a few things you can do to start planning how you want to tell your story of recovery. Keep in mind, we only have time for some starting steps today. I do intend to follow up with some more publications outlining this process, so please do follow my blog and I do hope to write a companion, “How To” book so feel free to follow me on Amazon — but right now I’m going to share a few steps that can help you begin the process of sharing your story.

The first thing to do is to find a group of people with whom you can share your story. As I mentioned at the start of this speech, stories about recovery are really hard for an unprepared person to listen to, so it’s important that you have people who will devote the time and attention to hearing what you have to say. This groups can be made up of family, friends, therapists, fellow survivors — anyone who is will to share some time with you. You are welcome to open your performance to the public, but you don’t have to.  The presentation can also be a private event among people you trust, it is entirely up to you.  What is important is that you do have some sort of audience, because having an audience creates the requirement of having other people understand the story. If you’re composing the story for just yourself, there can be overwhelming emotions that cloud the reality of what happened. I’m not saying ignore these emotions, but by forcing yourself to compose a story for other people helps to pull the author out of the emotional memory and focus more objectively on what happened while still acknowledging emotions that were present and how these affected what happened.

I also want to be clear that, when you perform your storytelling, it does not necessarily mean that you need to share a memorize piece. You need to plan to do what is most comfortable for you, and if you like memorizing a script, that’s fine, or maybe you want to have an outline of the story that you follow but the words are spontaneous, or maybe you want a paper in front of you that you can hold and recite your story to an audience. I don’t think that how you tell your story is important.  What is important is that it is spoken in a live performance so that you can be a witness to the journey of that experience in your head being translated into words and then passed through the body to be released into the air as language that flies and lands among the audience, and then you can see how these words affect other people. It is powerful to know that your story is heard and understood.

Once you have a planned audience, set yourself a date for the performance. There is no requirement for how soon or how far away this date should be, but setting a date gives you a deadline that you need to meet, and having a deadline helps to ensure that the performance will happen. I know that I need deadlines or else I’m never fully satisfied with my work.

That said, while setting a deadline is important, understand that if you need to extend your deadline for any reason, that’s also okay. Life happens, things come up, and sometimes a deadline you set for yourself is a little too ambitious. Give yourself a hard deadline to follow, but don’t be angry if you need to adjust. A deadline is intended to help and motivate you, not to be a hinderance.   Also, for your first deadline, I recommend giving yourself at least 4 months to work, and it is probably better to have at least 6 months. This is a long project, and part of the goal of this project is to give yourself time to really explore the memory of your early recovery and see what you can learn from it.  Deciding how your story is beautiful can be a difficult task and will require some serious work.

I recommend stating with those steps because it gives you a clear goal to meet. After that, you’re onto the creative part, and to get those creative juices flowing, I start a reflective journal. Write down your initial thoughts about this project, and start reaching into your memories, writing down anything you can recall having to do with recovery.  This is not for a performance script and does not need to be understood by an audience, so for this initial part of brain storming, an audience understanding is not required.  This is just for you.  You may want to share with someone, and that’s fine, but it does not need to be the goal of this journal.  Write the memories however they come to you. Get your thoughts out, and see if they bring up any other memories. Just start writing and see where it takes you.

Along with these journal entries, I recommend talking with other people — talk with fellow survivors, or family and friends who have been part of your recovery process — share memories and thoughts, and then journal some more.

You may have figured this out already, but I think journaling is a really important part of the early creative process. This can help you be aware as your story changes, and by going back and reviewing some of these journal entries, it can help you to get over some creative humps that are causing trouble in the creation of the storytelling.

From there, there are no boundaries to how you compose your piece. Again, I remind you that it is helpful to remember that you are composing this for an audience, so you need to be understood, and for that reason, I do recommend you schedule time to rehearse with a friend or mentor at least once or twice in the creation process, but it could happen much more often.  Work with someone you trust will be honest about your art, and use this person to make sure that your story can be understood.

I also recommend that you play.  Play with your memories and the material you wrote as you work with on the storytelling. Try speaking with a new voice — try moving in a new way — try rearranging the scenes— try inserting new scenes... remember that while you’re trying to create a performance to share with other people, part of the growth in this project is what you can learn along the way.

Those are just a few starting ideas of how to do this sort of project.  I’ll be writing and publishing more as I have the time, so please do stay in touch through my blog.