What is this?

Who Am I, Again? a verbal collage of stories about Traumatic Brain Injury premiered at the International Storytelling Center of Jonesborough, Tennessee in the spring of 2010 as a graduate thesis-project at East Tennessee State University.  To create this piece, I arranged stories collected from my experience with severe Traumatic Brain Injury (sTBI) in 1999, memories gathered from family and friends who were involved in that healing journey, and interviews with residents at the Crumley House Brain Injury Rehabilitation and Living Center - near Johnson City, Tennessee - to create a narrative that portrays several distinct journeys through the process of recovery after sTBI.

The piece began with several goals:

- To highlight common experiences and emotions that often occur in the recovery process.
- Now that I, as a survivor, felt more cognitively prepared - to learn more about the realities of brain injury and recovery,
- With that light, I wanted to reexamine my own experience with sTBI from a slightly removed, academically artistic vantage point.
- To provide an introspective, yet easily accessible look at the experience of recovery from brain injury.
- And, of course, I wanted to finish my university work and achieve a Master of Arts degree in Storytelling.

The performance was a success and, after completing my subsequent thesis paper, I received my graduate degree.

Since my graduation, I have continued to share Who Am I, Again? whenever possible and have had the privilege of performing in a small variety of locations.  With self-reflection, constructive criticism, and artistic direction from master storyteller David Novak, the piece has also continued to evolve as I gain a deeper understanding of the stories as well as improve my performance technique.  In recent years, however, this work has been limited to the apartments and classrooms of friends due to my employment as an ESL (English as a Second Language) Instructor in Korea and China.

While I love this life abroad, over the past year I have felt an urge growing inside me to focus on this story again.  For this reason I created Who Am I, Again? blog to share my philosophies and encourage discussions about brain injury.  The blog received some (relatively minor) notoriety and I am proud of the articles (feel free to visit the blog), but due to technical difficulties (I forgot my password) and complications created by moving from Korea to China, I have not been able to regain access to this blog.

But my urge has not been satisfied - I still feel a need to work with this piece - perhaps now more than ever - so I decided to begin a new blog - but this blog needed a name.  The title Who Am I, Again blog had already been taken (by me), so I took some time to think about what the story meant to me now, and I realize it has been the better part of a decade since the piece was composed.  These years have brought a lot of life-transformations, and although these changes haven’t been as dramatic as the ones caused by my accident, the changes have clearly altered my perception of the piece.  No longer am I looking at the subject as a recent graduate, but as an employed foreign ESL teacher and world traveler.  I am a different person Now.


Thus the new title: Who Am I Now - reflections on recovery.

For this blog, I will notate the scenes from the original storytelling piece (32 scenes) to provide more context and an explanation of how each scene developed and thoughts about the content.  The goal is the same - to share my philosophy and encourage conversation - but the writings will be more focused.  I may, and very likely will, include personal sidebar thoughts in tangentially related writings, but the general outline of this blog will be an examination the storytelling piece and what my reflections on the piece are now (2017).

With that plump bundle of contextual information, stay with me over the next year or so and lets see where this goes.

Thank you for reading - please leave comments below.