Listen to this post:

Storytelling!

In a few weeks, I’ll be leading a short storytelling workshop at the Texas Brain Injury Conference. Of course, I’m thrilled to be back home in Texas in August. I look forward to the chance to melt from the heat and humidity of Central Texas like I grew up doing. But in addition to melting, there’s this amazing looking conference where they’re including storytelling for its therapeutic and healing capacity.

As I’ve said many times, the medical healing is not the only healing we have to do after TBI. Even when that goes as far as it can, there’s still so much work to do. Because too many people face isolation, self-doubt, internalized stigma, ableism, loss of finances or their home, and all the unending weights that can land on the shoulders of someone who faces or faced trauma. But because medical healing is what’s on so many people’s minds, when we’re encouraged to share our story (which feels like it’s every 15 minutes), what people want is the story of how the brain cells got hurt (trauma) and how we made some brain cells better (rehab). That’s an important story to tell, but it’s far from the only one. For some of us, it feels like the least meaningful story to tell.

I had a speech therapist one time push back at me. This wasn’t someone on my own team, just one of the many SLPs I bump into in a day. She asked me to talk about how I got injured after I’d already said I didn’t want to tell that story. I told her that it’s not OK to demand that I or her patients describe their trauma to her if it’s not relevant to the therapy activity at hand. Let them tell the story they want to.

Her response, “But I learned in graduate school that we have to encourage survivors to tell their story.” So I pushed back.

“Yes, that’s right. But you don’t get to tell me what my story is that you want to hear. You have to let me tell the story I want to tell, and my ‘TBI story’ doesn’t include details of a traumatic wreck.”

Amazingly, amazingly, halfway through writing this post I stopped writing, and I was talking to someone about TBI stories. When I refused to tell him how I got hurt, he said, “But you don’t want to be known as that woman who will never tell anyone the story of how she got hurt!” I had to laugh and tell him that, actually, that’s precisely the woman I want to be known as. I told him about this blog post that I had started writing at 5:00 am today, in fact. This isn’t the only thing I wish to be remembered for, in case someone remembers me down the road. But the fact that I advocate for owning my story, sharing which parts I want to share and when, and that I challenge non-disabled listeners to enjoy a TBI story that doesn’t have a “how it happened” portion, yeah, that’s amazing if someone remembers that about my work. That would be very cool.

And I’m not alone. The beloved Reel Social Skills blog has an exceptionally wonderful recent, and very snarktastic, post about the hidden rules of telling your disability story to professionals. It’s pretty painful to read because it really pulls apart ways that sometimes non-disabled people want to hear a disability story to feel better about their own lives or to validate that they’re not one of the bad ones who might have been mean or rude or ableist or awkward to a person with a disability.

But professionals are not the only audience! And I am absolutely thrilled to be in a room of peers with TBI, working on storytelling to each other or to any darn audience we want.

Info on the flyer:

Texas storytellers with TBI or Texans with TBI who want to get into storytelling, please join me in this short session and stay for the whole day. It will be wonderful. And in my session, yes, I’m gonna encourage people to tell a story that they might not tell as often as the wreck and rehab stories. But all stories, just like all people, are warmly welcomed in my session.