Brandi Shah
Birmingham, Alabama
Solitary Third Space
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
~ Maya Angelou
My guiding spirit is a lifelong love of creative writing and storytelling; my professional expertise is health and medicine. As part of a broader commitment to health justice, I am committed to co-discovering the healing capacity of sharing stories, and especially committed to centering and elevating the remarkable stories of resilience and restoration from voices that are typically obscured, often stigmatized and dismissed. These are stories of lived experience that demonstrate the intersecting identities and humanity of us all. Yet, one unfortunate truth about stories and storytelling in our society is that similar to social determinants of health that keep some people from experiencing holistic wellness, many in our community are kept outside of storytelling circles, creating a false sense of privilege in which some stories are deemed worth sharing and others are not. Such stories create bridges across unfamiliar or disparate lived experience so we can move on to cohering our collective stories, recognizing our personal and collective agency.
I envision a “third place” that cultivates collective imagination for a just, affirming world, through brave storytelling that challenges and entrusts all of us to wield, deeply listen to and compel action from the stories we create and share across divides. This is how story becomes agency. By way of example, I offer the first story of my digital journey about my own personal experience with bipolar II disorder and hope through my own cathartic sharing that the stigma of mental illness can fall away so we can see, learn, support and act compassionately for those who both suffer and thrive daily with this reality.
I’ll take this opportunity to recognize my mentors and training at StoryCenter and offer gratitude to the visual artists who freely offer the use of images at Unsplash.com and contributed to this piece. I give heartfelt thanks to Vinegar for their mission, thoughtfulness, inclusiveness, encouragement and the exquisite community of creative, collective conscience-building they bring together with integrity and humanity.
~ Brandi
