Tomorrow, Wednesday April 15th at 6pm PST, 9pm EST I will be going on Talk With Tenney to talk about my experiences with blogging.
I will discuss how important blogging is for our movement and for us as individual psychiatric survivors because surviving psychiatry is being silenced, so every one of us has a lot to say.
A lot of trauma gets stuck in our voices, and even makes it hard for us to think clearly and function if we don’t speak out somehow, so blogging can be written words, audio, video, images, etc.
Whatever form it takes, we are all liberating each other. I recently wrote a blog called “My Story is Your Story,” in which I talk about how important it is for every one of us to tell our story because our stories are all wound up in everyone else’s stories.
There are still some stories I don’t share, mostly about my family and childhood, where I feel most silenced and by not sharing those, I’m limiting my own and other’s potential.
Many of my friends are terrified to share anything at all publicly and many people haven’t caught on fully to our current responsibility to make media. Blogging connects us to others, builds our movement, helps us make offerings from our pain that connect us with others and helps us find support too.
I can’t say enough about the potential we have as media makers.
The thing is, we all need to do it ESPECIALLY those who are most scared. We need to take ourselves more seriously than Facebook posts; by having blogs, and eventually books, we create lasting content that others can link to, refer back to and reference later on.
Mad In America has clearly been a game changer for our movement, yet it has a certain slant and many psychiatric survivors express not feeling safe there, so we need to create our own blogs as well.
Tina Minkowitz recently initiated a blog link up idea, which led to a very long Facebook thread with survivors interested.
Talk With Tenney is a good example of media our movement is creating, where Lauren Tenney will interview me tomorrow evening.
I recently taught a teleclass called, “Blogging Class For the Silenced” which was very popular (to order an mp3 of the event if you missed it, please send me $15 via paypal send to a friend at my email address chayagrossberg at yahoo dot com) .
Lots of people joined and started sharing their blogs in the weeks that followed and are continuing to. Ben Ross, a writer in the class, created a Facebook group called Pulse: Writing Because Alive, which people joined and are sharing their blogs on. Join us there.
Some expressed interest in small coaching groups to work through fears and questions around blogging which I am in the process of coordinating, so please contact me if you are interested in joining a group that is forming now.
Tune in tomorrow for “The Art of the Blog,” on Talk With Tenney, and call in with questions!
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