Who Am I To Stop It

After acquiring disabilities from brain injury in 2010, I tried to tell people what I was going through. No matter what I said, people often responded that they had no idea what I was talking about. So I took one particularly frustrating example of how confusing life is with brain injury and turned it into a short film with my Co-Director Cynthia Lopez. Suddenly it all made sense. The distance between the viewer and the screen made my stories more understandable and approachable. I think it also helped that it was a comedy. Non-disabled people generally want to be reassured it's OK when disability is the topic. Not only did this short film open up much-needed dialogue about the struggles of living with brain injury, but the process opened me up to a new community of disabled artists and friends. They used art for critiquing an ableist, inaccessible world, not to inspire people with triumphant journeys of living with an impairment. Writing, rehearsing, and making a film turned out to also be good rehab for my brain. After a time, I wanted to see if other people with brain injuries experienced the arts in the way I did: a way to be listened to and understood, a place to express social critique or rage or joy, a process where you're so connected to your own self-worth and power, that disability stigma can't touch you for the moment. The public generally focuses on rehabilitation and medicine as what surely must be the cornerstone of life after brain injury. For some it can be, for a while. Yet in the hundreds of people I've met with brain injury in the past six years, every last person talks about identity, community, belonging, and seeking self-pride and self-love. This is what medicine can't provide. But it is a path that art can lead you down.

It was important for us to make a film from within the community, from someone with first-hand experience of brain injury disabilities who is also interested in examining issues from the disability rights, disability culture, and social justice perspectives. A lot of media presents disability stories through the lens of the non-disabled person looking in with curiosity for the gory medical details. As if the goal for all of us is to reveal ourselves to outsiders rather than go about our lives. Often, brain injury narratives are built on the foundation of horrific tragedy and cathartic recovery. The most popular stories are linear, the ones where the focus is on someone who has it all, loses it all, fights like hell, and regains a life worth living again (i.e., one where you can perform successfully within a capitalist system). Usually, the emphasis is on the personal tragedy and personal achievement of one lone brain injury survivor at a time. Rarely do these stories address the complexity of intersecting factors in someone's identity and disability experience like race, ethnicity, poverty, homelessness, incarceration, social isolation, violence, coercion, loss of family support, and stigma. Yet when you go beneath the glossy veneer of mainstream TBI portrayals, these other factors are at play more often than not. Our film creates space for a lot of these harder questions, and we allow the subjects to talk about so many other parts of their identities than just brain injury. It's easy for outsiders to forget we are just as complex as we were before, and we don't want you to forget that part.