Mission Statement :: The World's Longest Open Love Letter

If you're curious about what I'm up to, I've constructed a collection of posts that together constitute a Mission Statement HERE.

The current Mission Statement link will always be found as a 'Category' on the sidebar.

WORKFLOW: This 'documentary' - each frame another page of "The World's Longest Open Love Letter" - will be constructed piece-by-standalone-piece with a backwards time line dictated by the blog-form in which its public process lives. Read it last post first.

CONCEPT: I put 'documentary' in quotes because this project takes documentary-making into the digital age, using Web 3.0 digital tools for sharing, growing, healing, researching, community, communicating, and conversating. A grassroots-based documentary that grows up a beautiful flower and life-giving fruit or vegetable from the manure of violence.

SCOPE: Even though I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse - and its own kind of violence - there are tons of survivors of craploads of categories of abuse. I needn't name them all here. The common thread is this:

PREMISE: All survivors of violence have strategies for doing it - surviving - well.

Those strategies are what I'm most interested in talking about.

So that's where I propose to begin.

STATUS REPORT: As of today's date I've pre-interviewed four individuals. Those four point me to three more. Momentum gathers. Conception has happened, 1 has been iadded to 1 and that equals = 2 and those two subdivide, and subdivide again. The project has a life of its own.

CASTING IS EVERYTHING: Two men are survivors of s*xual and emotional violence. Three women are in grassroots social services, and one is the loving aunt of a 13-year-old girl m*lested by an officer of the law who sat faithfully through the trial and conviction of said officer. Brava.

We need some mental health professionals on board, too. Calling mental health professionals, yo. :)

So much courage.

So much collective wisdom.

Difficult as it is to say: I need you. We need each other.

We need to hear each other speak truths. Even the unspeakable truths.

We need to hear from state-of-the-art professionals the how, where and who of current work to dig this thing up from the root. The root includes looking at p*rps.

In the words of the amazing Ann Emmerling who's agreed to help where she's able:

"The Blackburn Center is a resource for understanding, but more than that, an instrument for the social transformation of patriarchy."

Ann Emmerling
Executive Director
Blackburn Center Against Domestic & Sexual Violence
P.O. Box 398

Greensburg, PA 15601
724-837-9540, x 115

Another Premise: survivors can influence future treatment modalities for the better.

To ask for help is as foreign to me as the idea of how radically quantum mechanics research may change our worldview in 5 years.

To live well is to win.


Tags: Self-Help Art Depression