Mental illness does not discriminate: My TMI Project transformation

by Allie Quinn (she/her)

In the Fall of 2015, one of my therapists at the Mental Health Association in Ulster County (MHA) suggested I sign up for a TMI Project true storytelling workshop. Even though my interest was piqued, I couldn’t fathom telling my story to strangers. Some of my family and friends didn’t even know the extent of what I had gone through.

Mental illness does not discriminate.

I had vaguely learned about mental illness in psychology classes, but I never imagined that at age 21, days after my junior year of college ended, I would develop a sudden and severe mental illness. In a matter of days, I went from writing 20-page papers to feeling too overwhelmed to read or write; from working 3 part-time jobs to being too paranoid to leave the house without my parents. Within a few weeks, my extreme fight-or-flight responses made driving too dangerous. Over the next several months, I was hospitalized five times, in three different facilities, spending nearly three months total in the hospital. By December, I had gained 30 pounds, withdrew from college, and had accumulated more misdiagnoses and medication changes than I could count. Most of all, I had lost a sense of who I was. I knew I needed to re-evaluate my goals, but I couldn’t find the motivation or hope.

Over the next year and a half, I attended all of my appointments, practiced coping skills, and found stability on the correct combination of medications. I even got my psychiatric service dog, Joey, who helped me gain back my independence. Still, with all of the tools I had gained and the progress I had made, I still felt that a piece of myself was missing. I signed up for a TMI Project true storytelling workshop not knowing if I would have the courage to show up on the first day.

I walked into the MHA conference room and sat toward the end of the table, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that I was terrified. As people began introducing themselves and reading their writing, my anxiety and self-consciousness worsened. I couldn’t help but ask myself what happened to the outgoing, stage-stealing, referee-challenging young woman I used to be. I completed my first session, and even though I didn’t make any groundbreaking revelations, it felt satisfying to hold a pen and feel my words flow onto the page.

As the weeks went on, I arrived feeling excited and increasingly more comfortable telling the “TMI” parts of my story. Each time I wrote, I felt a familiar fire inside that I so desperately wanted to return. On week 8, each group member received their finalized monologues from the TMI Project facilitators. When I first read the monologue out loud I experienced an overwhelming feeling of relief and self-empowerment. I stopped and said, “This is how I’ve always wanted to tell my story.” Taking ownership of my struggles and strength was exhilarating. When it came time to read my monologue in front of family, friends, my therapy team, and strangers, I felt strong and confident. I realized that sharing my story and my experience with mental illness could help others who are dealing with mental health issues.

In January of 2016, I started my own blog, and the TMI Project facilitators asked if I’d share my story at other venues. I wrote pieces about mental health and my own illness for The Mighty, MTV, and as a contributor in the book Project Semicolon: Your Story Isn’t Over. That October, I received the Next Generation Award from the YWCA Ulster County for writing and speaking about mental illness. The next month, I applied to SUNY Empire State College to study Community and Human Services. Returning to college had been a goal of mine, but I didn’t know if I would ever be ready. My participation in the TMI Project true storytelling workshop and the culminating live storytelling performance gave me the confidence I needed to reach my goals.

In December 2018, I earned my Bachelors degree and was prepared to use both my education and personal experiences to help my community. I applied to MHA, remembering their deep commitment to me and others battling mental illness. I was hired in February as a Wellness Resource Coordinator, a dream job for me.

The next TMI Project storytelling workshop session at MHA  was drawing near.

As the next TMI Project storytelling workshop at MHA session was drawing near, I asked to be the MHA staff member to sit with the new participants as they wrote their stories and found their strength. Walking into the room on the first day of the session induced a flood of emotions. I was excited for the new writers, nostalgic as I thought about the people who had been in my group, and so grateful for the personal and emotional growth that had occurred for me in that same room. Before participating in my TMI Project workshop, I resented my illness and mourned the young woman I “used to be.” After TMI Project, I embraced my struggles and took pride in my story. I realized I’m never going to be the person I was before mental illness and that’s for the better. I’m so much stronger now.

Black Stories Matter in Academia: My Journey from the Projects to NYU

Tameka Ramsey (she/her), Black Stories Matter program director

This story is presented as part of a series of true narratives collected for TMI Project’s Black Stories Matter initiative. 

Out of 232 four year public schools studied over 10 years, 53 percent saw gaps between black and white students either stay the same or increase, resulting in a growing gap between the numbers of black and white students who graduate. ​Moreover, nearly one-third of the colleges and universities that improved graduation rates overall actually saw graduation rates for black students remain flat or decline.

In the of fall 1994 I took the E train from a rundown basement apartment in Jamaica, Queens to attend my first day at New York University. At 19, I graduated from SUNY Delhi with an associates degree, a 3.8 average and multiple scholarships.

Since I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, SUNY Delhi legitimately felt like it was in the middle of nowhere BUT the student body was 15% black and primarily from inner cities. The entire student body hovered somewhere around 3,000. Black students found each other easily and formed a community that frankly felt identical to the one I’d left. We even mostly all lived in a dorm affectionately nicknamed “the projects.” So, yeah, there were some issues even within a culturally diverse student body. But ironically, 170 miles from home, in what often felt like a town where people were outnumbered by cows I experienced almost NO culture shock. A life spent in NYC’s public education system had prepared me for an environment where the faculty and staff were 99% white. I joined the black student union. We went to “black” events on other campuses. We sat together in the dining hall.

Going to college and living on campus at Delhi for two years was great, but I wanted to come home to the city I was determined to conquer. SO, when I was accepted as a transfer student to NYU, I was excited, even though that meant living at home again. Or so I thought.

That summer I arrived back home, my single mother and I were evicted from our one bedroom apartment in the projects. My mother sat me down in our living room and announced that she and her boyfriend had tried to find a two bedroom apartment so I could continue living with her, but they couldn’t. So together, they were moving into a one bedroom apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens (emphasis on the word FAR). Here were my options: Sleep on the couch and commute two hours a day each way into the city for classes or figure something else out. I became an adult that day.

The summer that I should have been preparing for two years of rigor at one of the best colleges in the country, I was scrambling to figure out where I was going to live. I remember walking into my first political science class, under an inordinate amount of stress, unusual for an NYU college student. When I arrived, I stood frozen in the doorway looking at a sea of 125 white faces. The average class size at Delhi was 30.

NYU tried to support me via the HEOP program but it was almost like trying to connect through a distortion field. Everyone was white. Everything outside of the HEOP office was structurally set up to support a specific kind of student that came from a specific background – white, middle to upper class, steeped in “American” culture (i.e. white). All of my professors were white, all of the administrators, counselors, etc. and I had not fully honed my code switching skills yet.

Occasionally, I still presented as, “standing at the bus stop sucking on a lollipop”. “Don’t get it twisted, imma blow this midterm up”, in response to my professor’s concern that I might be juggling too much. He looked at me like I had two heads.

NYU’s black student population was 4%. Four percent of 50,000 students. I knew there were other black people… somewhere. But I had NO idea where to find them. Nothing in the NYU culture was for me. What the hell was a “Spring Break”? For my peers, a ruckus trip to party in Cancun. For me, an opportunity to work overtime. Networking? Not much of that to be done at my job at Burlington Coat Factory.

I felt too ashamed to explain what I was going through to what felt like a composite of well meaning but completely foreign white people. In my family, you didn’t “spread your business” with people you didn’t trust. And for the most part, you didn’t trust white people.

It would have been easy to blame my mother entirely for putting me in this situation but the reality is that our lives and the lives of all people of color are shaped by the class and race construct by which we live.

A few years before I started college, my mom, tired of being passed over for promotions for a decade in favor or white people with less experience, sued Brookdale hospital for discrimination. It was settled out of court when it became clear that she would win, but the settlement was barely sufficient and my mom had to agree to leave her job in order to accept it. What if my mother had been given those promotions and we’d moved up from working poor to middle class? Maybe she would have made different choices. Maybe she would have bought a house. Maybe I would have started college with a place to live.

Two years became 2.5 years. Then three. Then 3.5. I dropped out then re-registered. Then dropped out and re-registered again. I had to transfer to the continuing education division to work full-time so I could escape the basement apartment in Queens where unbeknownst to me, people were breaking into my apartment and stealing my belongings.

Most importantly, I had a pervasive feeling that I just didn’t belong. Graduation seemed more like some amorphous and unrealistic brass ring. I felt like the other students were in on something that I just couldn’t and would never understand and I was growing depressed.

As a community, we cannot ignore the impact that race has on the probability of success in higher education or the fact that our higher education system, along with all of our bedrock systems, set up a biased foundation. Our stories are unique and our struggle is real.

We need to start talking about how to create cultural environments that allows students of color to thrive. And in order to do that, we have to hear the stories of the lives that are impacted to foster understanding across the chasm.

To that end, TMI Project is bringing Black Stories Matter to Bard College! On April 4th, we present inspiring true stories and monologues about Black people surviving and thriving in the Hudson Valley– both for the school community and for the general public.

Performances will be followed by a panel discussion, which will allow the audience to tackle hard questions around race, identity and community. Black Stories Matter @ Bard College is open to the public ($20), and all local college students are encouraged to attend for FREE.

Reflecting on a year of Black Stories Matter and what lies ahead

#blackstoriesmatter performance 2017

Tameka Ramsey (she/her)

#blackstoriesmatter performance 2017

One year ago today, on Martin Luther King Day, Eva and I launched TMI Project’s Black Stories Matter initiative at the Hudson Valley Writers Resist in Woodstock, NY.

In true TMI Project fashion, I’ll be transparent; we didn’t know we were launching anything! We knew that we had a platform through TMI Project and that in the wake of Trayvon (and Eric, and Dante and Sandra, and…) that we wanted to use that platform to amplify the voices and stories of Black people in America, and specifically in our own community.

So over the course of 6 months, Eva, Sari and I worked with a group of committed writers to craft the Black Stories Matter inaugural show. Rev. James Child at the Pointe of Praise Church in Kingston, NY agreed to host us and the show debuted on March 25, 2017. We hoped for an audience of 200, maybe 300 if we were lucky, and 600 of you showed up to watch the Brooklyn Technical High School all girls step team perform and eleven writers read deeply personal stories about the richness and complexities of their lives.

That evening was the true start of Black Stories Matter as a TMI Project initiative. In the year since, we’ve developed a few projects that carry and extend the original production: we’re working with the Kingston Public High School to to develop a teen version of Black Stories Matter. And in the Fall of 2017, we collaborated with Historic Huguenot Street to create and perform Reclaiming Our Time, written, in part, during an overnight stay in enslaved people’s quarters in New Paltz. Now, one year later, I’m excited to announce that I’m officially coming onboard to work with TMI Project as the Black Stories Matter Program Director!

“I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they don’t communicate with each other, and they don’t communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.” Dr. Martin Luther King

What is Black Stories Matter and why are we doing it?

Black Stories Matter is TMI Project’s way of making an impact in addressing incidents of hate, bigotry and racial injustice in our local community while also participating as an organization in the national outcry of injustice. In alignment with TMI Project’s mission to empower people and bring about change through true storytelling, Black Stories Matter seeks to raise awareness around issues of inequality and injustice through true storytelling and amplification of the voices of those who have inspiring stories to share about black people surviving–and thriving–in the Hudson Valley and throughout the United States. We aim to provide audiences the opportunity to listen, expand their awareness, possibly identify internalized racism or uncover unintentionally racists points of view. This heightened awareness will enable audience members to replace biased belief systems with informed knowledge, deepened compassion and an active commitment to work for justice for all.

What’s next for Black Stories Matter?

This year we’re focused on creating true stories that will deepen the listener’s ability to feel empathy and compassion; programming that will ignite the humanity of the audience (our readers, after all, are already human) around issues of race in America and how that manifests in our own community. In addition to performing the show with the original cast at both Bard and the Kingston African American Library, we are expanding the programming to include facilitated community discussions so that we can work through and face the problems caused by systemic racism and segregation together.

We wish there were no need for an initiative like Black Stories Matter, but events like Charlotteville clearly demonstrate the need to combat ignorance with truth. These stories and so many more that are reflections of Black life in America, past and present, must be shared and amplified. Especially in our own community, where segregation (and the insidious redlining that enables it) is as alive here as it is in everywhere in America.

So on this Martin Luther King Day, one year to the day that Eva and I stood on stage in Woodstock and announced our intention to create Black Stories Matter, we’re pledging our renewed commitment to working hard in 2018 to create and support the development and amplification of Black stories through our platform.

  • Tameka Ramsey, TMI Project

Working Together to Shape Boys into Great Young Men

The Story of TMI Project’s Partnership with Coach Jeramie Collins

After Tony Porter of A Call to Men and I decided we wanted to work with high school football players and document the process, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Jeramie Collins coach of the Kingston High School football team was the man to turn to.

TMI Project storytellers had shared the stage with Coach Collins’ football players at a One Billion Rising event in Kingston two years earlier where TMI Project storytellers relayed personal stories about surviving domestic violence and Coach Collins’ players were recognized for their commitment to standing up against violence against women. This was the first time I had heard of a football coach getting his team involved in social justice and activism.

The following year, Tony presented at Ulster County Community College for Domestic Violence Awareness Day where I sat in the front row. I looked across the aisle and, there he was again. Coach Collins with a few of his football players were listening to Tony talk about the cultural expectations of masculinity. I was impressed. Not only did the coach get his players to attend, he also encouraged them to participate. He was clearly dedicated to shaping these boys into great young men.

I asked Coach Collins to partner with TMI Project and A Call to Men. He was on board without hesitation from the moment I posed the idea. Within 24 hours he had approval from the school’s principal and buy-in from the other coaches.

As you can imagine, getting a bunch of teen boys to share their emotional “TMI” stories has some inherent challenges. But Coach Collins doesn’t give up. He keeps encouraging his students to show up and he always models emotional courage. He’s shared his own stories in every workshop, performed alongside his students, and he let all 60 players know that he tends to cry easily and there’s nothing wrong with that. TMI Project is honored to recognize Coach Jeramie Collins for being a powerful example, and for always encouraging young men to bravely share their stories and have the courage to speak up in the face of violence against girls and women.

TMI Project is honoring Coach Collins, along with activist Tony Porter and three other Hudson Valley leaders and change-makers, on September 28th, 2017 at Voices in Action: Community Outreach Showcase & Fundraiser. We hope you will join us!

With gratitude,

Eva Tenuto

Working Together to Tell Black Stories & Inspire Social Action

The Story of Callie Jayne’s Partnership with TMI Project

When TMI Project started working on Black Stories Matter, our project that seeks to raise awareness around issues of anti-Black racism, inequality and injustice through true storytelling, we knew that it was critical that we create a program that not only impacted people while they were sitting in their seats in the theater but also spurred them to action after the show was over. We knew we could create the stories but we needed the right partner for the follow-through. We approached Callie Jayne from Citizen Action about a partnership and she was eager to jump on board and incite a true culture-shift in our Hudson Valley community.

I remember going to her off​​​​ice one day for an initial meeting. She was juggling a million things but she graciously took the time to watch the short video we had created with my iPhone during a recent rehearsal. When she’d finished watching, with tears in her eyes she said, “Okay, we can pass out flyers when we go door-knocking. Do you have anyone phone banking for you? How can we make sure the neighborhoods that are often forgotten about find out about this and have access to this show?” She was all action.

Callie helped us navigate all the logistics leading up to our first Black Stories Matter show, dissecting the complexities of decision-making around an event about race in Kingston’s mostly segregated community. She helped us spread the world and included outreach in her local activism. And she was there the night of the show with a table in the lobby where people could register to vote and sign up to take action in our community.

TMI Project’s work with Callie has just begun. We know we have social justice movement building in our shared future and look forward to collaborating again and again. The Hudson Valley is blessed to have a force like Callie Jayne, fighting for our rights every day. She’s relentless and passionate, and we are honored to recognize her as a Voices in Action Agent of Change.

TMI Project is honoring Callie, along with activist Tony Porter and three other Hudson Valley leaders and activists, on September 28th, 2017 at Voices in Action: Community Outreach Showcase & Fundraiser. We hope you will join us!

With gratitude,

Eva Tenuto

Working Together to Destigmatize Mental Illness

The Story of TMI Project & Denise Ranaghan of the Mental Health Association of Ulster County’s 5-Year Partnership

TMI Project’s work is all about getting people to divulge their deepest secrets. So it should be no surprise that neither Sari Botton, TMI Project’s editorial director, or I have a propensity for small talk. In fact, we both find networking torturous. Yet, at one particular women’s schmooze-fest in the early days of TMI Project we went around the room introducing ourselves and discovered that we were sitting across from Denise Ranaghan, Director of Wellness Services at the Mental Health Association of Ulster County (MHA). We hit it off immediately. When she heard about what we do–we use memoir writing and true storytelling to raise awareness about and amplify the voices of populations who often go unheard– and we heard about her passion for destigmatizing mental illness, we knew that we were destined to partner.

Flash forward 5 years later. Since 2012, with Denise’s support and partnership, twice a year TMI Project has offered 10-week memoir writing and true storytelling workshops specially tailored to meet the needs of MHA’s population of adults with mental illness. Our partnership with this peer-based organization, where a portion of the staff are people who have recovered from or accommodated for mental illness, is designed to destigmatize mental illness while empowering participants to work toward their recovery. In 2016, a documentary about this partnership entitled Vicarious Resilience was shot by North Guild Films and will be released later this year. The documentary follows eight participants as they went through our workshop, from the first session, where many expressed doubts and trepidation, to the final storytelling performance before an audience of over 100, and a final follow-up session where participants voiced the ways in which they experienced positive transformation.

Denise has been with TMI Project every step of the way. Not only has she been our liaison to MHA, she’s sat in on nearly every workshop we’ve taught there and joined us in outside workshops to offer therapeutic support.

Ellen Pendagar, CEO of MHA, has said repeatedly that the partnership with TMI Project has been the organization’s best stigma-busting program to date, an accomplishment we would not have been able to achieve without Denise’s passion and dedication. She empowers her clients by giving them a platform to tell their own stories. She is wholeheartedly committed to ensuring that those who live with mental illness are able to do so with pride and dignity. And for that, we are honored to recognize Denise Ranaghan with a Voices in Action Agent of Change Award.

TMI Project is honoring Denise, along with activist Tony Porter and three other Hudson Valley leaders and change-makers, on September 28th, 2017 at Voices in Action: Community Outreach Showcase & Fundraiser. We hope you will join us!

With gratitude,

Eva Tenuto