The Edinburgh Fringe is now well and truly over and countless artists are counting how many of the coveted four or five star reviews they received. However, most didn’t even get one. Having experienced this myself, I can tell you that it’s hard not to take rejection personally – especially when your show is all about you.
From cancer to coming out, poverty to prison, and addiction to ADHD, this year’s Fringe Festival had something for every voyeur. The massive rise in comedy, music and drama about personal adversity reached its peak this year with the hugely successful TV show Baby Reindeer — who was born in Edinburgh. Today, it seems, we can’t get enough of this “experience” cake.
But many years before this particular cake became a staple of the arts, I was one of several unwitting pioneers trying out this highly personal form of storytelling in the most glamorous and prestigious field of all: Scotland’s third sector.
In 2001, I was grieving the sudden death of my alcoholic, drug-addicted mother and reeling from the disintegration of my family that had left me homeless and on the path to alcoholism. I was carrying a lot of grief and anger that needed an outlet. I hastily began to channel my trauma into my best attempt at art. A growing interest in hip-hop and rap quickly became an obsession; notepads scribbled with lyrics and ideas, baggy pants, hoodies and headphones, and the obligatory confrontational attitude.
Performing locally under the name Loki at open mic nights and rap battles, I vented my youthful anger in autobiographical tales set to dusty boom-bap drumbeats. My reputation in the Glasgow music scene grew and I eventually established myself as a community artist. Then, when the Third Sector got a hold of me (and my ‘story’), I took to the stage at conferences where professionals sat open-mouthed and moist-eyed, marvelling at my ability not only to tell my story but to see it in a wider social and economic context: poverty.
Back then, there seemed to be an endless thirst for my accounts of adversity. Whether it was the campaign for Scottish independence, criticising decision-makers for failing the most vulnerable, or my musical output, everything seemed to resonate a little better when my opinions or observations were embedded in my own ‘experience’. This eventually culminated in the publication of my debut book in 2017 Poverty Safari – part memoir, part social criticism – in which I revealed, among other things, the traumatic experiences of my childhood.
This book changed my life. I overcame my personal challenges and was redeemed. People loved my story, my life experience; they loved Me.
Over the past decade, this kind of personal disclosure has become a central part of societal discourse – reaching beyond the arts into every corner of culture. Charities, philanthropists and, inevitably, politicians seem to be realising the value of hearing from people who have first-hand experience of many of the challenges they and their organisations must address.
But those of us who share our experiences must be careful. Our stories are also a commodity. They move and inspire professionals. They grace the pages of policy documents and grant proposals. They can even become bestselling memoirs or, in the case of Richard Gadd, world-beating Netflix series. As a result, we creators may feel like we’re making a difference, but the more attention our “story” attracts, the more our lives themselves can become a kind of performance.
Those of us who trade in the currency of lived experience are, like everyone else, unreliable narrators. We keep rewriting them, making sure we remain the hero. The true core is discarded and replaced by assumptions, speculations or unconscious white lies.
“Those of us who trade in the currency of lived experience are, like everyone else, unreliable narrators of our own stories.”
Let’s face it: The truth of our lives can never be packed into a tight three-act structure. Like most people, we take small liberties with certain details and make huge leaps with others. As a form of entertainment, this is not really harmful, but when lived experience is used in social discourse or politics and subtly influences policy, it is highly problematic.
Much like a fickle Fringe audience, critics on the ground don’t believe our stories of overcoming adversity are as powerful or useful as our fans do. In fact, many are irritated by the vulgar spectacle of watching people vomit out their trauma on social media or on stage. They view lived experience as a Trojan horse, smuggling unscientific, politically motivated, narcissistic anecdotes and personal opinions into serious matters of science and policy. They bristle at the idea that those of us who have experienced trauma or adversity ourselves are automatically given victim status in public discourse because our stories aren’t questioned like other forms of evidence.
Ultimately, Skeptics fear that every anecdote will be blindly accepted as a statement of fact, and that the fear of “devaluing” the lived experiences of “victims” and “survivors” too often takes precedence over the need to keep discussions and debates firmly grounded in the realm of truth. And they may be right.
Depending on the political agenda, certain stories of trauma and recovery are deemed more useful than others. One example is the drug debate in Scotland, where advocates of competing treatments (such as opiate replacement therapy or the 12 steps) tend to promote and present only those that have had success, and rarely mention all those who have relapsed or died while trying to get well using that method. There is a cynicism at play, not only among the storytellers, who develop a keen sense of which plot points to emphasize and which to edit out, but also among the organizations and institutions that present these stories, often to further their own social or political agendas.
And then we have the fundamental problem of protection. What if our psychological wounds paradoxically lead us to naively enter this performative arena and over-share the intimate details of our lives without much thought for the consequences of doing so? What if our trauma leads us to a subtle form of self-exploitation, where, in the pursuit of safety and validation, we tell our stories in ways that actually make us more vulnerable?
Our desire to help others and, yes, to gain affection, safety and love is often so overwhelming that we push aside any remaining doubts about whether we are suited to the risky public exhibitionism that may characterize us. And let’s not forget: once we have vented our traumas in a loud and unforgiving public place, we cannot not disclose them.
But perhaps the greatest misconception of those who greedily feed on our personal testimony is that we, who are willing to share so much, are representative of a mythical, voiceless mass—that everyone affected by trauma or adversity shares our experiences, our pain, our story.
Yet perhaps the truth is that those of us who give in to this impulse, and perhaps even over-reveal, are in fact an entity in our own right, much like people who apply for reality TV shows. We want to please everyone. We want validation from strangers. We feel safe speaking our minds and packaging our trauma into a palatable narrative for the public. The greatest irony of the Lived Experience movement is that most people living with active trauma would not let themselves be seen dead in the media. Most people with trauma don’t even know they have it. And even fewer attended the Edinburgh Fringe – a trauma in itself.
To the many thousands of artists who sang for dinner in Scotland’s glorious capital this year, giving audiences a glimpse behind the scenes of their private lives: believe me, now that you’ve told your story publicly, it’s no longer yours. And now that you’ve done that, your enthusiasm for everything else you have to say will suddenly wane. Once you’ve made your own life into a product, you’ll be tempted to keep draining that reservoir forever.
I think the public would be much more interested in the real story. The story in which we have confused the fleeting catharsis of feeling seen with the painful work of actual healing. The story in which we have become trapped in our own self-portraits and are no longer able to distinguish the truth of our lives from the story we have created. The story in which we naively believed that “our” truth was the same as the actual truth. The Fringe is a great experience by all means, but trust me, a pioneer of lived experience: the next appointment you need is not with The Stand – it is with a qualified therapist!
