Why another book and why now?
Everyone has a story to tell. Whether or not we know it or ever feel able to properly articulate it, all of our lives are stories, and stories worth telling, at that. And, yet, it has been my experience – and, this experience shouldn’t necessarily be taken as universal – that the stories we tell about our lives and the way that we understand our lives are not stagnant concepts. Though the details of the story – the times, the places, the characters – remain the same, how we situate ourselves within these structures, and the phenomenological meaning that we derive from them, can change. At one point in our lives, how we understand ourselves and our places in the world can look vastly different at one point than how those very same ideas looked or will look at another point.
The details of my life, or the practicalities that have given my life structure, have been recounted in article after article, interview after interview. The “story” of my life, or in other words the events that have given my life some structure, are, essentially, immutable. But, they are not necessarily who I am. The life I lead right now is the culmination of years – decades, in fact – of putting meaning and understanding on this structure; of putting an evolution of flesh on to the framework that the events in my life have created. Let me explain.
Almost 20 years ago, my family and I wrote our book, Miracles Happen: One Mother, One Daughter, One Journey, which chronicled the events that took place in our lives starting on the pivotal day of my accident – September 4, 1990 – and progressing through my graduation from Harvard nearly 10 years later. Miracles Happen was more than simply an autobiographical account of chronological events, though there were, even over 20 years ago, many more isolated life events that my family had experienced than could fill several books. Miracles Happen was an articulation of the struggles, understandings, and relationships that were woven into our lives as we learned to live with quadriplegia as a central characteristic of them. Miracles Happen is written in a narrative, informal, almost conversational style, driven by vignettes to move the story forward. It is a veritable series of snapshots of our lives at different places and times, and, more importantly, an important snapshot of my understanding of my identity 20 years ago. It is truth in all the ways I understand truth, yet there is a layered aspect of truth that grows with new revelations and new frameworks from which to see it.
When I wrote Miracles Happen, which became the basis of the movie, The Brooke Ellison Story, I was an entirely different person than I am today, and the difference between who I was then and who I am now is not simply a function of time or age. In fact, the duration of these past 20+ years is perhaps the least significant component of my evolution as a person from then until now.
20 years ago, I could not have written LOOK BOTH WAYS. 20 years ago, even though I had lived 10 years with quadriplegia, I still didn’t know what it meant to be disabled or how to understand myself as a woman with a disability. It took time. It took time for me to understand how disability becomes incorporated into someone’s identity and that this frames how you not only engage with the world but also how you see the world. Until a shift in my thinking took place – until I could see myself as a woman with a disability who is stronger, braver, more creative, more compassionate, and more badass as a result of it – there was no way that I could properly articulate what the true story of my life has been. That was a process. That was a process that took time, self-reflection, and an abject rejection of all social messaging that taught me to internalize ideas that were fundamentally flawed. I had to deconstruct and reconstruct my understanding of myself before I felt empowered enough to properly articulate my place in the world and how to change it. I regret the length of time it took, but I am grateful for the outcome it produced.
I didn’t need to tell another story about the events of my life but I needed to write LOOK BOTH WAYS. The two are not necessarily synonymous. LOOK BOTH WAYS is an account of events in my life, for sure, but these only provide the framework upon which so many valuable, deep understandings about myself and about life have been developed. Those lessons and understandings are what make LOOK BOTH WAYS particularly significant to me because, in honesty, they did not come about easily and were the products of years of tears and months of hard introspection. And I am a better person for all of them. That doesn’t make a different story to tell, it makes a deeper, richer, and more complete story to tell.