Straight to the point

With the Edinburgh Fringe well and truly over, countless performers will be counting up how many coveted four- or five-star reviews they garnered. Most, though, won’t have even landed one. I’ve been there and let me tell you, it’s hard not to take the rejection personally — especially if your show is all about you.

From cancer to coming-out, poverty to prison, and addiction to ADHD, this year’s Fringe had something to offer anyone of a voyeuristic bent. This massive rise in comedy, music and drama exploring personal adversities peaked this year with the wildly successful TV show Baby Reindeer — which was itself born in Edinburgh. Today, it seems, we can’t get enough of that “lived-experience” pie. 

But many years before this particular pie became a mainstay of the arts, I was one of several unwitting pioneers who road-tested this highly personal brand of storytelling in the most glamorous and prestigious domain of all: Scotland’s third sector. 

In 2001, grieving the sudden death of my alcoholic, drug-addicted mother and reeling from a family breakdown which had left me homeless and also on the path of alcoholism, I carried a lot of sorrow and anger which required an outlet. I hastily began up-cycling my trauma into my best attempt at art. A growing interest in hip-hop and rap quickly became an obsession; notepads scrawled with lyrics and ideas, baggy trousers, hoodies and headphones, and the obligatory confrontational attitude.  

Performing locally, under the name Loki, at open-mic nights and rap battles, I discharged my adolescent fury as autobiographical stories set to dusty boom-bap drumbeats. My reputation grew in the Glasgow music scene, and I eventually established myself as a community artist. Then when the third sector got a hold of me (and my “story”), I would take to the stage at conferences where professionals sat slack jawed and misty-eyed at my ability to not only tell my story, but to see it in a wider social and economic context: poverty.  

Back then there seemed an endless thirst for my accounts of adversity. Whether campaigning for Scottish Independence, calling out decision-makers for letting down the most vulnerable or, indeed, my musical output, everything seemed to land a little better if my opinions or observations were nested within my own “experience”. This eventually culminated in the publication of my 2017 debut book Poverty Safari — part memoir, part social commentary — in which I revealed, among other things, the traumatic experiences of my childhood.   

That book changed my life. Overcoming my challenging personal odds, I had been redeemed. People loved my story, my lived experience; they loved me.  

In the past decade, as this type of personal disclosure has become a mainstay of civic discourse — reaching beyond the arts and into every corner of culture — charities, philanthropists and, inevitably, politicians, appear to see the value in hearing from those with direct experience of many of the challenges they and their organisations have a stake in addressing.  

But those of us sharing our experiences need to be careful. Our stories are also a commodity. They move and inspire professionals. They grace the pages of policy documents and funding applications. They may even become best-selling memoirs, or, in the case of Richard Gadd, world-beating Netflix shows. As a result, we creators may feel we are making a difference but as our “story” attracts more attention, our lives themselves can become something of a performance.  

Those of us who trade in the currency of lived experiences are, like everyone else, unreliable narrators. We are always rewriting them, ensuring that we remain the hero. Kernels of truth are discarded and replaced with assumption, speculation or unconscious white lies.  

The truth of our lives could never be distilled into a tight three-act structure, let’s be honest. Like most people, we take small liberties with certain details, and massive leaps with others. As a form of entertainment, there’s no real harm in that, but where lived experience is deployed in civic discourse or politics, subtly shaping policy, it is highly problematic.

Much like a fickle Fringe audience, resident critics don’t believe our stories of overcoming the odds are as powerful or useful as our fans. In fact, many are irritated by the vulgar spectacle of watching people vomit their trauma up on social media or on stage. They regard lived experience as a Trojan horse that smuggles unscientific, politically motivated, narcissistic anecdotes and personal opinions into serious matters of science and politics. They balk at the notion those of us with lived experience of trauma or adversity are automatically granted victim status in public discourse, because our stories are not interrogated like other forms of evidence.  

Ultimately, sceptics worry that every anecdote is blindly accepted as a statement of fact, and that fear of being seen to “invalidate” the lived experiences of “victims” and “survivors” too often takes precedence over the need to ground discussion and debate firmly within the realm of truth. And they may have a point. 

Certain stories of trauma and recovery are regarded as more useful than others, depending on one’s political agenda. Take, for example, the drug-debate in Scotland, where advocates of competing forms of treatment (such as opiate replacement therapy or the 12-steps) tend only to promote and platform those who have succeeded, and rarely mention all the ones who relapsed or died trying to get well with that method. There’s a cynicism at play, not just among the storytellers who develop a keen sense of which plot-points to emphasise and which ones to edit out, but also the organisations and institutions platforming those stories, often as a means of furthering their own social or political objectives.   

And then we have the basic issue of safeguarding. What if, paradoxically, the psychological wounds we carry predispose us to enter this performative arena naively, oversharing the intimate details of our lives with little thought given to the fullness of the consequences of doing so. What if our trauma primes us for a subtle form of self-exploitation, where in pursuit of safety, security and validation, we tell our stories in ways that actually make us more vulnerable?

More from this author

Britain is addicted to poverty porn

By Darren McGarvey

Our desire to help others, and, yes, to gain affection and security and love, is often so overwhelming that we push aside any lingering doubt as to our fitness to engage in the risky public exhibitionism which may come to define us. And let’s not forget, once we’ve decanted our traumas into a rowdy and unforgiving public square, we cannot un-disclose them.  

But perhaps the biggest mistaken assumption on the part of those who feast rapaciously on our personal testimony, is that we who are willing to disclose so much are representative of a mythical, voiceless mass — that everyone affected by trauma or adversity shares our experience, our pain, our story.   

When the truth might be that those of us who do act on this impulse to disclose, and perhaps even overshare, may in truth be a distinct entity, much like people who apply to go on reality TV shows. We are people pleasers. We desire validation from strangers. We feel confident in speaking our minds and wrapping our trauma in a palatable narrative ribbon for public consumption. The greatest irony of the lived experience movement is that most people living with active trauma wouldn’t be caught dead in the media. Most people with trauma don’t even know they have it. And even fewer were at the Edinburgh Fringe — a trauma in an of itself. 

So, to the many thousands of acts who sang for their suppers in Scotland’s glorious capital this year, offering audiences a glimpse behind the curtain of their personal lives, take it from me: now that you’ve told your story publicly, it’s not yours anymore. And now that you’ve done telling it, there will be a sudden dip in enthusiasm for anything else you have to say. Once you’ve made your own life the product, you’ll be tempted to drill that reservoir forever more.  

I think the public would be far more interested in the real story. The story where we confused the fleeting catharsis of feeling seen, with the painful work of actually healing. The one where we’ve become trapped in our own self-portraits, no longer able to discern the truth of our lives, from the story we’ve created. The one where we naively believed “our” truth, was the same as the actual truth. The Fringe is a great experience for sure, but take it from me, a lived experience pioneer: the next booking you need is not at The Stand — it’s with a qualified therapist!