Transformation, healing, and elevation of self and others

In her culminating research work at Goddard, titled “Self-Transformation and Collective Liberation: Stories of Learning and Longing,” Kerrie Lynn Mayer (MA EDU ‘13) asks, “How does one become a teller of stories, a speaker of truths, a confronter of fears and injustices?”
“This has been an important question for me through much of my life,” she says.  “I was always quiet, and always wished I wasn’t.  As I began research for this project, I thought a lot about the role story has played in my own life… while stories have played a fundamental role in how I relate to others, how I understand the world, and how I interpret experience, the stories with which I engage are rarely my own.”
Through her thesis project, Mayer articulates the importance of stories and the ways they connect us to time—past, present, and future.  She insists that life without storytelling is barely a life at all.
“In my own life,” she says, “I have relentlessly conducted searches for meaning….I think about my storylessness, and I realize I want to shift this.  I want to be a voice for change, a voice that names fear, a voice that speaks up.  It needn’t be the loudest voice in the room; my time as a teacher has taught me that a soft and subtle voice can often be the most purposeful and powerful.”
 

Note: an abridgment of this story appears in the article, “Is Activism Dead?” in the Clockworks Fall/Winter 2015 issue on page 10.