STMS Community Member Invited to Share Pandemic Journey

Melony Hill
Jun 10, 2022
2 min read

What we love about our global community is that it's full of such a variety of survivors from all walks of life. Each has a special place in not only the world, but our community. We were excited to hear from one of our long-time community members last year, asking if we'd share our pandemic journey and offering the opportunity for others in our community to share theirs as well.

Before offering the opportunity community wide, Coach Mel was interviewed herself. You can listen to her oral history or read the transcript at Melony Hill Oral History, 2021/07/05 · Oral Histories · Covid-19 Archive

Coach Mel had the community member who interviewed them write up a message for others who want to share their pandemic journey. It can be found below:

Hello fellow survivors,

Let me just start by reminding each and everyone of you that your very existence is an amazing precious gift.

I'm conducting interviews with people about their experiences of the pandemic, and I would just love to uplift the voices of members of this community that have been so helpful to me in my own trauma recovery.

Here are a few details about the interviews:

- All my questions are open ended to ensure that you have a chance to tell historians of the future what has been most important to you. You never have to answer a question you don't like, and you're warmly invited to redirect the conversation.

- Interviews can be audio-only or audio-video, at your preference.

- The length of the interviews are highly dependent on how much of a "talker" the interviewee is. I've had interviews be as quick as 20 minutes and as long as 3 hours. If you have a time crunch I'm always happy to watch the clock, your time is valuable.

- Interviews are made publicly accessible on this archive: https://covid-19archive.org/s/archive/page/whatwedo; this archive is co-managed by Arizona State University and Indiana-Purdue.

A little about me: I'm a Welfare to Harvard story, my life has been real weird. I've been attending Stronger than My Struggles workshops since September 2020 when after 20+ of PTSD my world broke in half and I thought I'd never recover. Melony's been helping to nurture my soul ever since.

If you are even a little interested in finding out more I would be so happy if you reached out to me by email at kheintzman@gmail.com. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about me, the interview, or the archiving project in general.

Whether or not you're able to participate at this moment. Please, know I believe that your voices matter and I'm so proud to be in this community with you all. Thank you for all the work you are doing to heal and thrive. I appreciate you.