I took my first creative writing class while I was stationed at Fort Belvoir, an Army installation in Virginia. I had just come home, partially blind, from a deployment to Afghanistan. I had been shuffled around the world from one medical center to another, until I was finally diagnosed with multiple sclerosis — just as my little sister and my grandmother passed away.
I was trying to process an avalanche of grief — changes to my vision, losing my family and fear over my diagnosis — when I was invited to take an art class with a little-known organization called Community Building Art Works (CBAW) that offered free creative classes to service members and veterans.
Every week that class met, I drew stick figures. That was all I could bring myself to do. But the act of being creative became a crucial outlet for me, and I joined a women’s writing group through the same organization. That group eventually became a program called More Than One Story, a creative writing program exclusively for women and non-binary military.
More Than One Story was a safe haven for me. I was struggling with a loss of community after being medically retired from the Army (even though I still felt capable, having an autoimmune disease makes you ineligible to serve). But in that group, I felt like I belonged somewhere again.
As I learned how to express myself and tell my story, I started living the life I had in front of me, not the one behind me. I started new medications and physical therapy. I finished college and earned my master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. I learned that while I couldn’t do the job I had been doing before my diagnosis, I could be an asset to others in a different way. Eventually, after years as a participant, I was invited to be a part of the program staff.
Multiple studies have found that creative writing is an effective intervention for people struggling with the symptoms of PTSD and suicidal behaviors. More Than One Story is now in its third year as a recipient of a SSG Parker Gordon Fox Suicide Prevention Grant, through the Department of Veterans Affairs. The grants fund community-based organizations with innovative ideas for preventing veteran suicide.
Creative outlets, such as writing and storytelling, are vital for minority military communities. Women veterans experience disproportionately high rates of PTSD (13% compared to 6% of men veterans). The suicide rate for female veterans has nearly doubled in the last wo decades, increasing much faster than the rate of suicide among male veterans. Today, women veterans are also twice as likely to commit suicide than civilian women.
Still, military women are less likely than their male peers to self-identify as veterans or use the VA services they’ve earned. As Andrea N. Goldstein, a veteran and founding contributor to Task & Purpose, once wrote, “Service women are acutely aware of their visibility as a minority while in uniform and their invisibility as veterans.”
There’s less information about non-binary veterans and military members, but research suggests that gender-diverse individuals are twice as likely to serve in the military, but are also much more likely to experience anxiety, depression and PTSD.
In our virtual groups, I’ll see participants who’ve had their cameras off for weeks one day one day turn them on and start to share their stories. These stories are painful and hard and even tragic, and it’s usually their first time saying them out loud. But the rest of us can tell they’ve been carrying those stories for a long time. And finally they can put them down.
Learning how to tell my own story saved my life. It might just be the creative approach the veteran community needs to save more.
Alexis Laryea, of Woodbridge, is a U.S. Army veteran who serves as the program manager of More Than One Story with Community Building Art Works (CBAW). She is a licensed resident in counseling, a nationally certified counselor (NCC) and an Old Dominion University graduate.