It's talks daily, Amelie's you there's a saying that goes always leave a note.

Today's talk from the writer Sakinah Hoffler is an expansion on that idea. It's about the power of bearing witness by writing things down and she walks us through how to do it by the end of her 20/20 talk from Ted Xu of Cincinnati.

And she shows us how effective this can be by sharing a very personal story of her own. Have you ever seen something and you wish you could have said something, but you didn't? A second question I have is, has something ever happened to you? You never said anything about it, though you should have. I'm interested in this idea of action, of the difference between seeing something which is basically passively observing in the actual act of bearing witness bearing witness means bearing down something.

You have seen something you have heard something you have experienced. The most important part of bearing witness is writing it down. It's recording. Writing it down captures the memory. Writing it down, acknowledges its existence. One of the biggest examples we have in history of someone bearing witness is Anne Frank's diary. She simply wrote down what was happening to her, her family about her confinement. And in doing so, we have a very intimate record of this family during one of the worst periods of our world's history.

And I want to talk to you today about how to use creative writing to bear witness. And I'm going to walk you through an exercise which I want to do myself, that I actually do with a lot of my collegiate students desire a future engineers, technicians, plumbers, basically, they're not creative writers. They don't plan on becoming creative writers. But we use these exercises to kind of Ansel's things we can keeping silent. It's always a kind of a burden ourselves.

And it's three simple steps. So step one is to brainstorm or write it down. And what I have my students do is I give them a prompt. The prompt is the time when and I want them to fill in that problem with times they might have experienced something, heard something or seen something or seen something. And they could have intervened, but they didn't. And I had them write it down as quickly as possible. So I'll give you an example of some of the things I write down, the time when a few months after 9/11 and two boys did themselves to touch me.

And they did. The time when the time when my sister and I were walking in a city and a guy sat us and called us terrorists. The time way back when when I was a very odd middle school and girls a couple of years older than me would be a married off to men nearly double their age, the time when a friend put a gun on me. The time when I went to a going away luncheon for a co-worker and a big boss questioned my lineage for 45 minutes.

And there are times when I have seen something and I haven't intervened. For example, the time when I was on a train and I witnessed a father beating his toddler son and I didn't do anything. Or the many times I walked by someone who is homeless and in need, the vaccine for money. And I walked around him and I did not acknowledge their humanity. And the list goes on and on. But I want to think of times when something might have happened sexually, times when you've been keeping things repressed and times with our families because God bless our families, we love them.

But at the same time, we don't talk about things. So we may not talk about the family member who has been using drugs or abusing alcohol. We don't talk about the family member who might have severe mental illness. We'll say something like, oh, they've always been that way and we hope that I'm not talking about it and not and not acknowledging it. We can act like it doesn't exist that will somehow fix itself. So the goal is to get at least 10 things.

And once you have 10 things, you've actually done part one, which is bear witness, you have unsoundness, something that you have been keeping silence. And so after this, you're ready for step two, which is to narrow down and focus and what I suggest is going back to the Statton and picking three things that are like really like tugging at you. Three things you feel strongly doesn't have to be the most dramatic things, but it's things that are like like I have to write about this and I suggest you sit down at a table with a pen and paper.

That's my preferred method for recording. But you can also use a tablet, an iPad, a computer, something that lets you write it down. And I suggest taking 30 minutes of uninterrupted time and that you cut your phone off, put it on airplane mode, no email. And if you have a family, if you have children, give yourself 20 minutes, five minutes. The goal is just to give yourself time to write what you're going to write as you're going to focus on three things.

You're going to focus on the details. You're going to focus on the order of events. You're going to focus on how it made you feel. That is the most important part. So I am the guinea pig today, and so I'm going to walk you through how I do it. So I pick three things. The first thing I feel very, very strongly about is that time, a couple of months after 9/11 when I was two boys, Jack himself touched me.

I remember I was in a rural mall in North Carolina and I was walking, walking, minding my business. And I hope, like, feel people walking behind me, like, very, very clueless. I'm like, OK, that's kind of weird. Let me walk a little bit faster as a whole mall around me, what is happening? And they walk a little bit fast and I hear them going back and forth. You do it. No, you do it.

You do it now you do it. And then what about pushes me and I almost fall to the ground. So I'm kind of pop back up and some type of apology. And the weirdest thing is that they did not run away. They actually went and just stood right next to me. And I remember there was a guy with blond hair who had a bright red polo shirt and he was so not gonna give me my money. I did it, man.

And the guy with the brown hair, brown hair trimmer, had a choppy haircut and he gave him a five dollar bill. And I remember it was crumpled. And so I'm like, am I am I still standing here? This thing just happened. What just happened? And it was so weird to be dating someone is kind of dare and then also at the end to not exist to them. I remember, you know, kind of reminded me of a time when I was younger and someone dared me to touch something nasty or disgusting.

I felt like that nasty and disgusting thing. A second thing I feel very, very strongly about is the time a friend pulled a gun on me, I should say former friend. I remember it was a group of us outside and he had ran up and he had the stereotypical brown paper bag in his hand. And I knew what it was. And so I'm a very mouthy person. And I started going off. I was like, What are you doing with a gun?

You're not going to shoot anyone. You're a coward. You don't even know how to use it. And I kept going on and on and on. He got angrier and angrier and angrier and he pulled the gun out and put it in my face. I remember every one of us got very, very quiet. I remember the tightness of his face. I remember the barrel of a gun. And I felt like and I'm pretty sure everyone around me who got quiet felt like this is the moment I die.

And the third thing I feel very, very strongly about is this going away luncheon and his big boss, I remember I was running late and I'm always late is just a thing that happens with me. I'm just always late. I was running late and the whole table was filled except for the seat next to him. I didn't know him that well, has, you know, run the office. I didn't know why the seat was empty. I found out later on.

And so I sat down at the table. And before he even asked me my name, the first thing he said was, what's going on with all of this? I'm like, something on my face. What's happening? I don't know. And he actually was two hands this time. What's going on with all of this? And I realize he's talking about my hijab and in my head, I said, oh, not today, but he's a big boss, he's like my boss's boss's boss.

And so I put up for forty five minutes. I put up with him, asked me where I was from. My parents were from my grandparents. He asked me when I was in school at where I did my internship, said he asked me who interviewed me for that job and for forty five minutes I tried to be very, very, very, very, very polite and try to answer his questions. But I remember I was kind of making an eyeball helps to signals that the people around the table, like someone like say something, intervene and is a rectangular table.

So there are people on both sides of us and no one said anything, even people who might be in a position. Bosses Day, no one said anything. And I remember I felt so alone. I remember I felt like I didn't deserve to be in his space. And I remembered I wanted to quit. So these are my three things, and you'll have your list of three things, and once you have these three things, you have the details, you have order of events, you have how it made you feel, you're ready to actually use creative writing to bear witness.

And that takes us to step three, which is the pick one. And to tell your story, you don't have to write a memoir. You don't have to be a creative writer. I know sometimes storytelling can be daunting for some people, but we are human. We are natural storytellers. If someone asks how day is going, we have a beginning, a middle and an end. That is a narrative. Our memory exists and subsist through the art of storytelling.

And you just had to you just have to find a form that works for you. You can write a letter to your younger self. You can write a story to your younger self. You can write a story to your five year old child depending on a story. You go write a parody, a song, a song is a parody. You can write a play. You can write a nursery rhyme. Evraz I mean, these are theories that bhabhi black sheep have you and wool.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full is actually about an impoverished farmers in England being taxed heavily. You can write it in a form of a Wikipedia article. And if it's one of those situations where you saw something, you didn't intervene, perhaps write it from that person's perspective, you know, so if I go back subway and train home, I saw being beaten. What was it like to be in his shoes? What was it like to see all these people who watched it happen?

It did nothing. Why must I put myself in a position of someone who was homeless and just trying to figure out how they got there in the first place, perhaps to help me change some of my actions, perhaps to help me be more proactive about certain things and we'll tell your story. You're keeping it alive so you don't have to do any of that. You don't have to show anyone any of these steps. But even if you're telling it to yourself, you're seeing this thing happen, this rare thing to happen.

It's not in my head it actually happened. And by doing that, maybe you'll take a little bit of power back that has been taken away. So the last thing I want to do today is I'm going to tell you my story and the one I picked is about this big boss and I picked that one because I feel like I'm not the only one who has been in a position where someone has been above me and kind of, you know, talked down.

I feel like all of us might have been in positions. We felt like we could not say anything because this person has our livelihood, our paychecks in our hands, or at times we might have seen someone who, you know, has power talking down to someone and we should have or could have intervened. And so by telling a story, I'm taking back a little bit of power that was taken away from me. And I have changed names and it's been a decade.

So this would be OK. And it doesn't have a happy ending because it's just me writing down what happened that day. And so this is how I use creative writing to bear witness. At least is going away luncheon. I want to ask my boss's boss's boss, is he stupid or just plain dumb after he takes one look at my job and asks someone from in Southeast Asia? I tell him that it's New Jersey, actually. He asks. My parents are from my grandparents, my great grandparents and their parents and their parents parents.

As if searching for some other blood as a strategy for some reason why some black Muslim girl from New York was set up sitting next to him at this restaurant of tablecloths, illuminated menus. I want to say slavery, jerk. But I've got a car note and rent and insurances and insurances and insurances and credit cards and credit debts and the loan and a bad tooth and a pension for sushi. So I dropped the jerk. But keep the truth. Tell me, he says, why don't Sunnis and Shiites get along?

Tell me, he says, what's going on in Iraq? Tell me. He says, what's up with Saudi is Syria and Iran. Tell me, he says, why do Muslims like bombs? I want to shoven in one of his behind and confetti that pasty flesh and that tailored suit. Instead, I'm sipping my sweet, nice tea, looking around at the table, at the co-workers around me, none of whom not one looks back at me rather.

They do the most American things they can do. They praise the Lord. They stuffed their faces and pretend they don't hear him and pretend they don't see me.

Thank you, PR x.