"What is the most important thing in life?" We interview each other and get ready to ask this question to other self-advocates. It sounds simple. But sitting across from someone you've come to trust and answering honestly — on camera, on the record, in your own words — takes courage. This session was practice for something larger, and it was also something in itself.
The three words at the centre of the project
The name Memory Witness and Hope was chosen carefully. Each word carries a distinct meaning, and together they describe a kind of ethical commitment about how this project would approach the stories it was gathering.
Memory is about holding what happened. Not softening it, not translating it into something more comfortable for people who weren't there. The institutions were real. What occurred inside them was real. Memory insists on that reality in the face of a tendency to move past difficult history too quickly.
Witness is about testimony — being seen and heard. For people who spent years in a system designed to make them invisible, to classify and contain rather than to listen, the act of bearing witness carries particular weight. To witness someone's story is to confirm that it happened, that it matters, that they matter.
Hope is not optimism. It is the belief that things can be different, held alongside an honest account of how they have been. Hope in this project is forward-facing without being naive — it acknowledges the past clearly and asks what a better future would require.
Interviewing each other
In this session, participants practised interview skills with each other. One person held the camera. Another sat in front of it and answered questions. Then they switched. It was an exercise in both roles: asking clearly, listening well, and answering in your own voice without hedging or deferring to what you think the interviewer wants to hear.
The question — what is the most important thing in life? — brought answers that varied and overlapped. Participants spoke about:
- Community: the people around you, knowing your neighbours, not being alone
- Freedom: being able to come and go, make your own choices, live in your own place
- Friendship: specific relationships built over time, people who know you and stay
- Respect: being treated as a full person, having your views heard and taken seriously
- Health: physical wellbeing, access to support when needed, feeling safe in your body
None of these answers are surprising in isolation. What is striking is how directly they respond to what institutional life denied. The list reads as both an answer and a critique — a description of what matters most because it was taken away.
Preparing to go wider
This practice session laid groundwork for the pop-up event that would happen in January 2020, when the team would take the same question out into the broader community of Ottawa self-advocates. Before asking strangers, the group needed to feel comfortable with the camera and with each other, to know what a good interview question feels like from both sides, and to have thought through their own answers first.
That preparation was itself meaningful. It asked each participant to articulate what they valued — a reflection that is useful regardless of the project. Knowing what matters most to you is part of knowing who you are. For people who were told for years that others would make those determinations on their behalf, the question was more than a warm-up exercise.