The Sweet Synergy of Donuts and Digital Narratives in Mental Health

In the labyrinth of life's challenges, it's the voices of triumph over adversity that often shine the brightest. That's why we're honoured to have Makaylah Rogers, a beacon of hope in the realm of mental health advocacy, joining us to share their journey. Makaylah, a non-binary social entrepreneur, opens up about their dual passions: Frankie D's Donuts and Scale Naturally, and how these endeavors are much more than businesses—they're platforms for advocating for diversity and building connections to combat loneliness. Their story is not just one of survival but of transformation, guided by the profound impact of digital storytelling and the heartfelt honesty of a personal letter that brought them back from the brink.

We navigate the sensitive waters of suicide, a subject that too often remains shrouded in silence. Through Makaylah's experiences, we underscore the critical need for professional help when managing thoughts of suicide and the reminder that there is hope and help. Our episode peels back the layers of personal narrative-sharing, spotlighting the numerous paths it can take and the varied experiences of those who walk them.

For everyone out there who needs to hear it, we extend a heartfelt message through a special audio clip, "Please don't go. You matter. I want you to stay." This is more than an episode; it's an invitation to a community that believes in the power of each person's story.

Other Links Mentioned

• Makaylah’s Digital Story ‘Please Stay’ 
• Makaylah’s Mental Health Resources
• Yvonne’s Digital Story ‘Under the Rainbow’ 

About Our Guest

Makaylah Rogers is a passionate advocate, speaker, and facilitator dedicated to mental health awareness, fostering empathy-driven action, and creating a culture of  understanding. As a queer, non-binary individual, Makaylah draws from their personal experiences and journey. Their own healing path, supported by several years of therapy, fuels their determination to amplify the voices of those who feel unheard.

Makaylah firmly believes in the power of representation and the transformative impact of the message, "you're not alone." Their advocacy work spans vital topics such as anxiety & depression, mental illness, neurodiversity, LGBTQ+ education, suicide prevention, sexual violence and more. By breaking stigma and fostering open conversations, Makaylah envisions a world where everyone feels a sense of belonging and safety.

Website: makaylahrogers.com
Instagram: @inthemesswithmak 

About Leading Through Stories
Everyone has a story to tell—and what we do with that story can create lasting impact. Every episode, Leading Through Stories, helps unravel the how and why of digital storytelling with host Kristy Wolfe.

Life is made up of meaningful moments—which ones do you want to share?

This podcast is presented by Common Language DST, digital storytelling facilitation training for health and wellness changemakers.

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Transcript

Makaylah Rogers: 0:00

Please don't go.

Mike Lang: 0:03

You matter.

Makaylah Rogers: 0:04

I want you to stay.

Mike Lang: 0:07

Please don't go, you matter.

Kristy Wolfe: 0:14

Please don't go.

Makaylah Rogers: 0:17

You matter. I want you to stay.

Kristy Wolfe: 0:25

Welcome to Leading Through Stories, a podcast that explores the how and why of digital storytelling. My name is Kristy Wolfe and each episode I connect with storytellers or common language digital storytelling facilitators to learn more about the health and wellness stories they are creating and sharing. Life is made up of meaningful moments. Which ones do you want to share On Leading Through Stories with me today is Makaylah Rogers. Now, Makaylah is a friend of mine from the Bow Valley who approached me about doing their own digital story. Makaylah, will you introduce us to you and your work?

Makaylah Rogers: 1:00

Yeah, of course. So, yeah, my name is Makaylah, my pronouns are they them. I'm a queer, non-binary social entrepreneur and mental health advocate in the Bow Valley. Two social impact businesses. One is Scale Naturally, we do consulting focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging in the workplace, and we work with teams and help make sure that every voice is heard and there's mental well-being and belonging in the workplace. And our other social impact business is called Frankie D's Donuts, where we are on a mission to reduce loneliness, one donut at a time.

Makaylah Rogers: 1:31

And I created this digital story and worked with you on this because I'm also a mental health advocate and do keynote speaking around suicide prevention and mental health and mental well-being and it felt really important to tell my story. Tell people a little bit more about your digital story. Yeah, so I wanted to be able to share a story around my struggles with suicidal ideation and how I have coped with that, and a letter that I actually wrote for myself that ended up saving my life over and over again. I ended up writing an article a few years ago, posting it under a pseudonym, about this letter that I wrote to save myself and ended up getting translated into other languages and I got messages from people saying how it enabled them. It gave them a voice or words for an experience that they didn't have, and they were able to almost use my letter to help themselves, and so I wanted to tell that story, to not only have more conversations around suicide and suicide prevention and for me personally, my story is very linked to childhood abuse and mental illness and how that related to the suicidal ideation and my struggles with mental illness.

Makaylah Rogers: 2:42

People that struggle with suicide are not all struggling with mental illness. They're not mutually exclusive. I remember meeting with you, Kristy, and sitting down and going over all the different moments that I had around suicidal ideation and suicide attempts and my struggle with suicide and mental illness, and we really came to this point about wanting to share a story not only that reduce stigma, where we have the hard conversation about what it's actually like to be struggling with these thoughts inside your head but also to be able to share some hope and a tool that I have found and used that has helped me on my journey.

Kristy Wolfe: 3:22

And I would say a few of the things in my own lived experience is how we ended up starting to talk about this. So my dad died by suicide in 2015,. But there was also a digital story that Yvonne Law, the town of Banff, created with the Safe Talk program, and so she had created a story that they actually share in schools and it's a bit about resources, but it's also about her own lived experience with her brother and his death by suicide, and so a couple of different things brought us together over this particular topic as well, and I mean Makaylah and I have spoken at the Rural Mental Health Network with Canadian Mental Health Association, so these are conversations that we're already having. I wouldn't recommend to somebody if they are not talking about suicidal ideation.

Kristy Wolfe: 4:06

Mental health, suicide that's not a story that you would necessarily jump in with. This is in the wheelhouse of the things that Mikayla and I both share publicly. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like creating that? Because it wasn't easy for us to work on that together and we were co-creating, which means we worked together four times. We ended up doing it for about two hours each time to create Mikayla's story.

Makaylah Rogers: 4:29

Yeah, I think that I jumped into doing this story not only because this is what I do keynote speaking about, and I'm really passionate about reducing stigma and having conversations around mental illness and suicide prevention, but I've also been in therapy for eight years dealing with the trauma that I went through, my suicidal ideation, working on tools and coping mechanisms. So I wouldn't have done this eight years ago or any time before now, because mentally I was not ready to be telling this story and going back to these moments of struggle and I do think that that's an important part of my journey in telling this story is the therapy and the support that I have received personally to be able to get me to the point that I can tell this story. And then the process itself was still not easy. I remember starting this story and then, in March 2023, I went through another episode of a really deep depression and struggling with suicidal ideation again, and I had medication that was being adjusted. I had a psychiatrist's appointment, therapy appointments, and we put this story on hold because it was more important to focus on my own recovery at that point than telling the story.

Makaylah Rogers: 5:39

And then, I think it was about six months later, we came back to this and started working on it again when I was in a much better place. My medication was worked out, my anxiety and depression was much lower, my PTSD was much lower and I was coping better. So I think that it's only because of the support that I have in my life from professionals that allowed me to be in a space where I can share about this. I'm working through the struggles that maybe, or the triggers that come up in telling this story with professionals that are able to help me.

Kristy Wolfe: 6:11

Something that I want to mention is common language. Digital storytellers and facilitators have kind of a process that we use when we're in taking storytellers assessing whether they're telling their own story, but also we're assessing whether that person is in the midst of the trauma about the story that they want to craft. Now, sometimes you can't get away from it, and in Makaylah's case, this was specifically the story that they wanted to tell. That's not always true. We have quite a few storytellers that end up being volunteers for a project, and so we just really want to do due diligence to make sure that people have the capacity to work on the story at the time, the resources, but also that their headspace is in the right place, because a big part of our practice is really making sure that storyteller well-being is front of mind at all times. So taking a break from a story is sometimes what needs to happen, and knowing the goals of a project and how that's going to come around is an important part of that. So I'm glad you brought that up, but I also then wanted to jump into.

Kristy Wolfe: 7:08

We did get the story done. We took a little break, we finished the story and your goal was to share it at one of the screenings. You've been to some of the screenings in the Bo Valley that I have put on at Arts Place, and that's just a way to celebrate storytellers. I love bringing people together that have told a story and having them share it in front of friends, family, and so you came to the May digital story screening. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like sharing your story at that?

Makaylah Rogers: 7:34

screening.

Makaylah Rogers: 7:35

Whenever talking about suicide publicly, you often see a lot of trigger warnings, and so when we were planning this storytelling and screening it and sharing it, we wanted to address that.

Makaylah Rogers: 7:47

We wanted to give people a caution of the content that was going to be shared so that they could consent to whether they wanted to watch that or not, and at the same time, we didn't want this idea of trigger warnings to stop us from talking about suicide and talking about depression and mental illness, and so we did do a lot of extra work going into the screening.

Makaylah Rogers: 8:09

We made sure that people that were coming to the screening knew about the content that was going to be shared. We ensured that my story was at the end so people that were coming to watch the other two stories could enjoy those stories and watch them and partake in the screening and then have an option to be able to leave the screening before my story was shared, and so it was important to us. Consent is very important to me in every area, but especially when it comes to having conversations about suicide, it can be really triggering and really hard for some people who are extra vulnerable in that particular moment, and so I believe in giving people the option to leave to take care of themselves and the idea of this content being potentially triggering also not stopping us from having conversations about suicide, because I believe it is incredibly important to end the stigma around mental illness and suicide and to talk about the different ways that suicide impacts our life.

Kristy Wolfe: 9:05

And so I'm going to read the trigger warning and we even struggle with. Is trigger warning the right way to say it? Is it an activation warning? How does this fit in?

Kristy Wolfe: 9:13

But one of the things again coming back to common language we think about when we're getting ready to share stories. We're thinking about not just how we're caring for storytellers while creating the stories, but we're also thinking about the audience risk level. So, depending on the content of the story, it's going to determine what we suggest for distribution methods, so how the story is shared, but also facilitation methods. So some of the things that we discussed with Makilah was, if we're going to share the story, there should be some kind of warning at the beginning. So I'm just going to read that.

Kristy Wolfe: 9:46

It says this video shares my personal experiences of suicidal ideation. It doesn't represent all experience of suicide and mental illness. There is hope and help Watch until the end for suicide prevention and intervention resources. So when their story starts you see the title and then that's the very next screen and there's enough time to read the whole thing. So again, it's just one more step in the process of caring for our audience as well, to make sure that this is something that they can access at that time no-transcript A digital story screening, and I will shout this from the rooftops Anytime you watch a digital story, whether it's in a screening, whether it's part of a presentation, whether it's in a keynote please stop and have a conversation, whether that's a large group conversation or just turning to the person next to you.

Kristy Wolfe: 10:35

It is incredibly important to have people discuss what is coming up for them in the story. You could absolutely put other questions in and make it a bit more guided and facilitated, but even just the question what resonated with you in the story gives people an opportunity to talk. Our conversation at Arts Place in May was phenomenal.

Makaylah Rogers: 10:56

I definitely have gone to your screenings before and the other two stories went first, and often you ask the audience what resonated for you and people will share what resonated for them, but mostly they will ask questions to the storyteller about their particular journey or story. And then it came to my screening and you said what resonated for you. I honestly thought there would be more questions about my particular journey and less about me becoming an expert on suicide prevention. But I think that because we both have such lived experience in this from different angles you being someone who has lost someone to suicide, me being someone who has struggled with suicide attempts, episodes, ideation we were able to handle that. And we had questions like well, what do I say to this person who's struggling in my life right now? How do I open that conversation? What kind of resources? What if the person doesn't want to call for help? Questions even like who do you think is at fault when someone dies by suicide? Is it the community, is it the individual? And those were really challenging questions to answer and very confronting. And I think the biggest thing that you and I kept coming back to in every single answer was that suicide is not simple. It's very different for every single person and it's not about who is at fault.

Makaylah Rogers: 12:08

I think the biggest thing I've learned in my journey with struggling with suicide is that it's not up to any one person to save my life. It wasn't up to my wife to save my life. In the story you'll see her handing me a wet cloth to put on my face and her trying to help me with these suicidal thoughts that I was having. It's not her putting a cloth on my head or her not putting a cloth on my head, her being there or not being there in those moments that saved me from suicide or have me die by suicide. It's not that simple, and so I think we just kept referencing the resources and that you need professional help. We need to get people professional help and reduce the stigma and have more conversations about this so that it's more normal for people to call the suicide helpline. And I share that in my resources and I called all my resources and I speak to them all and I vet them to understand what is the process. When are you going to call 911? What kind of information are you going to get from a person so that I can relay that information to people and try and reduce the barrier and the reasons as to why people don't access professional help.

Makaylah Rogers: 13:13

It's not up to a friend or a loved one to try and save someone from suicide. A family member or friend can sit by you, like my wife sat by me, and I don't share this. In the story there were many times she could not be there because she had her own triggers and trauma. She couldn't handle being there in the room. It was too much for her. It was okay for her to leave. She wasn't there handing me a cloth every single time, and Whether she was there or not, that's not what saved my life. It was up to me and my the professional help that I had my therapist, that I talked to the psychiatrist. I talked to my doctor. I talked to suicide helplines. Those are the things that helped me be here today.

Kristy Wolfe: 13:54

We've talked about this already and you are open to having the link to the video shared publicly, so I will include that in the show notes for this episode. I'm also going to include the link to your resource page where you have, step by step, gone through all of these different resources in Canada talking about who they support, how they're trained, what kind of questions you can ask to get maybe, a better fit of a person to actually talk to. So there's a ton of information. I'll put that in the show notes as well. I also wanted to mention that Mikaela talks about this publicly. They are a keynote speaker.

Kristy Wolfe: 14:30

Your average storyteller is not going to need to do this level of debrief after a conversation. Sometimes at a screening, people will just sit in the audience and they'll just be there. They're happy to answer questions. Sometimes people like to come up and answer questions from, like, the podium. Sometimes people don't want to be involved at all. They don't want to intro their story. They just want to be there for the screening. So just know that if you are screening a digital story, it doesn't need to be this level of what we're talking about. This is definitely Mikaela's profession as well. So, mikaela, you shared your story at the the arts place screening, but I'm wondering is there other ways that you would like to share that story?

Makaylah Rogers: 15:05

Absolutely.

Makaylah Rogers: 15:05

I want to do more keynotes at conferences where we're talking about mental illness, mental health, suicide prevention. My story in particular again around suicide is linked to my childhood trauma and to mental illness, depression, anxiety, complex PTSD that I struggle with, and so I want to be able to talk more about that to help reduce the stigma and to share more of the resources that I've learned that have helped me. Again, it's not simple, it's not like Just the letter that I wrote to myself is what saves me when I have these suicidal thoughts. It's a mixture of things. I'm now on really great medication, I have a great professional team and it's taken me eight years to get here now. I've struggled with Depression and suicidal ideation for a very long time. The first time I had Imagined suicide I was very, very young and it was very scary. But when I say I've been handling this for eight years, that's when I seek professional help and went into therapy. So I want to share more about this letter that I wrote, but also this pack that I created for myself, that I kind of called my Suicide pack, which is I've now been told to call it something else, and I guess, like people in the In the profession of suicide prevention call it a hope chest, and I didn't know that I had essentially created this hope chest on my own, without knowing that a hope chest was what it was, and so what I did is I Worked with my therapist on what are the different thoughts that come up when I'm struggling with suicide, what are the different triggers that kind of trigger, those thought responses, and then how do we counter them.

Makaylah Rogers: 16:40

So I have a letter to myself telling myself to stay. I have pictures of myself as a, as a child and as a teenager, because that's who I'm really saving. Um, I have letters about, uh, like counter responses to the common thoughts that are in my head, and so I've got a number of things. I have things that I want to experience before I die. I have A list of things that I'm proud of.

Makaylah Rogers: 17:05

There's a number of things in this hope chest of mine that, whenever I'm struggling with a really bad period of depression or Suicidal thoughts or ideation comes up, my first thing is to go and get this pack, because I've already I've taken a preventative measure to create this, knowing that it's gonna happen again. It also helps my wife. It helps family and friends know that. It takes the pressure off them to think that they have to say or do the right thing, because all they have to do is get that Pack for me, and I've already created everything that I need inside there, including comforting things, a list of other things to do instead of self-harm.

Makaylah Rogers: 17:44

I've really thought through everything that I've struggled with for years and taken a preventative approach and put it all in there. So I want to talk about that and share that more, and there's even included in there. There's letters from friends and loved ones that are inside that pack so that my wife doesn't feel like in that moment I'm struggling. She has to say the right thing, because that's a lot of pressure. Instead, in a period of time where she was calm and I was calm and things are good, she was able to sit down and write a letter to me, to the version of me that struggles in that moment, so that I can read that and hear her words of love and that I'm not a burden and all the things that I need to hear, but she's not having to say that to me in that high pressure situation, because that is a lot to put on a person.

Makaylah Rogers: 18:30

So we have all of these things that are preventative. She just has to get me that pack, and I want to share more about my journey and to help reduce the stigma and also for a lot of people that are struggling with complex PTSD and trauma, because these are things that people often do not talk about in society. You want to kind of like put your head in the sand and imagine that children don't get abused, and unfortunately that's not true. Just because you don't want to think about it doesn't mean that it's not happening, and so we need to have more conversations, not only about childhood trauma, abuse, mental illness and suicide prevention. We need to be able to have more conversations about this.

Kristy Wolfe: 19:08

Well, and it sounds to me like this isn't just a conversation for a mental health conference. This is a conversation that could be embedded in any conference, and the conferences that I often seem to end up at are cardiology related or children's health care related, and there's physicians, there's nurses, there's social workers, and I think that that conversation needs to come to many different places, and it's not an easy kind of talk, but I think it's so worth it, so I will also put your contact information in the episode show notes so that if people would like to reach out to you and find out more, that they have access to do that. At the end of your video you added something in, and it just I thought of it because you were talking about the hope chest idea, and so can you explain a little bit about the end of your video?

Makaylah Rogers: 19:50

The whole concept of the video is this idea that there's this voice in my head telling me to go, and at the end of the video I talk about how we need to increase the volume on the voices that are telling us to stay, not only inside our own head, but from other people, from our family and friends and community.

Makaylah Rogers: 20:04

The video ends with three phrases that we want to increase the volume on Please don't go, you matter, I want you to stay, and how we did it is I went and asked a diverse range of people to record on video them saying those three phrases, and then we put them all together and increased the volume in the video, and I really love it, and I've been actually asked since the screening and people have seen the video to turn that audio at the end into an audio loop and to get more voices and to have it as a video that people can access for free, so that if they don't have people in their life telling them to stay they don't have a wife that loves them like I do, which I'm very lucky to have that they can still access other voices telling them to stay, and so that's something that I'm working on right now to have on my website and on my social media so that people can listen to this over and over and over again.

Kristy Wolfe: 20:59

Are you comfortable if I take a clip of that audio and put it right at the end of this podcast? I'd love that. I would love that too. If you were going to create a new digital story today, what would your meaningful moment be?

Makaylah Rogers: 21:10

I think. For me, I want to hear other people's meaningful moments around mental illness and suicide prevention. I think there are so many voices and so many lived experiences when it comes to suicide those that have lost people to suicide, those that struggle with suicide themselves and what I would love to see is more conversations like the one that we had with my screening, but with more range of voices. I would love to see digital stories in other languages. I would love to see a diverse range of people sharing their story that are BIPOC, that are Indigenous, that are queer, that are neurodivergent, whether that be they have ADHD or they're autistic people with disabilities. I think that suicide and mental illness is something that does not discriminate and it affects all of us. My story will not resonate with every single person, and so there are still more people out there that feel alone. What I would love to see is that you and I do a workshop together where we have people volunteer to share their story of struggling with mental illness or suicide, from whatever perspective that means for them, and we do a workshop where we come out with six to eight more stories and then I facilitate conversations in the community that I call Donuts and Conversations. So, without Donut Business, we create Donuts for Change. We want them to be a conduit for conversation. It brings people into the room. It brings their walls down. We believe in having hard conversations while having a sweet treat beside you to help with that hard conversation.

Makaylah Rogers: 22:45

So what I would love is to get a grant and funding that we can have more stories be told. We can do a screening. That is a Donuts and Conversation version, where I would facilitate a conversation about these stories. We would have a therapist and counselor in the room. We would have resources. I've got a bunch of local nonprofit organizations that have programs and services to help people that are struggling with mental health and suicide that want to attend and share about how people can get help. So that would be. My dream is not to tell more of my own stories, but to help facilitate conversations around this and have my story be a catalyst.

Kristy Wolfe: 23:18

That really mirrors what I want to do as well. I have done a couple of my own digital stories, but it's how I got into Common Language Digital Storytelling. It's why I kept going and ended up doing workshops instead of just co-creation. So co-creation is one-on-one with people, but workshops for digital storytelling is where you get to bring people together, and not only are you going through this process of creating a digital story, but there's also all of the conversation that happens when you are learning about it, when you are doing the story circle with your first draft, when you are working on the images, and that conversation in the back and forth between people in the workshop is also a huge part of the therapeutic intent of digital storytelling, and so it's definitely a dream that I have too.

Kristy Wolfe: 23:59

So, friends you heard it here first, we'll make it happen. I know we will, and sometimes it's just putting those ideas out there, and so when I think about speaking, I have my own digital stories that I can share to show as examples, because I always think it's important that if I'm going to ask you to be vulnerable, I need to also do that. I can't just stand up there and expect other people to do that. So I generally share my own stories, so people have an idea of where I'm coming from as well. Not that they all have to be super vulnerable, but often they end up that way. Makaylah, thank you for coming on Leading Through Stories with me Absolutely.

Makaylah Rogers: 24:36

Thank you for the work that you do.

Kristy Wolfe: 24:38

As today's conversation with Makaylah was a lot about community and conversation, I thought this would be a great time to ask Mike Lang to tell us a bit about common language collective. So our group of facilitators who have all done the training through common language support each other. And here's Mike to tell us a bit more.

Mike Lang: 24:56

When I was first thinking about creating common language, I sat down and created a list of what I would have wanted when I started out with digital storytelling, and it was number one a practical training that gave me all the tools to facilitate meaningful digital storytelling experiences but also could help me make a living doing it.

Mike Lang: 25:14

Number two it was a community of people to bounce ideas off and offer support. And number three was continuing education courses that could continue to help me grow my skills, and that's exactly what common language provides people. It's. The common language collective is an amazing group of trained facilitators, and I love my monthly connections with everyone as I learn about what each other is up to and we sort of ask questions, have discussions about our work, and many of the facilitators are working on projects together now, which is super cool. And then the continuing education stuff is really important too. You know, as it is with all professions right, it's important to continue to hone your skills and learn new ideas and practices that can improve the work that you do. So you know we never want any facilitator to be stagnant as a professional. And be part of that collective really ensures that we keep learning and growing our skills as a community.

Kristy Wolfe: 26:08

Everyone has a story to tell. We would love to hear from you. We always include a link to the stories we're talking about in the episode show notes. Please let us know what resonated for you in today's episode. Your comments will be passed on to the storyteller. You can email us at LTS podcast 2023@ gmail. com, or find us on Instagram at leading through stories. Leading through stories is sponsored by common language digital storytelling Facilitator training for health and wellness change makers. Don't miss the next episode. Subscribe to Leading Through Stories on your favorite podcast platform.

Makaylah Rogers: 26:46

Please don't go.

Kristy Wolfe: 26:49

You matter.

Makaylah Rogers: 26:52

I want you to stay. Please don't go.