The Spark of The Story Project
Show Notes
In this solo episode, Jessica Altchiler dives into her personal journey and the evolution of The Story Project podcast. She reflects on her experiences, sharing anecdotes from her college years that shaped her perspective and fueled her passion for storytelling. Jessica recounts a pivotal moment in her life — her experience with sexual assault — and candidly discusses the profound impact it had on her. She goes on to share how the Me Too Movement influenced her and highlights the power of collective voices in fostering awareness and driving change.
Transcript
Jessica
Okay, so hello and welcome to The Story Project. I am your host, Jessica Altchiler, and I'm here by myself today with a little solo episode that I have been wanting to record for a few weeks now, if not months, and I haven't. And so here I am two days before its release, finally getting to it because there…is a lot I want to share about my own story and my own life and my own experiences and about why I started this podcast in the first place. And I'll start off by saying there's an added pressure of it that I've been putting it on myself because on Sunday I turned 30 and there as much as I like to believe I'm the kind of person who can talk myself out of feeling that kind of pressure, like you're turning a certain age and there's all this meaning surrounding it. I have not been handling it as well as I would have liked. So when I turned 29, I was just so excited. I was like, I have one year to check all these things off of my list, things I wanted to do before I was 30.
And for me, they weren't the classic things that one might assume in society. They were more creative things and projects I wanted to do for myself. And what I'm reminded of is that a main project I wanted to do before 30 was this, the story project. And we are rocking it, rolling it, and having an absolute blast creating it and it's brought up so many wonderful conversations. I personally have had such growth from the act of creating it and from the conversations that I've had and I am so deeply grateful for everyone who has supported me along the way. So that started years ago when I was in college and as you know from listening, I did not have an easy time in college and I will not rehash that all now. But ultimately what I wanna explain is how we really got here. So in college, I double majored in psychology and psychology became my safe haven. I was really not enjoying or thriving in a lot of the dance classes that I was taking. My body hurt, my mind was aching in ways that I didn't even understand at the time. And I just knew that something was off in this dance program, but I knew I loved dance. And so I stuck it out and I didn't really question it that much. I did after my sophomore year, at the end of my sophomore year, I applied to transfer.
And I got into one other school that I applied to and I ended up deciding to stay at Marymount because it meant that I could study abroad, which ended up being the best thing that I did in those four years, I would say, besides the amazing people that I met. And it really changed my life. It changed my perspective on myself, on what life could be on dance, on what a career could be and how much broader it could be than I had originally known. And so I'm grateful for that decision. And then when I came back, I was really changed for a few months. I had this, again, changed perspective. I was able to really enjoy what I was doing because I was able to separate myself from my program and separate myself from what I felt was expected of us in ways that I disagreed with. And...then it slowly faded as it tends to, you know, when you, maybe you have some kind of profound event and you're like, I will never question this or complain about this again or whatever it is. And then that slowly conveyed over time. Sometimes that's what happened. And that was my junior year. And so my senior year, I had to do two separate senior theses.
So I had our dance senior seminar project, it was called, where you created a business plan. And we kind of laugh about it now because it's like, they wait to tell you until your senior year when they already have all your money, that dance is not a very viable career. You're not really going to be able to do much with it, most likely. So why don't we give you a backup option? That's what it felt like because other schools, they were going out to audition or another school, you go over your January break, your winter break to Europe to go and take class and audition and all that stuff. So where's the thing there like coming up with business plans that most people didn't care about. And fortunately, I loved my business plan. I loved the idea I had. And it became the beginning of this really necessary pillar of my career. And that project was creating a mental health intervention program for dancers. And that has evolved into the whole artist workshop, which I created and bring into studios. And I brought back to Marymount in a back door kind of way, which I'll explain too.
But in the moment, It had to, it involved a lot of different research about a few of the dance psychologists that exist and what their research was and pulling from their wisdom and their advice about how to make dancers' lives better and improve their mental health. So that was part one. That was in the fall semester. In February, that spring semester was when I experienced my sexual assault that I've talked about on this podcast a bunch. And somehow in my effort to push it down and pretend like it never happened, I was able to power through in an understandably very detrimental way that I could not possibly begin to comprehend in the moment. But that semester was when I was working on my psychology senior thesis. And that was called Eating Disorders and Disordered Eating in College -Aged Dancers. And one of my professors, who was our improvisation teacher and just came that year, she allowed me to hold a roundtable interview session for my project in one of our improv classes. And in it, I don't remember so many of the details. That's what happens sometimes when you try to forget certain chunks of your life, consciously or consciously. And I asked people about their experiences and what their mental health experiences have been like and what their experiences in the program had been like.
And a lot of us just really connected over the fact that, we had a lot of issues and we were still at the beginning of being able to talk about it with each other because everyone goes there with the intention to be a professional dancer and to go and work hard and do whatever they tell you to do so that you can accomplish your dreams, right? And then we're like, wait, that thing wasn't right that they said. Wait, that can't be right or appropriate or accurate what they're telling us right there. And it's hard to point out for the first time. And we certainly did it when we would get back with our roommates or in those kinds of situations, but to do it in a more public setting, like a class and in front of a professor was new. And I wanted to conduct more interviews. However, there's only so much I could do with the mindset I was in with trying to power through senior year with all the classes and… final projects and rehearsals and all of that. But I will say, after that interview, I walked down to the main dance studio where we were having this big rehearsal and two people stopped me and said, hey Jess, I heard you were thinking about doing these interviews. If you want me to be interviewed, I would love to be interviewed. And in that moment, I realized how important it was to talk about these experiences and how people wanted to share what they had been going through. And that to me was the spark of this podcast, even though at the time I did not know it would be a podcast. And I powered through graduation and a year later was when I first told somebody, I told my therapist about the assault and she encouraged me to talk to my family and my friends.
And I went back to my apartment that night and I told two of my best friends what happened. And eventually I ended up telling more people. And a year and a half after the assault was the height of the Me Too movement and the height of specifically the Larry Nassar case. And I said to myself, I want to come forward. So I reached out to my beloved professor, mentor, now friend, Catherine Cabine. And I really didn't know her that well. She taught one class for me and I was in one of her pieces. And in that time in college, I was in survival mode. So I really didn't get to know her that well. But she had planted these seeds about who she was and what she believed in and what she stood for so clearly that I knew she was the person that I needed to reach out to. And I did. She told me who to reach out to, Title IX, what to do, and she offered to come with me to everything. And at that point, I just needed to do this by myself. The fact that I knew I could go to her speaks of volumes about how even in a program where you're not really encouraged to push the boundaries or question things, I still knew she was the one. And so I went forward to the Title IX person. And I told them what happened. And they said, because of the severity of this accusation, they needed to ask me if I would officially like to open an investigation and that they would need to hire outside people. So an outside, I believe, lawyer and detective. And I said, let's do it. Let's do it. This person needs to not work at this school anymore.
And I went forward and I had 45 minute, maybe hour interview with the title nine person, the detective and the lawyer. And they asked me a bunch of questions going into all of the details about what happened. And this is at this point, he said, she said, and so I'm going into this knowing I'm telling my story. I'm telling what happened. I'm telling the only truth. And it's not up to me to make this decision that will protect other people. Now I'm giving you the truth. You have to decide what to do with that. And anyone else that gets hurt, if he doesn't go is on your hands. I didn't say this, but this was kind of how I calmed myself down about how high the stakes felt. And then at that point, he had his interview. After he did his interview, he was allowed to read my interview and then respond to it. And he was still found guilty. And after that, he appealed it. They found him guilty again and he was gone. However, he also worked at Montclair State University. He also worked at Kent State University. And he also worked at the Steffi Nossen School of Dance, which is, I did a couple of dance internships with him and with Nancy Lushington. They were both professors at Marymount. They knew each other prior. They were good friends. And they ran this incredible dance camp for adults and children with various disabilities. And I was able to participate for two summers. I loved my time there. I think it's such important work. It was beautiful work. It was hard work. And this person who's a predator was able to work with this population for all of those years in addition to having his own private Pilates practice, in addition to having small dance companies and working with small dance companies.
So I got him fired. I talked to my professor, Catherine, and she said that in all of her years in academia, she had never seen anyone get fired. And it felt like maybe times were really changing because of the bravery of Tarana Burke and anyone involved with coming forward about their own stories and the Me Too movement. However, then what? I'm sitting there. I'm courageous enough to come forward. I'm so proud of myself. I know that I have prevented many students from having to go through what I went through moving forward. But what about all the other places he works? I asked Maryman about that, Title IX, and they said, you know, there's nothing we can do. I asked the head of the dance department at the time, Katie Langen, what she was going to do to help prevent this situation from happening ever again. And I'm not going to go into everything she said, but in terms of an actionable step, she told me that everyone knows it's an open door policy and that you can always come to them or to Title IX. That's it. Okay. And then Title IX said, yeah, we can't reach out to anybody else. Okay.
So then a year after that, I posted my story on my blog. I knew it wasn't going to reach a lot of people, but it was the least that I could do to try to get my story out there and to help other people who had either had that experience with him or with somebody else, or just someone who was maybe going to work with him or someone who just needed to keep their eyes open a little bit more, unfortunately, because it does fall on us. It does fall on us to protect ourselves in some ways. And that's horrible, but it's the truth. I posted my story. I got tons of wonderful messages, just very encouraging, very supportive. And I got a few about him. And I got a few just about...similar situations in general. So I sent my blog post and I sent the official documents from the investigation to any place that he worked and no one responded. So I needed to step away from it for a little bit. A year after that, I reached out again and I decided to CC more people into my email. I still have not heard from either of the other universities, Montclair or Kent State. And I did hear back from Steffi Nossin that second time. What had really sparked that for me was going onto the Steffi Nossin page because I wanted to see if they were still doing that incredible dance camp, but just without him. So now three years after the assault, two years after, he gets fired. And one year after I post my story and send it directly to them, I go onto their website and the two of them are still running that program together. I was devastated that people would be put in that situation again, in danger, an actual dangerous situation that people had been warned about.
So I emailed again, I cc'd the entire board and finally got a response. It shouldn't take that much effort to stop a predator from working with adults and children with various disabilities, or anyone for that matter, but especially a more vulnerable population. And to this day, he's probably still working. I don't know what he's doing. I… have no contact, everything is blocked, of course. And I just can only imagine who he might still be hurting. With all that said, after I posted my story and after this whole situation happened, the idea for a podcast had been percolating by then for years. But that was the real deciding moment of...I need to tell my story. We all need to tell our stories. So the original idea for the podcast was much more of a tell -all kind of thing, like calling people out, calling institutions out. And eventually as I started to heal and started to become more empowered in my own story, it just evolved. It evolved from something that was going to be very much of an attack to know what's the intention here. The intention is to help people tell their stories, tell their truth, say what actually happened in their lives. And if that happens to involve calling somebody out or calling an institution out or a company out or a show out, whatever it is, then so be it. But that's not the point. The point is to be honest, to be open, to be expressive, to share for you as an individual who's sharing and for everyone who gets to listen to that and feel a little less alone, a little more understood, a little bit more connected. That's what it truly evolved into. And at some point last spring, so spring, 2023, I finally, for whatever reason, just got the kick in the butt to make this happen. I had been planning it for so long. I had done so much research. Thought about the name, went back and forth. This was always the name.
And I went back and forth on it so many times, asking a bunch of different people. And what I've learned from starting it is that it's going to be something different anytime you decide to start it. So if I decided to start it right after college, it would have been a totally different thing. It would have been more, again, an attack. And if I would have started it five years from now, with way more perspective and information and I have no idea what I'm gonna be doing in five years. I don't know what I'm doing with my career. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't even know where I'm gonna be, what I'm gonna be up to. And that would have been completely different. So what helped me get started was knowing that there's no right time. There was never going to be a right time. I do think the benefit of waiting was that I had...the ability to heal a little bit more, which may sound shocking, because as you hear in my podcast, I still have a lot of built up stuff that I'm working through. But here we are, and this is what I'm doing it. And it's perfect for that reason. Mistakes and all, hesitations and all, things that I wish I did differently and all, because I'm learning as I go.
So I recorded last summer with a bunch of people who I had been talking to about it. And I had already kind of inquired and told them, Hey, I don't know what this thing is. Some of them, I had been talking to them about it since before I knew it was even going to be a podcast. And we recorded in a week and a half. I recorded all the episodes, edited everything, posted it starting this past December, 2023, finished season one, was already recording season two. We started season two in April and we're wrapping it up with this episode right now in June. And all of my season three episodes are recorded and ready to go and mostly edited. And that'll take us from the fall into the end of 2024. And I learned so much more in doing it than I could have ever done it just by researching and watching videos and doing this and that. I love interviewing people. I've always loved having one -on -one conversations with people. I have mentioned that I frequently would have conversations with people and say, hey, we should have recorded that. That was really interesting or really profound or you had such a big epiphany or I had such a big epiphany, whatever it was. And I think that in needing to find different forms of expression other than dance as I healed slash continue to heal from my experience, this was vital. It brings together so many of my passions. It brings together performance in that I am speaking to you now.
It brings together my psychology background, loving and being fascinated with behavior and action and conversation and evolution. And knowing that I am so passionate about helping people heal in any way that I can. And for me, I feel like my strong suit is doing that through conversation and really listening and trying to sense what somebody needs. And my biggest honor throughout this process is that many people by the end of the episode or even halfway through the episode have said that it feels like therapy. That to me is the highest praise I could get. And if no one listened to that episode, it would still have been worth it to me because we had a conversation that changed somebody in some way. And I have been so changed through these conversations. On a creative level, I saw that I could create something from scratch, which I had never done before. I had choreographed one main piece in college. I had choreographed for recitals and things like that, but really doing something that I had this idea for for so long and nurturing it and letting it evolve into what it needed to be is one of the most profound experiences of my life. And I'm so grateful to every single person again, who was with me for any part of the journey. And that includes now listening to this right now, listening to anything, supporting anything, giving a like here or a comment here or a share here.
Those things when you're creating something from scratch really do make a difference. May not seem like it, but if I see you like a story or like a real, I notice and I really take it in. I don't see it as a number. I look and I see the person and I say that person appreciated what was said by this guest enough that they took their time to move their thumb and show their support in this way. It may seem silly, but it does make a difference when you're creating something and when your only means of sharing it and distributing that is in this way that we share things in social media now. And I am just so excited to keep it going. I have truly hundreds of people on my ask list for my guest list and I haven't even started reaching out again because I need to finish what's in front of me, which is this next season's edits. But I'm so excited to keep connecting and I have some really special ideas and I'm just really excited to see how it continues to grow. And another way that I personally have grown so much through the podcast is seeing what I talk about over and over and over again, which is, not being able to show up to a dance class, which is how scared I feel about my career and stepping back into an audition and things like that. And when you listen back and you're editing and you hear yourself talk about the same things over and over and over and over again, it really hits you that this is something that either you need to move past and move through or you need to address head on and maybe both. And so for me, I know that I will be spending a lot of time this summer sitting with that and I'm gonna say my goal so you guys can all hold me accountable, which is that here in Madrid, which is where I am this month, I'm going to take a dance class and I don't care what kind of class it is, it can be anything, but I'm just going to take a dance class and then we'll go forward from there. I've had a lot of ups and downs this year, the past few years, the past decade, and I am so grateful for the support that I've had around me. I'm grateful to have found medicine that helps me with my anxiety and depression.
And while that is all still a continuing journey and one that I just started about a year and a half ago, I'm really proud of myself for addressing the issues head on. And sometimes it really does take hitting an emotional rock bottom to get yourself to that point. But if there's anything I can say about medicine is that there is no shame to try and you don't have to wait until you reach an emotional rock bottom to try it and it has definitely changed my life. I've seen it change the lives of people around me constantly. And a lot more people are taking medicine for their mental health than you realize. So please, if there is any curiosity, talk to your doctor. And I still have health issues. I still have...lots of unknowns in my life. I still have things I'm working through constantly, but that has helped me get to the point where I'm able to function daily and address those things. It's not a perfect solution. It's not the only solution. It is one element that contributes to my personal healing and ability to address what needs to be addressed within my life. And additionally, when you're seeing the horrors of the world around you every day, it allows you, in my opinion, to look at what's happening, address what's happening, and continue fighting for the change that is necessary. That is in our own backyards, that's in our own country, that is in Sudan and Congo and Gaza. It's everywhere. And unfortunately with the way that our world works, it's not like it's stopping anytime soon. And so it's a long game. We need to be able to sustainably continue using our voices, showing up at protests, making donations, offering support and supplies and resources, trying to change policies, trying to change minds. That takes effort. And I know that that was not going to be possible for me until I figured out how to help myself. When you're feeling kind of hopeless about what's going on, which I do all the time, I think there's a lot of discussion, especially in the past few years about like, what is self care and what's important to step away from and what's important to prioritize with yourself.
And for me, like with everything, I think it's a balance. I think that...You can't hide behind self -care as a way to ignore what's going on in the world around you, but you also can't ignore self -care. And what does self -care mean? Let me say that. To me, it's taking my medicine. It was seeking out a psychiatrist and going on a long journey, trying to figure out what would work for me. And it's still ongoing. It's also about doing my writing and doing my podcasts and the things that make me feel like I'm...both clearing out my own brain, activating my creative side, and making a little change in the process. So to wrap up, I'm gonna circle back to the 30th birthday part of it, because I put so much pressure on myself all the time, and it's one of the things I'm really trying to work on. But I had a lot of pressure about all these things I wanted to do and share before 30, as I mentioned. And that included, this reflection, a bunch of reflection essays that I had been adding into my notes about like certain topics that I really wanted to share about that I almost felt like I wanted to get off my chest and leave behind in my twenties. It felt like there was something spiritual about the ability of letting go of this certain topic or releasing this certain essay in the twenties and not thinking about this topic in the thirties, but that it's all fake. It's just a number, it's days, minutes, it's just, it's all random. But what I do want to do is give a few pieces of advice that I have learned in my twenties. And you'll hear that on the next episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for supporting always. And we'll be back next week.