Exhibit C
Portrait & declaration
Portrait by J. Hardesty · Scottsdale AZ · June 2024
“My life has been a long argument with staying down.”
I speak about resilience, recovery, and what it takes to keep getting up. To audiences who have lived through hard things, and the leaders who have been tasked with helping them.
I tell my story.
There have been many lessons along the way, more than one room can hold.
If my proposal has landed on your desk:
I've failed at more things than most people attempt, and I've gotten back up from all of them. I'm choosing to leave the specifics to the bio, and I'll tell them plainly when the audience needs to know. The work I do on stage is not about the failures themselves. It's about what it takes to get back up, again and again, when staying down seems like the easiest option.
I speak to those still in the middle of their circumstances, and to the people responsible for what comes next. Sometimes both, in the same room, without choosing sides.
Every audience is approached with intention. I tell the truth. I will always gravitate towards rooms where words matter, and where they can change a mind, even just one.
With Respect,
Brian Mathrusse
Twenty years of mental illness, addiction, and institutions. Inside those years there were plenty of reasons for me to give up, and plenty of reasons for the people caring for me to give up too.
This talk is about the moments that got through anyway. Small acts of compassion, most of them unremarkable at the time, that lit a path toward a total recovery nobody predicted.
I come back to name what actually worked on me, and to ask what it would take, from providers, from systems, from the people who fund them, to reach the next person still out there.
“My life has been a long argument with staying down.”
Every talk is built for the room, drawn from a body of source material developed over years of structured work on this story. The catalog is always growing.