Practicing the hard things

A few weeks ago I had a comment exchange with @aimeewei_ a poet and author I have become a fan of. You can find her at https://projectionroom.substack.com/

Aimee wrote a post on her instagram about the struggle of doing social media, its negative effects, and inhabiting that space as someone wanting to create and wanting to experience authentic connection with an audience. That’s a huge challenge for me, and Aimee’s post resonated enough that I decided begin coming back onto social media and to mark out an end to a time where I have been protecting myself and hiding both from my own creative process and my own psychological issues around finding an audience.

It’s hard, and even in this little exercise I did on impulse (writing a poem and making it into a short film for Aimee, a stranger who I do not know beyond some of the lines of her work) in retrospect I can totally see it painted with all the cognitive distortions I have around art, work, self-worth, and creativity.

The footage in this film was shot in the summer of 2022. I was in the grip of decompensating #cptsd and was trying in vain to find a therapist while holding down a job. I’d just got out of the environment that given and sustained that complex PTSD, and through a fog of dissociation and flashbacks and the gradually surfacing of repressed memory, I found the voice of someone I, who struggles to trust, trusted. Without really knowing why. That was Jess @traumatized.motherfuckers

Thanks @aimeewai_ for giving me the excuse to create something out of these parts. If anyone reading this is going toe to toe with the weight of their own inhibitions, #perfectionism , guilt, #shame , or #impostersyndrome you can continue to struggle with all those things after you made the next thing you feel like you can’t. It’s easier to believe in other people, for other people. And you should. But I hope today is the day you start believing in yourself, even just a little bit. Especially, if it’s just to let yourself do the next hard thing.

“Hello, Aimee Wei” was written, shot, edited, and color graded by Yokai Lens with music by the incredible Chris Zabriskie https://chriszabriskie.com/index.html featuring his track “The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan” from the album Undercover Vampire Policeman