Imagine you are holding a lemon in your hand, you can see its bright yellow colour and feel its shiny, holey skin. Then you cut it in half and it bursts with juice. Finally, you pick one half and squeeze it. The fluid comes out of its flesh and the citric scent is extracted from its rind. While I am writing about this lemon, my mouth starts to water.
That was the exercise I had in a psychology session last week about how our experiences associated with our behaviours.
We always have a voice to stop or encourage us to take actions of something. Either an angel or a devil, it is the product of our minds. And it is so powerful that could become an enticement or an obstruction to our goals.
To me, making film is about making understanding to predominately improve myself and hopefully to make an impact to others. And it is more about the process that the result. And I am in the process of getting over those fears in my mind, which have been blocking my path to the destination.
This is where the EXiST campaign comes in place. I want to overcome the fears I have in terms of getting out there and realising the project. The most vicious product of my mind that stands between the human connection and I is the association of the threats I experienced in my childhood with how I perceive the world.
My own big brother who, today, would, be diagnosed as Narcissistic Personality Disorder abused me psychologically, sometimes, physically. And one of his best friends secretly had a sexual relationship with me. Living as victim of your own family had shaped perspective even though I managed to stand up for myself and moved on after the years of adolescence. I fought back against my brother and ended that casual affair I felt I was being taken advantage of.
My life turned upside down from a shy and reserved boy that was a target of bullying to energetic head of the cheerleaders in high school sport day that lived a double life with cool kids outside school and sneaked out at night for clubbing. Then I surprised everyone with the result that I got into one of the best universities in communication study in Thailand. I was very proud of the transition and the direction I paved it myself. However, I did not realise there was a sleeper deep down there.
That experience of being targeted by people around you was suppressed until I moved to Sydney. The first years of living in an estranging culture was a rough period. I was not able to create works because I could not use my writing skills and my visual expression was not rediscovered until later and it needed, still does, to be developed. The sense of worthlessness gradually grew on me as I tried to make a living in the overly expensive metro with the job I hated in hospitality.
At that point, the sleeper had been woken up and dominated my view that the world was not to be trusted. They would humiliate me like my brother had assaulted me, exploit me like his friend had molested me, and most of all, desert me like my parents had overlooked me. In the recent years, I blamed that on the people I loved and on myself like I had taken that on those people in my earlier life. It went down in the whirlpool of depression, anxiety, denial, irritation and recreational activities.
And that is the homework from the session—to identify those fears that stop me from making an attempt to promote the project and make it exist. It is a good exercise. It is not very easy to bare your soul to world but every time when the project gets a supporter, it is not just one little step closer to make the film EXiST for a good cause but it also makes me believe that those humiliation, exploitation and desertion are just the association of my mind produced from scraps of the past.
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