A fun little video I worked on. Who knew how much footage was needed for a short video like this, in addition to editing time haha but it was a lot of fun! I’m getting more used to recording myself and how filming/editing works and the associated workflows.
I started writing the script for this about a week or two ago because I was feeling quite low. The words are things I’ve learnt over the years and things that I need to constantly remind myself. It’s tough feeling like you’re constantly having a hard time and never feel like enough, and sometimes it feels like an all-consuming mental effort to try to keep it all together.
My standout favourite part is inspired by a comment I once saw in a reddit comment:
Let go of the fantasy that you can make things better if you try hard enough, work hard enough, say enough, do enough. Stop. Just stop. You’re enough. You always have been.
Words that I’ve needed to constantly remind myself and actually made me cry the first time I read them haha. Hopefully you can find solace in them too.
Regardless of how I felt, I chose to try and channel it into a little script and video that I thought may be able to help others going through something similar. I once read that one of the ways to find your niche in business is to solve your own problems and monetise the solution. So here’s me trying to weaponise my depression (haha). I’m joking obviously, since that is not a very healthy way to think about it, but if I’m to accept that it will just be part of my life, it would be remiss not to try to take advantage of it in some way – especially in a way that aims to help other people. My sole purpose at my previous jobs in IT/data analytics was to solve problems, so I’m going to channel that towards myself instead and see if I can help others along the way too.
My psychologist once told me to look up the statistics for depression and mental health conditions (shown below, courtesy of Beyond Blue). She said it would show me just how common this experience was and that so many other people are feeling the same way I am. To be honest, at first it just made me feel worse. That this many people felt the way I feel made me profoundly sad.
So I’ve turned it into motivation instead – knowing it’s not just me feeling this way, but so many other people in the world. And if anything I say or make even helps them just a tiny bit, I genuinely feel like my life will have been worth it. To be honest, this has become one of the biggest driving factors in my life above anything else.
I’d like to finish this off with a funny comic I drew. Hope you’re all having a better time than me because I really wish you weren’t able to relate to any of this, but otherwise, let’s navigate through this weird experience we call life together.
Russell Phung 