I have been thinking a lot about this project, about how it has evolved and changed throughout this past months, about how every time it has become harder and harder to work on, I have become unmotivated, stressed, and even sad when thinking about it. I have had many tutorials where honestly I have just ended up more confused than I was in the beginning, I have changed things and thought it was right even though my gut was telling me it wasn’t.
I think I have been very unfair with myself. At some point I stopped listening to me and what I wanted and started to listen to everyone else and everything they said I applied into this project and now I am looking at it and I don’t see myself in it at all. It makes me feel insecure, it makes me feel weak and dumb when it should be making me feel confident and powerful. How did this happen? But most importantly, what can I do now to fix it?
I love my idea and my project, it is honestly incredible and it has such a noble and positive objective, however I’m not sure I am the right person to do it right now, at least not in the way I had been planning on. I don’t feel I have the knowledge nor the skills to fully develop it and give it the life it deserves, maybe some day I will be but I think it is important to be able to admit it to yourself when you might be in over your head.
So the next step is simple I’m changing my approach. That doesn’t mean that the work that I have done during all of this past months is for nothing, on the contrary, it actually was all this work and research that brought me to this point today. Through my intervention I remembered I connect deeply to stories and storytelling, I already knew this but I think I forgot for a little while. The connection and community people get from telling and listening to stories is something very vulnerable. And I’m good at doing that, at telling stories, at listening at creating an environment where people feel safe enough to be vulnerable and share with others.
I had also forgotten that I wanted to create a community of creatives, I started focusing too much in Latin America and got a little lost there. I actually realized that all the research I had been doing was more related to this focus on storytelling and community than in Latin American artists, so I’m just pivoting my question a little bit because my original question “How can I help give exposure to Latin American creatives in the UK?” wasn’t correctly reflecting what I was working on.
For my reframing process I went back to my original project proposal and reviewed everything that I had researched, my intervention and the conclusions that I arrived at and the feedback I had received both from tutors, peers and stakeholders. My main discovery was that storytelling was all over my project in different ways, my second discovery was that the reason why I was feeling so unmotivated and insecure was because I didn’t feel that I had any experience to actually do what I wanted to do and I didn’t know where to start. While going back through my feedback I came back to something that Cai had told which was not to ignore my own creative skills and my experience, so I decided to reframe my approach by taking into account that I have a background in Communications and Journalism and 6 years of experience working in editorial teams at magazines. Also, I started remembering that people have asked me to help them with creative a narrative around something, helping them to tell a story about themselves, a project or even a business. Through this process is how I arrived at my new question: How can developing a compelling narrative help creative individuals get closer to their goals?