Un-fond Memories: A Cringe Compilation.
It’s so easy for me to get caught up in hating myself for my fuck-ups. For all the shit I didn’t know. All the shit I didn’t get. All the shit I did wrong.
I used to think it was necessary to hold onto that self-hate. I used it to punish myself, to help motivate me to change for the better.
The tricky part is, it worked. Or, at least, it felt like it did.
In the past, I shamed myself into changing things about me. And I gained some sense of progress that way. But it made for such a shitty journey.
Shame has a way of keeping everything hidden, tucked away. It’s internal by necessity: to allow me to maintain a clean, shiny public-facing front. Gotta keep up that good PR, right?
But this private hate-fuelled “healing” made for a very cold, lonely experience.
The pain made me bitter and resentful.
While I was protecting & projecting my false image of perfection, it felt weak to empathize with others who were struggling through their own growth experiences.
So I judged, shamed, and hated on them for the very same flaws I saw in myself.
And I kept the bar high, so any progress they made was never enough.
To justify all that hate I felt, all the judgments I cast—it was only fair that I applied those same standards to myself.
And for any improvements I made, I’d raise the bar even higher.
Fuuuuck.
Shame robbed me of the humanity, connection, and support that are possible with a more compassionate approach. A shared approach. An acknowledgment that we are all imperfect. That we all struggle.
I’m a human. I owe it to myself to forgive myself, accept myself, and love myself. I owe it to myself to talk to others, to ask for help, so we can share in our struggles, learn from each other, and feel less alone. I owe myself that humanity.
Punishment does so little to fix things, and so much more to break them.
It’s counter-intuitive, but I now believe acceptance is the path forward. The path that will allow me to keep growing without continuing to hurt myself and the people around me.
Now I just gotta find that acceptance… I know it’s around here somewhere 🙃
process &
behind-the-scenes
This piece was so much more work than I thought it’d be 🥵
After coming up with the concept, I mocked up a rough layout in InDesign, using reference photos. (The typeface I used is called “Ogg” by Sharp Type Foundry.)
I printed it, cut it out, folded it, and tested the rotation illusion effect on a Lazy Susan (spinny circle table thing). Then I made tweaks to the letter spacing in my digital layout for better alignment & legibility.
Once that was refined, I traced an outline of the main details of the photos using Photoshop. I printed that outline, as well as the type, to use as a sort of colouring page. This was my template for the final painting.
Painting in split panel sections was tricky but fun. It was weird not knowing how it would look until everything was completely done.
I let it dry overnight, then folded it, and did some touch-ups on the gold lettering. I tested the rotation illusion effect. Things lined up pretty well, but not perfect. (Oh well, not starting over at this point.)
I had no idea how I was going to capture the visuals. Luba was of major assistance on the production side of this piece. He helped me plan and shoot everything.
The final video animation is comprised of 20 frames. We shot the piece 40 times: 20 times lit from the left, 20 times lit from the right. For each of the 20 frames, we gradually rotated the piece, with pre-determined angle-based rotations that Luba calculated with the intent of creating a smooth, easing animation.
Then in Adobe Premiere, we overlaid each of the left-and-right image pairs in order to have the final image be lit from both sides.
This thing literally would have been a shitty Boomerang if he hadn’t helped me so much on the technical side. Thank you Luba!!!
I then spent hours touching up the letters and manually adjusting some of the more broken alignments in Photoshop to create a stronger final piece that would read more clearly.
This thing is a total Frankenstein of digital and analog. I love it, but I never wanna look at the working files ever again. 😁