Summary
When I created the psychological modality of Media Therapy in the 90s, it was born out of a desire to really understand how people could watch artistic mediums so differently and the different aspects of psychological and emotional development (or lack there of) that figure into how media is interpreted uniquely.
#FirstCoffeeThoughts
I didn’t learn positive lessons from people. I didn’t grow up around inspiring people who gave me good advice or even listened to me when I tried to express myself.
I grew up around broken, angry, selfish, abusive, violent, miserable people.
I was surrounded by neurotypical people who couldn’t understand how I moved through the world or how the world moved through me … and I couldn’t understand how they existed, and even thrived, in darkness and disconnection.
All of my lessons came from philosophers, books, films, and art that lifted me up and communicated with me in my own language …
Media was a huge factor in how someone with aphantasia, synesthesia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, agoraphobia, chronic pain, and PTSD, learned to experience the world; in a way I could actually understand, relate to, and gain healthy and positive experiences from.
Books (especially picture books and encyclopedias), video games, films, music … NOT people.
I could understand media better than I could ever understand people and a lot of media I felt could understand me better than people ever would.
I connected with media – film, books, television, music, art, etc – in ways that I never could connect with people around me and media gave back to me in a way that people never would.
One reason for that is media knows what it is … creation is an act of willpower, it is directed through someone who has intention, honesty, desire, EMOTIONS.
If there were people in my life that I did learn positive things from, that I did feel comfortable with, that did understand me … it was creative people.
It was people who were in touch with themselves in creative, expressive, honest, and sometimes uncontrollable ways … all the ways that I experienced the world as a synesthete, as someone with a different neuro processing ability, as someone who felt things deeper and differently …
Most of my good friends are creatives in some way.
They are creatives across a variety of spectrums and skillsets … writers, actors, directors, builders, musicians, singers, growers, makers … people who work with their hands, people who connect with nature, the world, with each other through acts of expression and creation that comes from somewhere deep within.
A lot of them are also neurodivergent in some way.
But I didn’t find these people until I was well into my 30s and 40s.
Growing up … even mostly through college … it was Hell … surrounded by the most mundane, most hateful, most broken, most lost, most dysregulated people.
Media for me was never about escaping reality, but discovering ways of interpreting it, learning language to explain it, and seeing something visually that matched the way my brain processed information …
A lot of foreign media especially was closer to the way I expressed internally and moved through the world externally.
In the same way that learning and speaking multiple languages changes your brain … there are some things that really stunt development and some things that limit mental, spiritual, and emotional growth.
It would be easy for me to say that living in America is absolutely one of those things …
But what I mean is more of a larger, overall concept of what it means to be a whole person that has access to all parts of themselves … and how to turn that FREELY into expression.
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances in different countries and a lot of them, who know me well, say … you’re not suited for that country, your thoughts aren’t suited for English language, your spirit isn’t suited for such a hateful place …
And I 100% agree and I 100% felt that even as a child; born in the wrong body, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong country, adopted into the wrong family … wrong everything.
And I was never willing to change myself to fit in.
I was never willing to carve out parts of my mind, body, and soul to become more palatable, understood, acceptable, or to make people more comfortable and as a result I lived – still live – a very isolated, yet peaceful life.
Venturing out of that I endure the wrath of broken, dysregulated, angry people who HAVE given up everything they are to be a part of a world that doesn’t accept them as anything less than what is deemed “good” and controllable and they are miserable because of it.
When Chris Brown interviewed me for the HPL 250 Stories series, he asked me if there was a piece of media that really influenced me and I said there was never a piece of media that DIDN’T.
I gained so much from different forms of art growing up because all the variety of it that I sought out and exposed myself to was able to speak to me on levels I could understand and process in a way that was normal for me … and I didn’t have to try and process abnormally to suit others.
When I created the psychological modality of Media Therapy in the 90s, it was born out of a desire to really understand how people could watch artistic mediums so differently and the different aspects of psychological and emotional development (or lack there of) that figure into how media is interpreted uniquely.
It took everything I learned from my psychology and philosophy studies and rolled it into something that was a great way to help people understand media, themselves, and others.
Media literacy, or lack there of, aside …
… psychological transference is a redirection of internal feelings onto often unrelated external sources. Media therapy is an examination of one’s transference; what you put into media when you watch it, not what you take out of it. Art is a perfect medium for pulling emotions from us and unlocking deep levels of understanding of how we inadvertently connect unrelated things to unrealized trauma and emotional disturbance.
In the years of refining and evolving the Media Therapy modality, I have come up with an almost 100% accurate system of telling me almost everything about a person solely based on how they watch and interpret media.
Everything that is broken in a person, everything that needs to be examined, healed, and understood, everything they refuse to acknowledge on the surface that is hovering just beneath the masks they wear, all of the dysregulation, and all of the pain … is easily revealed.
Psychotic fanatics of Star Wars, Star Trek, anime, comic books and other niche mediums …
Emotionally starved, groomed, and dysregulated women with abuse and control fetishes …
Anti-intellectuals, anti-Black, anti-logic, and anti-reason folks …
Binge watchers, distracted watchers, people with no attention spans …
People who are only functionally illiterate, poorly educated, under educated, or just simply don’t care …
ALL of these people live in very different realties.
Those different realities COMPLETELY shapes their ability to engage with, comprehend, appreciate, and even understand creative media and art.
Reviews are the neurotic biases of the person who consumed the media and their opinion of it through said lens. Reviews are useless unless you’re most interested in the reviewer themselves.
I’ve never met a person in my life that sees media in the same why I do. It’s impossible and will never happen.
It’s not because I’m some over educated expert, it’s because MEDIA IS SUBJECTIVE and how you interpret it, react to it, understand it, and learn from it, is SPECIFIC TO YOU.
It doesn’t mean moments of artistic punctum don’t ever happen … where collectively something touches people in such a universal way that almost everyone has the exact same emotional response … it just means that when it comes to how people engage with media and understand it on a personal level, it’s all VERY personal.
Stop expecting people to be you. You are NOT THE CENTER.
Stop expecting people to see media, feel about media, or appreciate media the same way you do. Your perspective is not GLOBAL.
Media is subjective.
Art is personal.
Everyone’s lived reality shapes how they see the ENTIRE WORLD including how they see media and art.
More than 50% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade reading level … so just LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS, mind your business, and enjoy art for YOURSELF.
For 90% of the world … Star Wars isn’t at all about fascism. Star Trek isn’t political. Wuthering Heights is a love story with no lesson or themes to be studied. 1984 is just a date … and they think that Republicans are “ripping off” the Handmaids Tale.
If you are angry about that stuff it means your expectations are too high and your understanding of reality is based on delusion.
Collisions of hope and reality are the leading cause of anger and depression in the world.
Just wake up.
The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.
– Marcus Aurelius
If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.
Surround yourself with people who aren’t illiterate, can think critically, who have healthy emotional regulation, and who are fully realized, selfless, non-racist, and positive people … and your life will absolutely look different and feel different.
Stop trying to reason with, change, appeal to, educate, and support people who are evil, selfish, racist, willfully ignorant, obstinate, Nazi, misogynist, narcissistic, and who enjoy bringing pain and misery to others because it actually fills them with positive energy because they’re broken AF.
Stop. Just stop.
Stop arguing with bots, psychopaths, and people who DON’T READ.
You’re wasting ENERGY and TIME on people who DO NOT MATTER.
Save it for yourself and those who DO.
