As a writer, I consider myself an artist. It’s an outlet for my voice, it’s cathartic and it allows me to share with the world a little bit of who I am and how I think.
As a child, I was mostly quiet. At times, I felt invisible. I identified very heavily with Casper the friendly Ghost in that I would haunt the hallways and skulk through the house trying not to be seen or heard. I didn’t have the ability to speak up or show my emotions.
But, I found them in books, movies and music.
I could spend all day watching movies or reading books. It felt like I was joining the characters in their adventure. I was seeing the world through their eyes and experiencing all of the emotions of the journey.
I was able to process feelings that I was experiencing. I was able to dream about things that I hadn’t yet experienced. I remember having a crush and listening to music dreaming that he would see me as the love of his life. Music helped me feel all of those feelings and imagine what it could be like. It also comforted me in the unrequited love with songs of love lost and hopeless romance.
Books, movies and music are powerful in their way of shaping our ideas, informing us of worlds we’ve never seen and introducing us to people we may never meet.
Storytelling is the one thing people throughout generations have in common. It’s why we know what happened in history because people wanted to tell their stories. Ancient Egyptians put beautiful colorful hieroglyphs on the walls telling their stories in their tombs. Museums are filled with busts and statues and the walls adorned with art of various people capturing what life was like for them. They are all telling a story to the people who come after them.
As you see what they had or didn’t have, you develop an understanding of their challenges. Each person you meet is a story being lived in real time.
Books have long been used in schools to help students understand language and prose, but also to learn about the world through the eyes of the author and the use of the characters. I can remember reading Shakespeare and thinking my teacher must have disliked us as students to make us read something that sounded so foreign. But, by the end of it, I walked away with an understanding of sorrow and human psychology.
Ophelia was a young woman who loved Hamlet but withered away in his presence while he was focused on avenging his father. She couldn’t satisfy all of the men in their views of her and so eventually, she ceases to exist in their world. She is a metaphor for lost identity.
Through these characters, we see how we approach challenges and the common themes in families, society and life as a whole. Maybe, you are inspired or you may be able to feel the feelings you don’t allow yourself in your regular life.
Movies also have the power to create empathy. They can give you insight into a life you may never have to live or never could live. Where movies and tv shows can misuse that power is to only show people of certain races, genders and sexualities in a negative view which shapes the perception of people who don’t live with, near or have exposure to them to counterbalance the images they see.
In this way, several movies with the same tone can be damaging or limiting in the way it shows people and lead to misconceptions or negative feelings towards a group of people. This is why representation is important. This is why stories must be told in a way that empower people to understand others by seeing their differences and their commonalities, but most of all their humanity.
Art has the ability to bring people together and to help people see that we live similar lives in different ways. It also has the power to give insight into a life that you may never have to live, but you can be sitting right next to someone who is. And, maybe if they come to you for comfort, you can draw on that movie character in understanding how they might be feeling while they go through something you may never have to.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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