Something's Coming

Anxiety is something that we all deal with in everyday life, whether it is with school, work, or family. We all have responsibilities that cause us to feel worries that are the part of our natural lives. Paranoia is defined as an instinct or thought process, heavily influenced by anxiety and fear, to the point of delusions or irrationality. However, who gets to decide whether your anxieties are reasonable or not?

I grew up with parents who were very precise in how they carried themselves and their household. They had concern about how to behave in a evil and secular world in order to live a “proper” life. Growing up in this environment caused me to have many of the same anxieties. It was exhausting on my soul and I did not even realize it at the time. Once I got to university, I was able to see other points of view and talk to the right people in order to alleviate some of my angst.

One of the common practices suggested for me, in order to cope with my anxieties, was to use art to express and deal with that. I knew I had a love for movies ever since I saw Jurassic Park at the tender age of 8: my parents made me cover my eyes anytime someone got eaten, but I still peaked between my fingers. My attraction to film grew to the point that by the time I was in high school I knew it was what I wanted to do as my profession. I enrolled at The University of Missouri, pursuing my degree in Film Production and learning many valuable skills along the way. But, I still did not see film as a therapeutic possibility.

That did not come until I took my first screenwriting class and got the chance to write a legitimate screenplay. I wanted to explore my anxieties and what would happen if I indulged those feelings to the point of delusion. My attraction to the horror and sci-fi genres stemmed from how they delve into our everyday anxieties, and present a twisted and horrible version of a very real feeling or thought you may have. So I wrote a screenplay based on that, and through many revisions and edits it became the short Something’s Coming that I have here today.

Through writing and creating this short I was able to express and explore my emotions through creating a nightmare version of how I often feel. This expression has been invaluable to me as a sort of comically overblown example. I do not think I will ever do something as drastic as my protagonist does, but it still is a visual representation to me of what I believe can happen if I indulge in my worst thoughts. It was incredible feeling finally being able to put a piece of how I feel out to the world by using same artistic medium that I have loved since childhood. Going forward,I plan to continue to use my skills in order to channel my experiences and emotions into new scenarios, albeit twisted and nightmarish versions of them.