The Truth and its Many Contradictions
As I may or may not have said in my previous projects, I have been visiting the University Health Center for regular therapy sessions. I am someone who regularly suffers from depression, and I am visiting to prevent the next episode. Through these sessions, I have learned a lot more about myself, my memories, and my feelings, looking at different parts of myself under different lights. While I might not have experienced a very traumatic childhood, I have lived a life of relative isolation and stress due to my upbringing as a first-generation low income Korean-American. After many sessions, I have realized some common themes about the thoughts that run through my head, particularly concerning that of paradoxes, transformations, and cycles.
Paradox - One of the common things that would regularly come up would be how often I seemed to contradict myself. These contradictions, however, weren’t always untrue. Paradoxes, by definition, are contradictions that are somehow true. My therapist brought this up, and it made me wonder why these were true. One example that I’m comfortable sharing is my love and hatred for my home in Colorado. Of course, I love my parents, my sister, and my friends back in Denver. However, after an incredibly stressful year living in Colorado during my semester off, I came to hate “home” because of the trials and tribulations I went through. How is it possible to love and hate something? I think this is something we say in some of our relationships, especially romantic ones. These paradoxes don’t indicate that you want to avoid something. Instead, we should see paradoxes as indicators of the things you truly care about.
Transformation - This is an idea that I will be exploring in my next project through origami. As human beings, we all want to change for the better because our successes depend on it. Personally, after my semester off, I wanted to become a much more motivated person, stopping at nothing to pursue a career in film. Part of me recognized that, in order to achieve my goals, I needed to change, and that started with me getting my degree. This also meant that I needed to leave home in order to get myself out of whatever prevented me from changing. I guess this is why some people choose to go to school in far off places - to learn about themselves and the world beyond them.
Cycles - This is another common theme that came up in my conversations with my therapist. Whenever I would transform into someone better, I always fall back into a previous form of thinking that placed me in a rut in the first place. I think people have a tendency of doing this, running around in circles and always ending up at the start. As of right now, I have no idea how I can break the cycle. However, to put it metaphorically, one must push the wheel to move it, and I think that’s how we should look at life: Instead of going in a straight line, it’s more like a roller coaster with loop after loop after loop.
