Anxiety Attack
Go inside of an anxiety attack and come out on the other side.
Transcript
This is not a kind path to walk, but I have to walk it anyway.
I could be walking beside you. I could be the person ahead of you, or behind. I could be someone you know.
I could be you.
Picture yourself driving on the highway in rush hour traffic. You are tired and you have somewhere to be. But you’re stuck surrounded by all the other cars, crawling forwards. You are caged between white lines, resenting the drivers ahead for being so slow and the drivers honking and that idiot trying to cut in ahead of you.
Then compound that feeling into being shoved in a crowd of people and trying to move. In the space where your car could be are half a dozen strangers, all pushing in different directions, all pushing in on you. You pass face after face, apologise for stepping on someone’s toes, try not to fall.
Now imagine that the crowd is internal. You are surrounded, but only in your head.
The thoughts just niggle at you, at first, like whispers at the back. Insecurities, doubts. You start to count out your flaws. You list everything you need to do until the lists could fill books, could fill shelves, could fill boxes piling onto your chest like a Jenga tower, precarious, threatening to topple at any moment and let dust cascade onto you. The whispers become a dissonant chorus, an endless crescendo…
And you want to scream you want to shout you want to cry out you want to cry but your eyes remain dry as desert, just like your tongue. Your spine is a rod struggling to hold up the weight of a nervous peripheral nervous system, a paralysed central nervous system. Your stomach becomes five fingers forming into a fist that tightens, tightens, tightens until nails are digging into palm. And where is your heart? Your heart has gotten lost in your throat. It is accelerating rapidly. It urges you to run, and the soles of your shoes slap against the tarmac uselessly.
Your heart and feet race each other. Where are you going? How do you escape your emotions?
Where are you going?
How do you escape your emotions?
You stop.
You aren’t choking.
You can catch your breath.
Stop.
Stop so you can catch your breath.
Stop so you can catch up with your breath.
You have spent so much time counting time. So you will inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds.
Inhale. One… two… three… four…
Hold. One… two… three… four…
Exhale. One… two… three… four…
Hold. One… two… three… four…
Again.
Inhale. One… two… three… four…
Hold. One… two… three… four…
Exhale. One… two… three… four…
Hold. One… two… three… four…
Keep going. Keep counting. Regulate your breath until it begins to slow.
You are tense; your shoulders have hunched forward. Let them go.
Your mind is a beach. You are wading in the water. It laps against your knees. It is cold, but the sunlight on your skin is warm. You have been heading subconsciously to a pier, not far away. It is sturdy, wooden. Your thoughts are a net of seaweeds. Ugly brown and black that feels like lettuce between your toes. They may wrap around the pier’s columns, but the pier will still stand. They may wash up on the shore, but the tide can take them away, too.
They will drift away again.
At least one in seven Australians have anxiety. I am one of them.
Look at the people around you. Count half a dozen of them.
One… two… three… four… five… six. And you make seven.
You are seven people.
Any one of you could have anxiety. Any one of you could be me.
Background
During the summer of 2022, I participated in a Sound and Spoken Word workshop organised by SIGNAL Youth and hosted by the sound artist Xen Nhá and the poet Thabani Tshuma. This script goes inside of an anxiety attack.
Reception
The full piece played at the SIGNAL Sound Walk on Flinders Lane in the centre of Melbourne for a month.
Creative Collective
Background
Following the great time we had during Female Futures, participants were all very keen on collaborating together for more work. We even met up again to exchange ideas.
Unfortunately, this was February 2020. It wasn’t long before we all were plunged in lockdown.
Working remotely, we came up with the idea to interview fellow creatives whom we know about creating in confinement. These would all be put up on a website alongside our short films.
I edited my fellow artist Alex Veljanovski‘s interview with the playwright Amelia Newman.
Connections
Young people write and connect messages of what a gender equal future could look like.
In the summer following my high school graduation, I was accepted as a participant in a film-making workshop hosted by SIGNAL Youth and run by Hannah Moore and Kate Lefoe for female and non-gender binary creatives under the age of 25.
The workshop was intended to run for ten days, though unfortunately some days were cancelled due to the poor air quality from the Black Summer bushfires. In that time, however, all of us ended up creating a short film, from concept to shooting to editing. On the final day, we listened to a panel with Hannah, Kate, Hayley Adams and Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore about being a woman (or non-binary) in this industry.
We were given the prompt ‘What would a gender-equal future look like?’ and the option whether or not to use it ‒ all of us did. For Connections, my abstract idea came just from playing with the recyclable straws… as you can no doubt tell.
During the production stage, we were one another’s cinematographers, actors, interviewees, sound technicians, continuity and production managers. The stars of Connections were the thoroughly engaging Hollie Chivers, Vivian Qiu (with a mea culpa in the credits ‒ I misread her surname) and Izzy Lyndon-James. Boudoir photographer Natalia Naa offered her expertise with cinematography, as did TuffGuts for assistant directing, who was there in a general manner as support from SIGNAL. I filmed the footage in the bright Naarm streets.
Reception
Connections was shown at Federation Square on 8 March for an International Woman’s Day event. It also played on the outdoor screen at Bunjil Place from July‒September 2021 and March‒June 2022.
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