On The Power of Storytelling

Last week, I found myself on a train heading an hour away from home with a borrowed phone and nothing but the views of houses and hills to soothe my frazzled nervous system. I was heading to my first KPop concert after a busy day of work and trying to figure out how to fix my phone that had suddenly broken that morning. I was stressed. The type of stress that leaves you on the verge of tears from the amount of cortisol rushing through your veins. Without my normal distractions on my own phone to distract me, I used the train ride to breathe, reset, and reflect on why going through all this stress behind 8 men that I’ll never meet and just learned about felt worth it. The simplest answer was that I was inspired and I wanted to experience something new. On a deeper level, it had been a long time since I felt genuinely inspired and I wanted to see it through. Despite the stress of the day, I went on to have one of the funnest nights and solo adventures I’ve had in a long time.

If you haven’t guessed already, I’ve recently fallen down a deep K-Pop rabbit hole thanks to KPop Demon Hunters and I’ve managed to successfully get a lot of my friends to watch the animated masterpiece because of everything that it has activated for me. Not only did I end up going to see this KPop boy band named Ateez live about two weeks after I found out about them, I also have learned about Korean art history, language, history, shamanism, and the broader KPop industry. I’ve recommitted to my dream of being a polyglot and I’ve been thinking a lot about the dangers of parasocial relationships, the misused power of fandom, and the toxic aspects of the entertainment industry — all off the strength of one movie. That is the power of creativity and storytelling, especially stories that are culturally specific with universal themes.

As a practitioner, one of my healing modalities is creative expression because a big part of my healing journey has been healing my own relationship with creativity and my inner artist. I’ve dabbled in many different kinds of art throughout my life from wanting to be a singer at age 5 to focusing on screenwriting as an adult with a short stint of being a theater kid in between. I love storytelling in all forms and I’ve known the power of storytelling since I was a very little kid. When I was about 7 years old and I had my first experience of racism (which was essentially someone making a very frustrated assumption about me because of my Blackness), I had the thought process that people only discriminated against others because they didn’t understand them. I realized that stories were how people understand each other so I just wanted to write stories.

I still hold that belief to be true and in a year where the orange man is doing his absolute best to cause fear and chaos in the U.S., having two of the biggest movies of the years be Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters is no small feat. The success of these movies proves what the entertainment industry, ran by wealthy white men looking to extract art from creatives for profit, has always been afraid to admit —people want diverse stories and want to connect with thoughtful, intentional art. The challenge with creating the conditions for more stories like Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters to exist is that storytelling and art mainly reaches the masses through a vehicle that is incentivized first and foremost by racialized capitalism, the pursuit of profit and the maintenance of the status quo, rather than art existing for art’s sake.

Societal structures are collapsing and the U.S. is losing the soft power it has held for years by exporting stereotypes about marginalized communities and projecting this image of strength to other countries. We need art and artists to help us — not only process what our current experiences are but to imagine a new and better world. It may seem trivial, but one of the most important things you can do right now, (in addition to calling your reps, getting involved with your local community, and prioritizing your healing) is create. We need art. We need new stories that show us that another world is possible. Despite the limitations of the entertainment industry as it’s set up currently, projects like Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters prove that true art is, and always will be, undeniable — the thread that brings us together when the powers that be try to keep us apart.

With that being said, I invite you to consider: what does your relationship with your inner-artist look like right now? How can you affirm that your art, your perspective on what is happening in our world and what our world looks like in the future matters? Because it does.

As always, thanks for reading and if you’ve watched KPop Demon Hunters, please let me know so we can geek out together.

Also if you’re interested, the next Collective Energy Reset Session will be next Tuesday 8/19 and we’ll be focusing on the theme of “Dreams.” You can register for it here.

With love and gratitude,

Paula