Storytelling

My father still dreams in french. A friend once told me he perceives the world in music. Every once in a while, I catch myself thinking in film, divvying the world into camera angles, clips of dialogue, melding the music in my ears into a soundtrack, rather than simply processing the stream of images before my eyes.

If I weren't becoming a psychologist, I think I would become a documentary filmmaker. There is something romantic about not only seeking to absorb oneself in every drop of knowledge about a topic and being willing to gallivant about the earth to discover it, but also the act of wanting to expose the topic to the entire world. Perhaps it is the noble ideal about the pursuit of knowledge that leads me to be driven in my own research- but the research we do as academics seems less pure somehow, tainted by egotistical motivations, departmental politics, and ridiculous truisms like "publish or perish". We speak not of findings, but of extra lines on our CV. We don't seek to present our knowledge to the world at large, rather preserving its exclusivity in our now cliched ivory towers. There seems something more authentic about storytelling.

For some reason, a rather unremarkable image has become wedged in my head. Years ago, an old boss told me of going to see a documentary at a film festival. The director was there... but not many others. This struck me as so tragic, to imagine someone working so hard to expose the images that no one actually wants to see or to have told the story no one feels the need to hear.