‘A process of unlearning’- by Korrie Powell
It’s probably best to introduce myself first, my name is Korrie Powell, I am a 23 year old visual artist, who currently works at BBH/Black Sheep Studios as a director and photographer. In this blog post, I’ll be speaking about my journey with therapy and how my relationship with it helped to create my conceptual project ‘RAGE’.
Back in 2018, I wasn’t in the happiest of places. I found myself feeling as if I was regressing in life, working in multiple bars after leaving my first internship in the creative industry (as an in-house filmmaker) at 20/21 years old. Spending my money on impulse and struggles with anxiety, meant that I had neither the funds nor the confidence to find my voice creatively. My main focus was to ensure that I was making enough for myself and my family as well as trying to fulfill my filmmaking dreams, hoping that one day, I would get some sort of big break.
Working as a bartender was tough; long hours, heavy lifting and parenting drunk people to say the least. It was hard, but my biggest take-away from that experience was what I learned about people. I’d serve new and old faces every day and sometimes spend up to eight hours listening to their stories, achievements, hopes, failures and regrets. It was all on display for me to hear and all I had to do was pour a pint and listen.
I took a particular interest in the men who visited the bar. All different in their own way but their conversations were bound by this ‘mask’ when talking about their insecurities or troubles.
Behind the bar it felt like I was standing ashore staring at a sea of sad faces, men drowning within their own insecurities. I couldn’t help but feel like the tide would eventually come in and pull me in too. After realising this, I knew that I needed to reflect.
I purchased a journal after my manager complained that she kept on finding my ‘thoughts’ littered around the bar on the back of till receipts. I always carried it with me and whenever I could, I would write down thoughts and ideas. Initially it was used creatively, but soon I was using it more meticulously, for day to day thoughts and feelings. It very quickly became my diary - an extension of my mind.
Whenever I felt low I began to write down what I perceived to be my flaws and my innermost thoughts and feelings. In doing so, I exposed myself to a lot of hidden anger and pain I had been harbouring inside of me since my school days. Around winter of 2018, I had completely filled the book. Inside, there were more negative thoughts and feelings of myself than ideas. I knew journaling was not enough, I would have to go further.
Therapy was always something I wanted to explore and experience in my life. I saw it depicted in film and television a lot, an example being one of my favorite TV shows, ‘The Sopranos’. I thought it would be something that could help me delve into my feelings, and find ways to understand them. This was easier said than done. In my experience as a Black man, our culture (be it Jamaican or for Black people in general) does not see therapy and mental health in the best light. There is a general consensus that your mental health issues should be kept to yourself. At first this made me hesitant to engage with the idea of therapy fully. I didn’t want to feel like I was ‘too far gone’. However, I couldn’t help but look at the older Black men in my life and realise how much they were masking the trauma and pain that they had experienced. They would have benefited from therapy in their younger years. I didn’t want to continue this cycle of pain and repression, I knew I had to go through a process of unlearning.
The first stages of therapy were tough. I was assigned to a White woman and this made it harder for me to fully express myself and break down how I was feeling. This stemmed from my early experiences of feeling unable to articulate to my teachers the needs and struggles I had growing up Black in a predominantly White schooling system. Although she was my therapist, she was unable to grasp the complexities of Blackness without attributing stereotypes to my experience.
The eventual transition to having a Black therapist thoroughly changed how much I was able to share, as I finally felt like I was being seen and heard. I was able to be more open with my therapist and myself, and this made the experience much more rewarding. I felt validated. I used the sessions to specifically target areas of my life that I wanted to unlearn and further delve into as a man.
RAGE is a film and photography project that I worked on for the best part of two years. The project explores the complex and often turbulent relationship between masculinity and vulnerability, as portrayed through the eyes of a Black man. Whilst I was working on this project, I was also going to therapy, and a lot of the themes analysed in the work are reflections of the things I learned whilst attending my sessions. I found it interesting how both the project and therapy overlapped, and the project provided me with the tools to visually articulate what I was discovering about myself.
The making of RAGE was itself therapeutic, and with therapy fueling the direction of the project, it forced me to look at myself and ask some difficult questions I would have never asked, if I didn’t go on this journey. Using visual lenses allowed me to explore themes that often go unseen in everyday life and push the audience to explore them. Hopefully I gave them the courage to face themselves.
I hope you enjoy!