Reframing fear A cinematographers take
imagine a life without fear
completely fearless doesn’t that sound
wonderful
but is it really what we want and is it
even attainable
i don’t know about you but my greatest
fear is losing the people i love
working as a cinematographer i have
sometimes covered
humanitarian crises or conflict areas
where i’ve witnessed
the worst of that fear come to be
last year in mozambique the impact of
cyclony dai
left thousands without a home having
lost loved ones overnight
those in the city of bera saw most of it
destroyed
others in rural areas observed the
entirety of their crops for the year
flood and sweep away many populations
were inaccessible for weeks
people were handling mountains of pain
no food no electricity somehow
having to figure out what happened
i can still vividly recall an interview
with a woman
in a refugee camp in iraq
now she explained to me that her husband
had
strangled her nephew for being too loud
while he was sexually assaulting him
she looked like a shadow
in 2013 i covered one of the world’s
largest killings of demonstrators in a
single day
in recent history the raba massacre in
cairo
i followed several protesters for weeks
prior
normal people like you or i until that
day
august 14th and it was at that moment
where
in the midst of all the chaos a switch
went off
and people who had lost family members
or maybe their best friend started
saying things like
now i’m gonna show the government what
terrorism really looks like
now i am willing to die for the cause
many of the people in these stories
might appear
as though they had no fear
that was simply a reaction to the losses
and the trauma they’ve been exposed to
they felt they had nothing more left to
lose or to give
and their natural survival instincts
were completely drowned
by the grief
have a colleague and dear friend who
said to me you know i would much rather
work in a conflict zone
than go back to my family home it is so
suffocating there that i’d rather
operate in a war zone
the first time i went out on assignments
and bullets were flying i was scared
and my adrenaline was riding a roller
coaster
but i also realized that it didn’t feel
as unnatural as i would have expected
so i took a pause and did a bit of soul
searching and realized that
i’d grown up in a complex family with a
volatile home
in an unpredictable country mexico where
bullets did sometimes go flying and we
all had to proceed
as normal maintaining a high level of
alertness was a part of the landscape
sure this can come in handy very much so
in moments of extreme
pressure but it doesn’t mean that you’re
fearless
simply means that you’ve been exposed to
fear a lot and you’ve learned how to
work with it
it’s amazing how we will continue to
gravitate towards the familiar
relationships lifestyle line of work
until we truly decant whatever hang-ups
we’re carrying in our backpack
and it’s only once we do that that we
can truly operate from a place of
wholeness
knowing full well that we are capable of
overcoming challenges
but most importantly gaining
are better for our life and more
powerful than fearlessness
courage resilience
one of the hardest conversations i ever
had was
telling my father that i had been raped
what made matters worse is this it
happened with a family member
let me introduce you to my first cousin
he really was a lovely person
he was great at business he went to an
ivy league school
got married had a daughter
and to this day i just cannot
understand what got into him
because i had been raised to look up to
him as an older brother as an only child
that was really tough and
the worst part of that was i was trying
to explain it to my dad
and you know there’s a lot of discourse
out there around sexual violence but not
a guidebook on how to reveal something
like this to your father
i had a pit in my stomach pins and
needles in my head
my hands were shaking
and for a moment i considered a viable
option to just
not say anything at all because my fear
was going
what if we just don’t tell him in fact
what if we just pretend that this
never happened never tell anyone ever
sounded good till i realized that every
time there was a family gathering
maybe christmas or a dinner a birthday
i’d need a level of academy award acting
in order to pull off normality
i’d also have to carry the whole weight
of that on my shoulders
in silence for a crime i didn’t even
commit
nope i quickly moved on from that idea
and decided to tell my best friend
now at the time i was in mexico because
i’d been shooting a documentary and he
was in canada
so this happened over the phone and as
soon as i told him my fear went
okay we survived that but we are
absolutely never doing that again
he very wisely said you know the longer
you keep this a secret the harder it
will be
to speak about you need to just bite the
bullet and start
speaking out now he hung up the phone
and said he was calling me back in 10
minutes to make sure
that i told someone in mexico because i
needed support
then as soon as he hung up and i heard
that silence
it felt loud and
i didn’t know if i could do this to be
honest with you
then i realized yeah he’s right
i did want to disclose and this was the
best thing for me so
i called another friend and she drove me
to her house via a pharmacy
where i got a morning after pill i took
two eventually and
that was just in case no doctors were
consulted on that decision
but when we got to her house she dialed
my mom’s number
put the phone to my ear and just went
here just get it over and done with
all alarms are going off in my body at
this point i’ve got temple palpitations
i’m vibrating i can hardly feel my skin
but somehow i knew i’d built some form
of muscle
granted a very weak one at this point
just enough to keep going
so i picked up the phone very
reluctantly
and went high
and as soon as she heard my voice all
she said was
were you robbed or were you raped
i was shocked i mean how does she know i
don’t know if this was a reflection of
how
well my mother knows me or the fact that
in mexico city we are sometimes exposed
to a high level of violence
anyways i just started crying and
somehow got the point across
now so far i have been very lucky
because i’ve been disclosing and
receiving support
sadly it doesn’t always go that way and
i also had a chance of speaking face to
face with my aunt
my cousin’s mom she was my godmother
growing up and we were very tight
and unfortunately she chose to face to
face just point blank look at me and say
i do not believe you oh
that hurt to this day that hurts
and after that she proceeded to expunge
herself from my life
basically and a long chain of family
members proceeded to do the same
never speaking to me but just deleting
me off of social media
you better believe that every single one
of those losses was mourned
and grieved back to my father now the
fear
felt real i mean
what if i lost him too
and what if he decided he didn’t want to
see me again
we were sitting in the backyard the sun
went down we didn’t even notice
in a bench in the dark i could have
planned this better
sorry dad but i felt shame
and embarrassment and somehow
we got through now i wish that had been
like ripping off a band-aid and that
initial sting passes and then it all
starts to subside
no that was not the case this was
different
people were navigating uncharted
territory fighting an inner battle
digesting at their own pace everything
got
too much and one thing led to another
and my father ended up
in hospital with a stroke
and it was most likely caused by stress
so now my fear had skyrocketed because
now i’m going
okay what if this is how my father dies
and it wasn’t long before i found myself
going
this is how my father dies and i have
killed him
by revealing this information i never
should have done that this is my fault
this is how the story ends
when you’re in the thick of your fear it
is so easy to panic
you know i was experiencing
a level of anxiety and it’s anxiety
that’s
making us dread that hypothetical
outcome that may or may not be real
real fear is meant to protect us
and keep us alive it’s triggered by the
amygdala in our brain
and can send us into fight flight or
freeze modes so if a car skids in your
direction as you’re walking down the
street
it’s what kicks you into fifth gear this
was not that
this was another kind of fear which i
refer to as my excuses fear
and it’s the one that keeps you
operating on this high level of
vibration
and it doesn’t let you ground yourself
and also it prevents you from making
decisions that could have
very positive and lasting impact in your
life
so back to the hospital luckily my
father did not die that day
in fact he is very much alive and
kicking nearly a decade later
what did happen was that i chose to get
help
because i just knew that i couldn’t deal
with this alone
so in therapy i came to realize
that the reaction of my family was
actually quite normal for a rather
traditional conservative mexican
extended family and this kind of thing
happens
all over the world every day sadly
i also came to realize that confronting
reality sometimes
takes a lot of guts not everyone can be
ready at the exact same time
nelson mandela once said he never lost
he either won or took a lesson
i was terrified of losing the people i
loved the most
but i did and it hurt so what’s the
lesson
well i think it’s really important to
remain grateful
for all of the moments and memories that
we share together
because those make me who i am today
but it’s also okay to draw a line family
or not
and understand that people can be
wrongfully occupying in a place in your
life that they no longer deserve
it was time to part ways
i was once shooting a documentary in the
sahara desert with a tuareg who are
a nomadic tribe in the desert
and they have lots of crosses
and drawings and patterns and embroidery
jewelry and i wrongfully assumed that
this must be a religious thing until i
sat down with one of them and he said oh
no no no
these lines are arrows this is you
and this is everyone else you’re going
to meet in your life
you need to learn to appreciate that
intersection
because it could last a moment or a
decade
but in the end you’re on your life’s
journey and they’re on theirs
and it’s important that you welcome the
moment that you have to part
out of respect for each other’s
direction
i thought that was beautiful
and reframing our greatest fears
it’s not only possible not not only
possible but taking charge over them
to author our life’s novel is
almost like a human right in my mind as
creatures
of reason and creativity sure we all get
some miserable cards dealt at one point
or another
but the reality is that we get to decide
whether to play them
burn them magic trick them fold or keep
them close to our chest
transforming hardship and to fuel to
motor us forward
is entirely done by choice
now my aunt once told my parents that
they had to find a way to keep me silent
because if people found out about what
happened it would destroy
my life that was very much
her fear because speaking out about this
allowed me to lose the fear of people
finding out the big secret
and i was also able to empathize and
connect with people in a much
deeper level than i had before when
they’d gone through similar things
i was able to put my skills to the test
and use my creativity and
technical abilities to create a
multimedia exhibition
addressing the impact of rape alongside
24 other rape survivors
i wrote a book on it but most
importantly i regained my confidence see
fear of anxiety could have prevented me
from having an incredibly
beneficial outcome
so now the big question is what is it
that truly petrifies you that you know
is a roadblock in your life that which
your intuition
knows man if only i could get over this
i would feel such
freedom it doesn’t have to be extreme
it could be as simple as the fear of
saying i love you
or i’m sorry
in my line of work cinematography and
visuals it is impossible to compose an
image
without having the presence of both
light and darkness
they’re forever entwined one cannot
exist without the other
and i have always loved how this is a
real metaphor
for life because had we not the
dark painful moments we would be unable
to really enjoy those bright moments
that feel like perfection
and had we not the fear we would not be
able to
understand that we’re able to face it
navigate through it
and come out stronger the other side
sure it’s not a linear journey all the
time
because today i’m strong tomorrow i’m
not and in a few more days the stakes
have changed
but as long as we can continue taking
those little steps forward
just like making those phone calls it
all works like building blocks
teddy roosevelt once said and i am
paraphrasing here
it is not the critic who counts it’s not
the guy
pointing fingers at you saying how you
stumble and how you could do things
better
don’t listen to those guys it’s about
actually
standing into the arena of your life and
trying and failing and trying again
because there’s no effort without error
i tell you what there is no
self-confidence without conquering a
fear
so have a look around your life observe
whatever darkness might be there
befriend it understand whether it’s
there to protect you
or prevent you from something figure out
whether you need to
adjust your sales or stay firm on the
course
no matter the tempests and as you’re
navigating through the
depths with nothing but the crumbling
bits of your very last
nearly used up match and the broken
compass
just remember all the answers are within
we are all born with an inner light
and wisdom all we have to do is
pause listen to that intuition
reframe if we have to and let that
guide the way thank you