First of all, this is my favorite class in this semester even though I thought at beginning that Kickstarter project would be my most worried thing. The result was becoming less important to me because I got inspired a lot on the way I’m thinking and it shaped my understanding of entrepreneurship. It just opened a new door for me to interact with people and this world. I really appreciate the experience of doing it.
I got to understand this project better when it was approaching to the end. The concept that I think is most valuable to me is how to build a community, offering the community and gain support from this community. After this project, the question I’m asking myself the most is why I have the ability to represent this community and why people can trust me on doing it. At beginning, I put a lot of effort on thinking how to make people feel empathetic and how to encourage them to participant. It was valuable for how to make the whole experience good, but it was not the right direction to convince people to trust me that I have the ability to run this project.
The reason I think I have the power to represent this community is that I’m a survivor and I found the hidden correlation between depression and childhood verbal abuse. After I published the confession video, many of my friends said to me that they have gotten the similar hurt words from their parents and went through some hard time in their childhood as well, but they never make a connection between verbal abuse trauma and their character flaws. Some of them didn’t even realize the origin reason is verbal abuse. However, they were so excited to tell me that I’m right and the verbal abuse is definitely the origin cause of some of their depressions.
This reaction enlighten me on how to approach people and how to make this project even more meaningful. In my current project, what I encourage people to do is to let go the hurt words, but the reality is, for many people, before they realize what’s hurting them, there are many steps to reflect back to their childhood and make a connection between what they depressed about and the original cause. The correlation is actually very hard to find. In fact, the process of finding the correlation and realizing the original cause is the process of healing themselves. Once they realized the reason, they can let go their pain somehow.
I think this is an amazing finding while I was doing this project. I would want to continue doing this project and shift it from letting go the hurt words to finding the correlation between your original family and your depressions or character flaws. As a person who want to represent this community and offer support, I should boldly propose to them to try to make a connection between childhood verbal abuse and their depression. By proposing this, I can show in the public that I’m confident about what I’m proposing and also use myself as an example to validate what I proposed. I believe this will communicate to people that I have the ability to run this project.
This is a meaningful project for me, not only because I care about this topic, but also the process made me believe in the correlation more than before.
