I Want to Make People Feel Things
By Paola Parra Leggs, Baja California Sur, Mexico
As I sit here at my living room table, my sisters doing their own respective things, I struggle to put into words what this past year and a half has meant to me and I almost don’t want to. It’s hard to explain myself to you when you’re not here in my brain with me. I like to think that I’m someone who feels things very strongly, so this is my attempt to be as sincere and authentic as possible. I will write today about what I consider to be the two most important things in my life: sisterhood and moviemaking.
For me, out of all the things I am, I’m an older sister first, and during the pandemic I’ve thought a lot about this. I want to be a good sister, but being a role model can sometimes be hard — how can I be this to my sisters when I’m a faulty human being myself? I want to make sure they are loved and that they know they’re appreciated. I want them to be caring and compassionate. I want to make sure they know they can accomplish whatever makes their hearts happy, and that they’re allowed to feel intense emotions. All I want is to uplift them, which is why I hug them every chance I get, and why every time they show me a new creation they’ve made, I make sure that they know I think it’s the greatest thing in the world.
And it’s hard not to learn from the two of them — they make me a better person because of it. For now we’ll continue to grow together and all I can wish is to make them proud, because I already know I will be of them.
My 13-year-old self discovered filmmaking and storytelling were a thing and decided it was the greatest thing ever, after watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the first time. I’m now almost 17 and am such a distant person from who I was, but the one constant the entire time was my love for cinema. I think the main reason it is such a big and important part of my life is because I want to make people feel the really cool and beautiful feelings other people’s art has made me feel, and most importantly the way they’ve helped me because of it. My biggest wish is to be that someone to somebody else.
This has been yet another all-consuming thought these past months, because a) How am I going to make the movies I want to make? and b) Where do I find the motivation to do anything right now? To make matters worse, I tend to immerse myself in the type of media I really enjoy from the creatives and content creators I admire. There is nothing quite like the powerfully beautiful emotions I experience from things that I know make my heart happy, and that also make me hopeful about my future — but by spending a great amount of my day doing this I endup feeling lazy and unproductive. It’s a very weird cycle of getting incredibly inspired from the media I consume and at times being so dependent on it for my happiness, that I then feel bad about not producing my own art. But it’s all something I’m working on and I’m glad I’m self-aware about it.
Having open conversations with my friends about our emotions and deepest thoughts is the biggest way I can combat this intense feeling. It’s such a special experience to be going through adolescence together and I’m so grateful that I’m surrounded by such beautiful people I love very dearly. I’m an amalgamation of so many things and this is only part of who I am. This isn’t even half of what I think about but as I’m writing this I wonder what the people who read it will think of what I say and who I am — for I am scared of the world and almost everything in it, but I also want to make people feel things. I hope that the inner workings of my brain have made you feel something, at least for a second.
