Questions. By @JacobDeFig
By Jacob de Figueiredo
Questions.
Throughout my life, I’ve always had an unsettling tendency to question everything. Now, some people would say this is a positive quality as I guess it shows ‘curiosity’ and a ‘thirst for knowledge’ but, if I’m being completely honest with myself, it drives me insane. Ever since I was able to form full sentences, I’ve never been able to feel fully satisfied with an answer that I’ve received, it just leads to more questions. I was a pretty cynical child; I came out of the womb screaming my head off and my mum used to say that, even as I grew up, I never really stopped screaming. I just couldn’t see any beauty in the world for a long time, while most kids would approach their parents asking for toys, ice cream and to stay up later than 9pm on a school night, I’d be questioning our existence with my infamous catchphrase, ‘what’s the point?’ Traditional school definitely didn’t help with this either; I remember the questions that used to bounce around my head vividly as I’d receive another big fat D on a mock mathematics paper. Essentially consuming my very existence as I desperately tried to extract some kind of answer from the chaos, ‘Why do I hate this so much?’ ‘Is this really the only way I’m going to be able to reach success?’ ‘Why are all my other friends succeeding but I’m still failing?’ ‘Surely there’s another way, why do I have to follow a path that’s already been set out for me?’
And for a while, I just kind of accepted that there were no answers. It used to eat me up inside, everyday living my life with every fiber that made up my existence feeling completely unsatisfied and lost.
After I found SCA and it all changed, the internal questioning stopped as I felt I’d found my place, for a bit. Then it all started again, when I found myself constantly asking questions over and over after various master classes, whilst feeling like I was wasting everyone else’s valuable time purely because I needed to find out more, in order to exile the familiar feeling of being unsatisfied with myself that I was eerily used to during my schooling career.
I’d use the line, “this might sound like a stupid question… but…” constantly before asking any questions. The weird thing was, I had no idea I was doing it, it was as if my subconscious was creating a way of me covering my tracks before I asked each questions, due to the fact there would be many a time where it’ll just be me, keeping the class behind with an influx of excessive question asking.
I’m going to try and wrap this wall of cynical word diarrhea up now with a positive ending, there was a massive turning point for me during a master class we were graced with by a lady called Adah Parris aka Mama. Her job was to help us discover who we truly are and how the world perceives us. She allowed me to come to the realization that these questions are something I should be proud of and are a part of who I am. People will approach me and actually say they envy the amount of questions that I asked during class, which was a pretty surreal feeling and her master class has made me realize I should be proud of this. It’s now my duty to make sense of all the answers and project them through my work as a creative.
I came here to learn about advertising, who knew I’d would be on a journey of self discovery… and I’m only 7 weeks in.