TRANSCRIPT:
Hi! Welcome….. to my day, to my train of thought.
I recently had this idea, and I want to do something special, exciting, and challenging for myself. Today is December 7th, 2020. This video is about my (hopefully) upcoming projects of short videos related to Brinktober. I know it’s not October… Obviously not, but that doesn’t matter. I still want to do the challenge I started in October. Brinktober is sort of inspired, but not inspired by, more of a new/modified version, of what used to be the well-known Inktober thing, but the story behind it is that the creator stole another artist’s original work, so that’s out of the picture. Now, the new thing in its place was created by my dear friend, my love, Bridget Berrigan. Her instagram is @onthebriiink, I don’t know how many i’s… Maybe four? Three? I don’t know. I’ll have to check. But check it out, you’ll find it. She is an amazingly skilled artist. I’m blessed to have her in my life, and we’re all blessed to have her share her art skills with us. She actually started something that made other great Deaf creatives/creators come up with their own forms of artistic expression too. Really, I’m super impressed. I love seeing all the different talents, like vlogs, ASL poetry, ASL songs, self-made earrings, sketches, [I was thinking of resin art pieces lol], and just all kinds of art! Writing, too. Whatever you name it! Even Twitch, YouTube, blogs, funky coffee or pet Instagram pages… A to Z! And beyond! I love, love, love it. And yeah, honestly, the community has inspired me to pursue this new thing for myself. I will translate my Brinktobers. My favvv is writing. My thingggg is writing. I love to write! I’ll also translate my brief prompts in ASL. Good challenge for me. I really love bilingual access, with both languages. I’m really into that. I even have jobs related to that. So… I’m gonna go do this for myself, and why not share with whoever is interested to watch, or not. This is really very exciting for me, because what I wrote/am writing for Brinktober is really versatile. Some are scary… wooo… and some are more like ruminations. I’m inspired by Ross Gay. Too bad I don’t have the book here – I have it somewhere else. That book is “The Book of Delights.” Ross Gay is a super intelligent Black man, a beautiful author, and he writes his delights of the day. You know, life is tough with a lot of struggles and frustrations, but find that one delight, that one thing that gives you joy during the day. He made note of them and wrote about them every day, so I’m inspired by that. I feel like Brinktober is a good way to start doing that for myself, with stories or random thought spillings or whatever. That. I’m excited to start this challenge. In October, I only did seven days… Oct 1 to 7. Today is December 8th, so I’m gonna continue. So instead of saying October, I will use “day” like “Day 8”, 9, 10, etc. My goal is to get to 30 no matter how long it takes me. Maybe even after 2021, and that’s okay! I will write it out, then sign. Or maybe I’ll sign something, then translate it. Either way. Let’s see how I feel! No rules to this! I just want to take a moment to… Share that, and to say… Don’t be afraid of what skills you might have. Sometimes you might feel… To be clear, with ASL for me, I’ve always struggled with it. The previous video froze for some reason. Anyway, so in my life I was always a bit insecure about my signing. Often I’d code switch to PSE and turn the dial back to ASL, and sometimes I’d use PSE or not sign very often for a long time and then suddenly go back to ASL. I would feel totally out of place. ASL didn’t feel real. It felt like I kept messing up, and like people were looking at me strangely and thinking I was awful, but that wasn’t true. Sometimes I’d overthink it. So to be here and taking this leap to share ASL videos for the sake of signing… Poetry… Expression… Is an incredible feat for me. I’m proud of myself! And thanks to those who might want to watch them, or not. I don’t expect you to, really. I really don’t. And y’all, explore your passion. Explore different things that make you feel excited. Explore. Be creative. I think that’s really important, no matter what your preferred form of creativity may be – it can be anything. So this is my exploration, to write and sign. Thank you. I’m excited for what’s to come!Â
