Comic-Con fans! Let’s find new ways to keep our mental health strong during a time of uncertainty in the world.
Join forces at this San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) @Home panel to discuss the importance of a creative outlet for mental health with Dr. Steven Chan (Clinical Assistant Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine), Dr. Alicia Zhou (Chief Science Officer, Color), and Liezl Fernando (Manufacturing Engineer, Bluepoint Controls). Moderated by Dr. Francis Kong (Curator & Founder, Imagine Talks) as a pilot of the rebellion.
Watch the YouTube panel here:
Joining Forces with Captain Pike, General Leia, Rebel Pilot, and Dark Magician
Francis Kong: All right everybody, welcome to this Comic-Con educational panel. This is a panel focus specifically on a very serious matter, as you can see how [we’re] dressed. We are focusing on why being creative or have a creative outlet is so important to what you do professionally, and also personally.
I’m Francis Kong here, and I have moderated many Comic-Con panels before and I'm really honored to have some really great guests here. I'm going to actually let them introduce themselves first before we get started.
And once we have all that done, then we'll sort out some of these questions about why we think creative outlets are really so important for a person's well-being, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
Dr. Steven Chan as Captain Pike
Francis Kong: I’ll go down, I guess, clockwise from what I see on my screen here. Let’s go to you, Captain Pike. Tell us who you are in your real life and what you do.
Steven Chan: Hi, my name is Steve, I am in costume as a Star Trek: Discovery captain. And, in my professional life, I am a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine, teaching psychiatry and behavioral sciences. And I clinically see patients in my practice for addictions and psychiatry. In my personal life, I am a huge Star Trek nerd and a Star Wars fan, and I am so glad to be here.
Dr. Alicia Zhou as General Leia
Francis Kong: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Chan. I’ll go down on my side here, General Leia. Organa, Leia. Please tell us who you are in your alter ego.
Alicia Zhou: Hi, everyone, my name is Alicia Zhou. I am the Chief Science Officer at Color. We are a company that does genetics as well as now COVID-19 testing. We’re located here in the Bay Area.
My background: I am a cancer biologist, a clinical geneticist, and now dabbling in epidemiology, and in my free time, I am a huge, huge, huge Star Wars fan. So I dug into some more of the archives of Leia. This is Hoth Leia. So, from The Empire Strikes Back. And I’m really excited to be talking with all of you all today about this very important topic.
Liezl Fernando as Dark Magician
Francis Kong: Awesome. Thank you so much, Alicia. And finally, I have I believe this is the Dark Magician that is joining us here. Please tell us who! Love the hat. Please tell us who you are in your alter ego.
Liezl Fernando: Hi, I’m Liezl. I'm also known as Tytalis cosplay online. I’m a cosplayer, I’ve been cosplaying [since] around, around 2013. I make a lot of my own costumes. I taught myself and I make a lot of stuff in my free time.
Liezl Fernando: Professionally, I just recently got my masters in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley last year, and now I’m a manufacturing engineer at a small electronics company in Milpitas.
And a big part of how I became an engineer is actually inspired by my love of cosplay and all things nerdy. And so those two things are really closely intertwined and I’m really excited to talk about that today with everyone. Thanks for having me.
Francis Kong: So we’ve got great representation from Stanford, from Berkeley, and I believe two really good schools. Alicia, you’re representing as well, too.
Alicia Zhou: Yes, MIT and Harvard.
Francis Kong: Oh, yes. And MIT and Harvard. Yeah, I’ve heard of those schools. OK, so from the world of academia, we’re going to dive a little bit into exactly, now that I have the idea of what you guys do. And we’re talking a little bit about mental health in general. And you guys obviously all have, I think, pretty stressful jobs, especially in COVID-19. We’re producing a lot of these test kits in the medical field. And also as a biomedical engineer, before we talk about like creative outlet.
How Do We Define Mental Health?
Francis Kong: I’m gonna throw this out there and everyone’s answer can answer that. How do you guys define what mental health is in the first place? Anyone?
Alicia Zhou: I mean, I feel like Steve probably knows the clinical definition of mental health more than anybody. But I think for me, mental health is really how do you approach your day?
How do you have the positivity and the emotional balance and well-being and probably aspects of your social life as well, to be able to make sure that as you are undergoing sort of all the experiences that are happening to you throughout life, that your mental state is positive, that you’re able to sort of take in everything that’s happening to you all day long and be able to process that and be able to sort of maintain that kind of equilibrium in your life? So personally, that’s what that would mean to me.
Steven Chan: Yeah, I agree, I think with mental health, it’s sort of well-being, psychologically, socially, [and] spiritually. And when we think about mental health, there’s a spectrum: there are mental disorders, disease, sort of the things that we think about when we think of, say, a psychiatric hospital. We also think of mental well-being, more positive things where you want to achieve a certain quality of life or...want to do things that you want to do in life.
I view mental health as a spectrum and certainly, anyone can land anywhere on the spectrum. And our goal, at least and what I practice in psychiatry, is to help people move towards the [goals] that they want. Most folks want to improve their quality of life. So [when] I think of mental health, I think of well-being.
Francis Kong: Liezl, what do you think mental health actually means?
Liezl Fernando: I think I can’t put it a whole lot better than Alicia and Steven. Especially, I am by no means a medical professional, but I can only talk about my own experiences. As Steven said, it is a lot about, you know, your own well-being. And as Alicia Zhou said as well, kind of being able to process how you deal with things in life like struggles or even good or bad things, how you can kind of take those in and, you know.
Make yourself kind of see, like if bad things happen, you can kind of process and be like, “OK, why is this happening?” or, “Why do I feel the way I feel?” and hopefully kind of get more of a positive reaction out of it. And that could definitely help you kind of how to react to those situations as well going forward.
Francis Kong: OK. Good. Thank you. So if we’re all agreeing that mental health, is basically someone’s overall well-being and able to focus and function properly. It sounds like it’s pretty important to me. And if that’s the case, why is it pretty obvious to me and to the community, why is mental health largely ignored a lot of times? Anyone can take that.
Steven Chan: Well, go ahead, Liezl. Go for it!
Liezl Fernando: Yeah, I think there’s still kind of a stigma around it, especially growing up in the Asian family. My parents, it was very hard for them to admit that mental health is an actual thing. When I went to college, I had a lot of social anxiety and depression and, for a long time, I didn’t even realize I had that my parents were always just like, “Oh, you know, you’re just sad, get over it,” like it's not an actual illness.
So for a long time, I was like, “Oh, I’m feeling this way because it’s like it’s not, it’s not something in my brain. I just should just get over it.” So I think a lot of it people are, I guess, scared that they want to admit that it’s an actual illness. They don't want to admit that. They just want to kind of say, “Oh, it’s some you’re just kind of sad.” Like, this isn’t something that you can just like you can actually medically fix.
So I think a lot of people still don’t understand that it’s a thing that people actually struggle with. And it can be even like a chemical imbalance in the brain that could be fixed medically. So I think there’s still a lot of maybe ignorance in the community, I guess, that can definitely be helped with more education and awareness.
Alicia Zhou: Yeah, I think the other piece is, you know, I’m a parent and I have a five and a half-year-old man. I hear him in the background; so poignant in this panel. But one of the things when I watch him sort of learning how to deal with his emotions, he definitely sort of goes between very extreme emotions very quickly. He’ll be very, very happy and then very, very sad very quickly. And I think when we see that kind of behavior as adults, we kind of assume that it means that you lack maturity or that somehow you haven't grown up yet.
So when you see an adult behaving that way, you kind of you don’t think that this person maybe is struggling with mental health and instead you say, “Oh, grow up,” or like, “Oh, you know, be more mature about it.”
It’s because we’re seeing this behavior that we kind of equate to the way children act and we think that must mean that you can grow out of it and that often makes it such that people are very sort of embarrassed to admit that they have struggles with mental health because it’s almost as if they’re admitting that they aren’t mature enough or that they haven’t grown up. I think that’s one of the major issues why people won’t recognize if they have that.
Francis Kong: Wow, interesting, Steven. What about you?
Steven Chan: Yeah, you know, when I think about what—and reflect about what—Liezl had shared (about how people feel like it’s something that you can just get over or that it’s something that’s pretty stigmatized), I think that mental health really is the last frontier of medicine and health care.
When we think about all of the medical discoveries that we’ve seen, we’ve learned how the heart pumps blood. We’ve seen how lungs can pump in air and pump out air. And so we can see a lot of these physical changes in the anatomy of a human body.
But the brain is super complex. You can measure things through imaging, through electrical signals, and you can also measure someone’s mind, state, or mental state, by speaking to them or looking at their facial expressions, or hearing the way they talk when it comes to the brain. It’s such a complex organ that it’s taken years to develop and everything from childhood, everything from education, how a family is formed, to the present state, can all really change the way we behave and feel.
And so with mental health, it’s so much so complex and Liezl touched upon [these factors]: could it be neurotransmitters or could it be a chemical imbalance or could it be part of someone's upbringing or environment? so it's such a complex issue, which is why I really like the subject.
At the same time, there’s a lot of misunderstanding about mental health. It’s hard to connect the dots when a lot of the concepts are super abstract to people, especially in our school, in our education, where mental health and emotional intelligence isn’t something that’s part of the curriculum and isn’t necessarily something that you can test on a multiple guest’s standardized exam. So that’s why I think mental health is truly the new frontier or the last frontier of medicine.
Francis Kong: Wow. How appropriate, Captain Pike. Alright, what I’m getting here is. (inaudible)
Steven Chan: Is Francis back?
Francis Kong: I’m here, I’m here. OK. OK. (inaudible). I froze here. Are you guys back? OK, alright. We're back, cool. So, yeah, from a cultural point, I’m hearing like, yes, so there could be like a degree of cultural indifference to it or not admitting that it actually is an issue.
There’s also a social component where you associate maturity with the state of mental stability, so to speak. And then there's also our medical reasons of why we're just not at that level of technology actually measure. And if you can't measure something, then you can't really gauge where it is on the spectrum. I assume that's like you're saying, right? Steven? So, OK, if that’s the case, then we’re finding a lot of battles here for the state of mental health and well-being.
Are Creative Outlets Important for the Well-Being of One’s Mental Health?
Francis Kong: So then if that's the case. Largely, this seems like it comes down to the individual to be able to have to do a lot of self-healing, self-reflection, self-recognition, self-insight, because there's almost zero support out there and sometimes even negative support out there. So [if] that's the case, why do you think creative outlets actually act in a therapeutic way at all to the well-being of one's mental health in first place? Anyone?
Alicia Zhou: I mean, this is something that I feel like just anecdotally, when I think across the scientific field and when you think of people who are very, very good analytical mathematical science minds, every one of those people I know also happens to have a creative outlet like photography, like music.
They like art. And I personally as well, I find that being able to use art as an outlet is really important because of how free form it is. Unlike in engineering and science and math — where there's always the right answer and a wrong answer — with art, that it really is just a spectrum. There is no right answer. There's no wrong answer. You can find what gives you joy and no one can disagree with whether that gives you joy or not.
No one can judge the sort of quality of that joy, as long as you drive that joy. I mean, I think that means that there's a much sort of broader spectrum in which you can really display and sort of emote your emotions because there is no sort of black and white. It really is. You can be a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And there are so many different types of outlets that I feel like I can really give you that kind of balance.
Certainly for me, where my job is very analytical during the day, being able to do something creative outside of that is a complete sort of 180 from what I do during the day. And it really helps me to actually focus on my job because it rests that kind of analytical part of my brain to be able to go and think about more creative things. So to me, I think being creative is a natural counterpart, actually, to being analytical.
Francis Kong: OK, very good. Steven or Liezl.
Liezl Fernando: Yeah, I completely agree with Alicia...I believe creativity is really important...Like she said, there's no boundaries on creativity; you can really do whatever you want and you can't say, you know, there's no right or wrong answer to creativity. So for me, with cosplay, it really helped me kind of be more outgoing.
I guess I was always known as the quiet, quiet, shy kid in class... I was always in the background. Like, people didn't really take notice of me. And it's hard for me to make friends. But then when I started getting into cosplay, you know, it helped me bloom a lot. It brought me to this community of people who are very similar to me and it helped more confident when I'm wearing cosplays and I'm meeting people. And it's definitely just a venue of passion and creativity is all about bringing something to life or bringing some kind of vision to life.
It's very freeing in that way and to me, it's very important to have that. And so it's definitely really helpful, again, for me personally, for my social anxiety. It was really helpful to have that venue to kind of show people like, oh, I'm not just the kid who just sits quietly in class and does whatever she's told or whatever. I have this other side that can help me and like, show people that I have this other side.
Francis Kong: Awesome. Very good. Thank you. Steven, what do you think?
Creative Outlet and Mental Health go hand-in-hand
Steven Chan: Yeah. You know, creativity, I got to say, creativity, mental health go hand in hand. And we just heard an example from Liezl about how really the creativity really has helped her come out of her shell and also help with, you know, keep things calm. And I think that when we see mental health treatments, for instance, it's not just medicine, it's not just talk therapy. There can also be healthy recreation exercises, healthy creative exercises. Where I work, for instance, folks can go out on trips, outings, even healthy activities like cooking too. Cooking is so creative and so delicious too. And it brings so much joy to people.
Steven Chan: So, when I think of creativity, I think that creativity is very helpful for mental health. At the same time, for those who need help with some of their mental health, sometimes it's hard to be creative if you are, say, very anxious, or are in sort of caught in a loop where you're sort of thinking about bad memories, over and over and over again. And so I got to disagree with one thing you mentioned, Francis, about how there's no support.
Mental Health Activities in Video Game Conferences?
Steven Chan: There is support. I feel like I've heard of how some video game conferences, for instance, video game conferences, have more mental health activities and more greater mental health awareness. You've heard of it? Have you heard of this?
Francis Kong: I have heard. There are some steps and lots of video game conferences that do offer this.
Steven Chan: Yes, and I believe there’s actually a Harvard-trained psychologist or psychiatrist — I forget which — but someone on the East Coast who actually goes and streams on Twitch and also talks about mental health while they’re playing video [games].
And also there’s a lot more social media. I know social media has been painted as in a negative light for a lot of the issues of mental health. But some of the companies have been working with mental health groups. Like, one of my friends runs Stanford Brainstorming. They’ve worked with Pinterest, for instance.
And there are some healthy ways to use these platforms to get social, to get mental health support if you follow healthy accounts, like Mental Health, America, or NAMI National Alliance for Mental Illness. They have a lot of uplifts. It’s great to use to get some positive support in your life, too, so there is some good out there, too, when it comes to mental health support.
Alicia Zhou: Yeah, I mean, I think the other thing Steven’s sort of going off, what you said about sort of Twitch being a platform where mental health is actually something to be talked about, there is something about the creativity that also is a form of escapism, which I think is very healthy to be able to sort of unplug from the current reality of the world and whatever stresses and problems you may have in your life and be able to somewhat move into a different space and kind of escape from that.
Over the course of 2020, which has been a very stressful year for all of us, I discovered adult coloring books. These are coloring books for adults. There are a lot more complicated than children’s coloring books with exact same concept. Right? It’s an image, it’s already printed on paper. I got some really nice color pencils. It’s very sort of calming and therapeutic to sit there and just color away at my picture of nature and there is a form of sort of escapism that comes with that.
Really, when I think of sort of why I love Star Wars, for example...it’s really great to be able to sit for however long, sort of take off the mantle of all my problems and all of these things that happened to me today, put that away and really dive into a different universe or a different world where things are a little different and the problems are very different. And I don't have to think about my current sort of world during that time.
I actually think then it is really helpful to unplug in the beginning of the COVID pandemic, for example, where I certainly felt a lot of sort of uncertainty about the world. I was very worried about what was going to happen every single day. And my job was very stressful because we were building this COVID testing lab. I really found that was the moment when I really needed the creativity and the outlet more than anything, any time before because I couldn’t have my brain 24/7 be focused on the real world and the real world problems. I needed to have that break.
Francis Kong: Now, yeah, so what I’m getting here is that a lot of mental health can be have some sort of correlation with very restrictive, very demanding environment[s] or schedules, or expectations on a constant basis. And the reason why creative outlet is a great therapeutic is because that kind of, by definition, removes all of those restrictions. And you make your own rules, you make your own timeline, you make your own goals, you make your own achievements.
What are the Different Creative Outlets for You to Recharge, Relax and Take on the New Day Again?
Francis Kong: There is nothing that you need to do for approval from an external source. That’s what I’m getting here. All right, I love that. That makes so much sense. That makes a perfect correlation, why. So if that’s the case, then. A little bit more about you guys. Now, anyone who wants to speak up first, what do you guys do personally? As a creative outlet that you see as a very therapeutic way for you to recharge, relax and take on the new day again. Any one of you guys?
Oh, and why? Not just why but how did you discover it? That’s an important thing. Like some people may want to know how to discover their recharge. So how did you guys discover? What do you guys do? And how did you guys discover that? Anyone?
Let’s go with you Liezl because I think it’s pretty obvious what you do, but I would love to know how you discovered it too. OK, I’m sorry I messed up, (inaudible) we're back? OK. We're back.
So, Liezl, I was going to ask you so I’ll start with you. What do you actually do and how did you discover it in terms of your therapeutic outlet?
Liezl Fernando: Yeah, sure, so I do cosplay, so yeah, like I said, I have been calling for several years now and I make my own stuff, so ever since I was a kid, I always loved, like, nerdy, geeky stuff. I played Pokémon as a kid.
You know, I watched Sailor Moon and all the anime and growing up with a lot of video games and so on. And I always love that side of like what I did in my free time. But at the same time, I felt sort of ashamed of it. All of my friends at school, they were all just bookworms and like, they weren’t really into video games. So I was scared of telling anyone I was into Pokémon because I didn’t want to be made fun of.
And so, you know, this kind of mentality just kind of ruined me for a long time until around I think it was almost end of high school where I found this cosplayer online. And she’s very famous: you probably heard of her, Yaya Han. She’s a very famous professional cosplayer and she makes all of her stuff and it's all amazing. And I saw that. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. Like, she’s a grown adult who makes these costumes and becomes these characters and brings it to life just for fun.
I immediately wanted to do that. And so I, for my high school graduation, I asked for a sewing machine and I taught myself how to sew like, you know, pajama bottoms and then I grew from there and it was just a really cool outlet for me to finally show that, like, yeah, I’m a nerd and I dress up like we’re from Bleach and all this kind of stuff and it was really fun going to conventions and meeting people again, you know, who were like me, who also maybe thought that it was not the cool thing to do, but because there were so many other people like us, now, we could finally share in our, like, you know, fandoms and all of that.
And, yeah, it’s always just been kind of for me, if you know me, it’s like 90 percent of what I do in my free time. Like...if I have free time, that’s what I'm thinking about. Like, “Oh, what’s my next [costume] like going to be?” Or, like, looking at Etsy or fabric shop, like, “Oh look at these nice fabrics.” I can use this in my next costume and suddenly it could be stressful times to get cosplays done like the night before for an event, an event.
Liezl Fernando: But at the same time it’s still definitely therapeutic to, you know, just sit in my room and be able to sew things and kind of get out of my like, you know, like Alicia said, my work zone of just thinking, oh, I have to do this tomorrow, I like these works. I have bills to do or whatever, but I could just be like, I’m going to dress up like Dark Magician Girl today. I get to do this like it’s really fun to just be able to step out of that and become someone else for a day, I guess.
And that definitely led me into love of designing and making things for a long time. In college, I was actually on track to be to becoming a doctor because that was my parents’ dream for me. And so I was taking chemistry classes and doing all that at the same time, like just starting constantly and getting used to that as well. But then I realized I really did not have any interest in becoming a doctor. I don’t like biology and...it's just not like I have so much respect for people who go to med school, but I don’t think I would survive that.
So, while I was kind of lost in my professional career, I still had cosplay going on and I was always loving, like taking apart costumes and trying to see, like, “OK, how am I going to make this? How am I going to put these things together and design it?”
And then I kind of realized, like, that’s sort of like engineering, like, you know, taking things apart, designing it, figuring out how to put a design from on paper and bringing it to real life. And that’s kind of how I started exploring, becoming an engineer, and then, here I am with a mechanical engineering degree and finally being an engineer and actually putting a lot of the skills that I got from cosplay into an actual professional career. And so, yeah, it’s definitely something that changed my life and it's just for me being a nerd and playing games in my room when I was a kid. So it definitely was very helpful for me.
How to Do Both PhD Research and National Taekwondo Championships
Francis Kong: Awesome. Thank you so much. What about you, Alicia? What do you do as a creative outlet and how did you discover it?
Alicia Zhou: Yeah, so actually, for me, it was, is martial arts and so for me, actually, when I was young, I grew up really wanting to be a Power Ranger, like I really want to be so bad. I want to be Trini the Yellow Ranger, the original Yellow Ranger.
I went to see all about her. And I really wanted to be a martial artist. And I was a kid. I was like, oh, I want to go to karate and I went to my parents and hey, I really want to enroll in martial arts class and they’re like, “Great!” and then they’re like the next week and they signed me up for Chinese dance class. So I did Chinese dance for two years, like the fan dance and the ribbon dance and all that.
And I think they never really quite understood. I think what I meant was that I want to be physical, I guess. But I really wanted to be a Power Ranger, and I was like, this is not going to get me there. And so I really went most of my childhood really never, ever doing anything sports-related or physical. I was very much a mathlete, not an athlete. And when I went to MIT, actually, that was when I got the opportunity to actually join a martial arts club.
So, I chose the MIT Sport Taekwondo Club and I started taekwondo, which is this Korean martial art and [when] I started I was a complete beginner. I luckily was coordinated because of my Chinese dance classes. And so I was able to sort of keep up with the intro classes. And I had no intention at that time to go very far. I just wanted to give it a shot. And then I really enjoyed it. There was this sort of intramural league that my team participated in where we actually went to tournaments.
And we actually slowly over time, I got different belt rings, and eventually at the end of my senior year of college, I got my black belt, which was not something I had been aiming for. In fact, I was explicitly sure I was never going to get a black belt. After I saw my first exam, I was like, that is super scary to you've had like that looks super hard. And so I got my black belt my senior year.
And then afterward, after I graduated MIT, I actually became an instructor for the club. I stayed in Cambridge to do my Ph.D. just down the road at Harvard. And so I was still an instructor at the MIT club. I would actually still go and teach classes there and my coach, who was very dedicated to all of the students who are in his taekwondo club, you know, he was a engineer by day at Lincoln Laboratories and a computer science engineer and then at night he was doing all the taekwondo. He opened his own taekwondo school. He was teaching the taekwondo club at MIT. And he took a bunch of us and said, you know, I think you guys can go pretty far in the sport.
Alicia Zhou: And I was one of those people. And so I ended up doing a lot of extra training with him. I was teaching the MIT club, I was doing extra trainings with him at his taekwondo school and I actually ended up making the collegiate national team in 2009 and 2010 and I had the insane opportunity actually to travel in both years as part of the national team and compete with USA on my uniform and represent the United States at these tournaments.
And one of the things that was people always ask me, how are you getting your Ph.D. while also competing and sort of the international taekwondo? And I don’t think of them as mutually exclusive at all. I actually think it was because of the dedication I had to taekwondo that really propelled me in my work and in my Ph.D. because I had no choice but to be focused at work because I knew I was going to have to — I was going to go and train in the evening.
And so there was no opportunity to procrastinate. There was no chance to say, oh, “I just need to take a longer coffee break” or “I’m just going to watch another YouTube video” because I needed to have the discipline to say, “No. Tonight, I’m going to go to practice,” “I have to teach class,” or “I’m going to work with my coach,” whatever. But it meant that I needed to fit my Ph.D. into those hours during the day and any Ph.D. student will tell you most Ph.D. are 24/7 kind of thing where you go into lab at 2:00 in the morning or like you basically are sleeping next to the lab. I couldn’t do that because I had this kind of other career, other life.
And I actually think it was the best thing because I had so much balance. I was spending almost equal hours doing my Ph.D. as I was doing taekwondo. And I was excelling at both because I had that balance and wasn’t getting burnt out by one or the other.
They were really actually helping balance each other. And so for me, so that was how I discovered taekwondo. And even now today. So I’m a 4th-degree black belt now. And I actually, a couple of years back, opened with some of my friends, opened a studio here in the Bay Area to teach taekwondo.
And for me, being physical fitness is always my outlet for sort of getting that workout every day and breaking that sweat. Taking that time off for my brain to use my body is something that I feel like very much as important for me to bring balance.
Francis Kong: Wow. It gives a whole new meaning to using the force there, Alicia. Wow, a fourth-degree black belt international taekwondo competitor. Did you win or place?
Alicia Zhou: I did. And I have a bronze medal at the world championships.
Francis Kong: So, we have a bronze, the third-best taekwondo martial artist here in our (inaudible)
Alicia Zhou: Like 2010. It’s been a while.
How to Fail at Getting a Pixar Internship, Before Medical School
Francis Kong: Oh, it’s been a while. Yeah. I’m pretty sure you (inaudible). Very impressive. So, Steven, to you, what do you do for your creative outlet that makes you happy and brings you joy, and relaxes you? And how did you discover that?
Steven Chan: You know, I got to say, I'm laughing because it’s hard, it’s hard to follow Liezl, Alicia, and Liezl’s cosplaying and costuming skills and the creativity behind it. Alicia's martial arts skills.
I cannot, can’t top that. You know, I got to say, I’ve been such, growing up, I was such an introvert and I actually did a lot of my creativity through computer arts. I remember going to Barnes and Noble booksellers, one of the bookstores, major booksellers, collecting all of the computer arts magazines, computer art design magazines, staying after school and high school to learn Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator and InDesign in order to get a newspaper going, a monthly newspaper going.
And even through college, I would do things like teach rabid premeds — hundreds of rabid premeds — but put together biochemical illustrations and organic chemistry illustrations in Adobe Illustrator for the worksheets. And I would take 3-D animation class. We learned Maya.
I almost got a Pixar internship. I think I almost got it because I went to the second round of interviews and they found on my resume, “Oh it's an honor premed society,” and poof! It went out the door, so they caught me, they caught me, they were onto me.
And so I did, admittedly, I did go through the premed route, the medical school route. It was just like a train track. You just go down and it's very constrained. There's really not too much wiggle-room. There's not a whole lot of room to fail. So in order to really decompress, I would do things like create art, create computer arts, and create designs.
I would always have a Wacom tablet. I would do Photoshop coloring of scanned art and create cartoons or comics. And then when I went to medical school, I noticed, well, we don't — this was actually I'm dating myself — this was before Facebook really took off beyond colleges. We had a really terrible way to share files and share knowledge. So I ended up putting a lot of the creative work in creating web designs for essentially a student internet portal that was running on an open-source system.
So, I use some computer science skills and I did a lot of sort of like usability testing, etc. And it was just more of a pet project, a project to love. So what I'm doing nowadays for my creative outlet is to write about my journey and to talk about how I have been, you know, overcoming things like depression and anxiety, social anxiety, and write about it in a very creative way. But that also teaches people about how to at least try to overcome a lot of those hardships that I faced. And I'm hopeful that that that that message can come out. So that's what I'm working on at the moment.
Francis Kong: Wow. OK. All are very, very powerful stories and journeys to how you guys got where you are. And in a very early stage, you guys discovered your own personal outlet and really helped to keep the balance that I think a lot of people are lacking and the ones who don't get the insight yet. So we only have a few more minutes. That was a very fast panel. We have a few more minutes left. And I'm going to ask one last question for you guys. It's maybe one or two minutes, if you can.
How to Make Time for a Happy, Creative Life
Francis Kong: But I just go down the line here. Let's go with, let's go with you, Alicia. (inaudible). What is one last, a bit of wisdom or parting words — resources you want to share with the world watching this — on how they can start creating that own personal, second part of their life that gives that balance ... and helps them discipline and achieve that the overall yin and yang patterns in their lives?
Alicia Zhou: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the thing I wanted to say is that sort of creativity and art come in many, many different forms. And so I think a lot of people feel like they need to pick a sort of conventional form of art. But there's actually so many different ways you can think about that. It could be visual, it could be written, it could be musical, it could be physical. And I think everyone probably has something that they really enjoy.
And it's just about sort of following that intuition, and especially when it comes to being creative, because there is no right or wrong. It really is about sort of figuring out what it is that you're really excited to do. And the way you know you're excited is when you want to do more, you want to learn more. You want to find somebody else who likes the same thing. And that's how, you know, you found something that you really enjoy and just be unafraid to pursue that. And I think we've all sort of said here, being creative is a key part of being successful in other parts of your life.
So, instead of saying, “Oh, I don't have time for this, because I have to make time for my career or my job or my family,” or whatever, and it's often the first thing you cut off your list. Instead of doing that, make it the last thing you cut off your list. Make it the thing that you have to do, because it's the thing that's going to keep you and give you that balance. So don't let it be the thing that you cross off.
Achieving Fun & Creativity for Work-Life Balance
Francis Kong: I love that. Thank you so much. Liezl, what are the parting words of wisdom for people who are looking to achieve balance and creative outlet for their life?
Liezl Fernando: Yeah, I think Alicia said it really well, you know, just having it as a priority is something that a lot of people overlook, I think like I have a lot of friends who don't really look into the creative side. Like if they have free time, they're like, “Oh, I don't know what I like. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. I'm just going to sit around and watch TV.”
And for me, I'm like, “Oh, I have to be doing cosplay.” If I'm not working on cosplay, it feels so weird to me.
Like, I don't feel productive because it's just so part of who I am, like having something to do that's not work, that's enjoyable. And you know, it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to just stick with one thing and like that's the thing that defines you. Like, there's plenty of things you could like, you know, try to coloring books or something really simple, like whatever sounds interesting to you.
Just try it out and then kind of go from there and explore different avenues and what could be fun or what you might be passionate about. Because in the end, it's about like, art isn't about — unless you're professional — it's not about making money, it's not about anyone else, but it's about making yourself happy and feeling fulfilled for yourself.
So, yeah, just finding it, what you like, what you're passionate about and just, you know, follow your heart, follow like what you really want to do. And that's all that creativity is about.
Francis Kong: Awesome. Thank you so much, Liezl. And Steven? Parting words of wisdom for people out there who want to find their creator soul.
Toxic Productivity: How Guilt & Shame Affects Anxious Overachievers
Steven Chan: So, OK, so I alluded to this with my, the last question, but I’ve been working on a site called Mental Power Hacks, and Francis and I have talked about this many times.
So it’s something where I’ve talked about: talk about how it’s OK to give yourself permission to play, and it’s OK to give yourself permission to be creative. And I think Liezl talked a little bit about this, about how there’s some guilt and shame that can come with not being productive or just going off and playing.
And so, one of the things I’ve learned in my life — and I think it applied to a lot of others — is if you’re one of those anxious achievers, overachievers, people who feel like it, they must work. 24/7, eight days a week, that sort of thing. Carving out time for rest, self-care, meditation, exercise, creativity can really, really help you. Not just to be more productive in other areas of your life, but also spark new ideas and creativity.
So, I actually to find that resting and playing and trying out new things like what Liezl said and what Alicia has done in her life certainly has been very helpful for me personally and to be happier and to be more mentally well. So I’m hopeful that we can spread the message with this panel that way.
Francis Kong: Awesome. Thank you so much, you guys. We are now out of time. That has been such a wonderful joy (inaudible). Herewith Captain Pike, General Leia, and Dark Magician.
And I hope all of you guys got something from this panel who are viewing this and we’ll see you hopefully soon in Comic-Con, hopefully no later than 2022. Fingers crossed. See you guys there. Take care. Goodbye now.
Steven Chan: May the force be with you.
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