"A fear is if you're not good enough or not going to make it." "Then you ask yourself:" "Do I want to do this?" "Maybe my talent is not being the trendy, sly guy" "From my point of view this is the best time ever." "My parents always said:" "You can be anything you want, as long as you try." "You really want people to think about you:" "Ah, he's doing well." "The most important thing is that you're happy." "Regarding freedom, opportunity and chances it's a special time." "If you want to do something, you want to do it good, right?" "You don't want to do anything half-heartedly  so that others do it much better?" "Then why would you even do it?" "In that case find something you can do better than others." "I've drawn my life." "And I always wanted to be an illustrator or do something with drawing." "So I had to go to art school and that was in Utrecht." "Subsequently I lived in Utrecht for seven years." "Then I had had enough of Utrecht." "I went to London." "I went there to direct music videos." "Because there I have much creative input from my own ideas." "And that's really fantastic." "I have fun orders." "Styling for commercials, television and video clips." "And I did a project in South Africa." "Made a collection." "I can go on an internship in Berlin." "I can perform with a colleague." "I also made a long journey through South America." "Last year I taught in Cambodia." "I saw a different continent each year." "I'm now at a point that things are going nicely." "But I must meet that in turn, or something" "Yes, I must meet that." "I must give everything for it now." "What image do you think people have of you?" "In general, someone who has absolutely no trouble with life." "Someone who easily flows through." "That's what I think of many people." "Making a very nice line or something is obviously very intangible." "But that gives a kind of eh nice feeling or something." "Simply that locomotion." "I'm not someone who feels bad and makes all sorts of nasty stains with black because of it." "That's not my thing." "Big exhibitions." "Articles that are really about me." "As an illustrator." "That would be great." "Yes, you can say that that is the dream." "It's hard to look seriously." "Put your hand in front of it?" "Slightly lower." "Sometimes I think:" "It's all possible, but a man dreams more than he does." "It's willpower." "You want something and you think you can do it." "I was born in the Netherlands." "When I was four we moved to America." "We lived there for three years." "We moved to Switzerland." "I finished school there." "And then I went to study in the Netherlands." "Now I live in Brussels during the week." "And in the weekends mostly in Rotterdam." "My friend lives in Rotterdam." "Getting coffee in bed in the morning." "That makes me happy." "And a beautiful film." "Yes." "And reading texts and a book that I really like." "That makes me happy too." "I'm spending a weekend in Amsterdam." "Seeing friends." "And then I'm in Berlin again to meet some friends." "This is what my life is like." "When I graduated I knew exactly what I wanted to do." "That was what I'd already been doing for three years." "In the third year I'd made a clip with someone." "We had done that as an internship project." "From that moment on things for started." "We were often asked for things." "People suddenly saw us as a director and no longer as an animator." "I did everything myself then, together with Rogier." "Filmed myself." "Edited myself." "Visual effects." "Everything myself." "And I really like that." "One day we were emailed by two producers from London." "And they'd seen it." "And eh..." "They thought it was fantastic." "They wanted to meet with us." "That was the first link to London." "(She's fucking great, man!" "Yeah!" ")" "It's an adventure to go to another city" "Certainly a city of the size that London has." "Really the whole time my expectation was that I was heading for an exciting and uncertain time." "But I was also going to make beautiful things." "I only go there when I think  that I can become very good and matter, or something." "It always starts with tingling hands." "The first time I didn't know what it was." "I just fell asleep." "And then I woke up and thought that I was having a heart attack." "You just think that that's it." "That it's over, or something." "You have stabbing in your chest." "Your hand and your arm tingle." "You feel your wrist." "Your pulse is normal." "But you think it's not going well." "That something's wrong with your heartbeat." "At night I called a GP." "It's not good." "I'm having a heart attack." "And I got the assistant to the line." "She asked:" "How old are you?" "I said 27." "She said:" "Then it's not a heart attack." "Are you very fat?" "I said:" "No, not very fat." "Just a little bit." "She said:" "You're probably having a panic attack." "She told me to go to the doctor on Monday." "I did." "I told what I had." "The doctor said the same:" "That's a panic attack." "It comes out of nowhere." "All at ONCE." "That an anxious feeling starts to rise." "If I'm uh...in a very anxious state of mind, so to speak." "And if the fear plays a very big role." "Then eh, that's the least pleasant Daniel, for myself." "I guess I've always, despite my fears, ... still done the things that I wanted to do." "Only after that came eh..." "that I no longer coped." "At a certain point I slam shut and I play hide and seek." "And then I'm no longer at home." "Then I don't function anymore" "And that's perhaps something that could also become a depression." "What are you afraid of?" "What I'm afraid of is that eh that I and the rest of the world discover there's nothing about me." "Yes." "MUSIC" "What I'm really very afraid of, is to die." "To die and not be remembered by anything by something that I've done." "And I think that's such a stupid thing." "But probably... that's about it." "And I wish I wasn't like that." "Stress." "Everyone is stressed." "You know, everybody has to deal with expectations..." "And I think that people, say, their personal being often is forced very much into the background by the things that they have to deal with in everyday life." "If you are too busy, or do too much, ... or if things do not quite go the way you want them to it's very easy not to show that on the outside." "It wouldn't surprise me if that is the same with most of my circle of friends." "You are increasingly judged on how you look and if you can do something cool, rather than on who you really are." "MUSIC" "I think I do ask much of myself." "I just want to do my job well." "And you need to be liked, and you need to be fun." "And that I look good." "I think that's important too." "Everything must sort of go well." "With more stress in turn comes more fear and more uncertainty." "Yes, that's very difficult." "You also feel a certain pressure to get the most out of yourself?" "Yes, I feel that." "I can't pinpoint a specific point where that comes from." "That's more something that I think is rooted in society." "Sort of a kind of general ideas or something." "You are at the beginning of your life and you must make sure that you get the best out of it." "And later you can sometimes mess around a bit when you have achieved something." "I've got a nine to five job." "I'm in the trade union world." "Pretty boring, haha." "I get the feeling that I'm always looking at other people's work." "Then that I should do something myself." "Because I would like to be creative myself also." "I used to dream that I was a fairy." "I went to sit in the closet with a light..." "And pretended I was a fairy." "And now I sometimes ask myself in jest, what I would like to be now?" "If it simply was possible." "And now I find that at times, I do not know." "It can be anything you want, what you can do." "You've got no restrictions on what you say or what you do." "What you believe, where you're going." "I have so much choice that I don't know what to choose." "That's very paralysing." "I'm looking really hard at what I did." "And what other people are doing." "And then I also notice..." "I'm look- ing very hard..." "That sounds silly!" "But looking at ages." "What they've already done." "And mostly be very busy with an external image." "Or a virtual image, which is especially sketches online." "On Flickr, MySpace and on Hyves, in the Netherlands." "On your websites and blogs, everyone has a blog." "I would also love to let go." "It's not important." "Because at the end of the day..." "What have you got to show for it?" "The whole fucking world seems pretty cool." "Everyone seems to be an artist." "And whatever." "You're on Facebook and everyone has lots of great, funny party photos." "Then you think:" "I'm sitting on the couch being depressed while the rest is having fun." "That's a really bad feeling." "On Hyves or YouTube you can get a certain impression of someone." "Eh, what you see as reality and immediately take for it." "And, uh, but what actually is not the reality at all." "I make a selection mysef too of photos that I may or may not post." "Do you think you do that in your daily life as well?" "Yes." "Yes, ah..." "It is difficult to keep an aye on a limit for that." "That you're not going to really act." "Sometimes you do that a little bit." "Are you concerned with the image you create?" "Yes, I concern myself with it." "But it's above all that there has to be a picture." "And certainly don't go looking behind it." "Because it's not me yet." "When did this uncertainty start?" "Yes, that's, uh, probably sometime during puberty." "Then a strong uncertainty came." "About myself." "That you always want to know what others think of you." "FRENCH MUSIC" "FRENCH MUSIC" "I do want to prove myself, I discover that every time again." "I always make it hard for myself." "If you linger in the question of what you could do." "That won't make you happy at all." "I very much felt the pressure that I had to perform." "That I had to be good and had to stand out and had to be the best." "That became a vicious circle." "Until I really woke up in the morning and didn't want to." "That was the moment when you think to yourself:" "Shit, I've done something wrong." "QUIET MUSIC" "The ideal Nikky looks much more industrious." "More organized and much neater." "Not only in your work but also for your friends." "Simply an ideal woman." "Yes, the perfect girlfriend, the perfect daughter." "The ideal, yes..." "Everything." "What kind of effect does that ideal image have on you?" "Eh, if I feel that pressure very much then I sometimes completely snap shut." "Then I think:" "Okay, I'll just stay in bed." "I take on calls." "Not even my parents or my boyfriend." "Just really hide!" "At the end of the day I feel really unhappy." "Then I always cry." "Yes, because then I just walk away." "Crazy girl!" "I think you're a very crazy girl." "QUIET MUSIC" "I think that fear is in me, unconsciously, through my work." "And the kind of life that's linked directly to the kind of work." "It never really bothers me that I feel very stressed." "But meanwhile I do get panic attacks." "Or I can't sleep." "MUSIC" "Anyhow, the work and the culture in London are really totally different than here." "It's so incredibly difficult to get a job there." "Several times I've really strawled through London with my backpack full of show reels." "And then the weeks or months after that, you sit and wait for the emails to come." "And after a few weeks you hear nothing and you're gonna call." "And then you ask if they've seen it." "And they often say that they've never got them." "Then I'll go back into the city." "I actually didn't gain a pound in the eighteen months that I was there." "FAINT SOUNDS" "NERVOUS SOUNDS" "DANCE MUSIC" "DANCE MUSIC" "NERVOUS SOUNDS" "MUSIC" "MUSIC" "MUSIC" "Of course I also worry very much because of the sense of anxiety." "I really felt that I literally freaked." "And then you try to, sort of divert your thoughts as hard as you can." "And to think of something nice." "But that doesn't work and even that scares you." "Then you get even more of a sense of anxiety." "And even more panic comes." "And that keeps on building up." "And I really got some basic sense of anxiety." "That went so deep." "And I even got a bit of a feeling that I wanted to lie by my mother or something." "Someone who would protect me, sort of." "You're scared." "And you must do this and that to cancel out your fear." "You must touch this so many times or look at that so many times." "And then it becomes less." "While I know by now that it doesn't help." "That it will only get worse." "And yet you do it." "If you have a ritual and you're really going to put other things aside for it..." "And you feel bad afterwards because you didn't execute the ritual well, or didn't execute it at all then it becomes a compulsion." "A bad phase is that I get wrapped up in it completely." "Then I get all caught up in a web like that." "I see it a great deal around me." "People who suffer from the same things." "The stress." "Burn-outs, RSI." "A lot of strange psychological ailments." "Just from the life we lead, or something." "It's almost a kind of common disease, it seems." "Or a new pandemic." "Does it also have to do with a certain age?" "Yes, age, but also with our generation." "With the fact that you can be anything and are aware of everything." "We've never been as safe and as happy as now." "And everyone is afraid." "Yes..." "But there've never been so many opportunities either." "We have never been able to do so much." "Just the thought that if I want to be in Australia tomorrow that I really can be there tomorrow." "That alone is an unquiet idea." "We can simply do anything we want." "Isn't that a bit..." "I mean..." "We just have too many things to think about." "You can do anything." "There is no framework." "And if it fails, it's your own fault." "What do you mean?" "You could have chosen something else." "Or you could do, um..." "All possibilities are there anyway, so why couldn't you do something." "We really know..." "Your dreams may be as crazy as you want." "That's why they are dreams." "They may be super wild." "There are no limits to it." "What if you do not reach your dreams?" "Yes, that will annoy you." "Or at least, it does me." "It is very bad, especially..." "frustration." "Where are you so incredibly frustrated by now?" "Is it because you actually don't have a dream at all?" "No concrete dream." "Yes, I think that, uh, that, uh..." "Yes, that's really very true." "There are so many things that I want that I cannot say it." "Like:" "Now I'll continue with this." "I want it so badly, really." "I wish I could say tomorrow:" "I know!" "That's what I want to be!" "This is my medium." "But how is it that someone who's so smart and so nice and so talented, is so lost, or something." "Yes, I do not think that I'm so smart, nice, and talented." "Smart what?" "Talented what?" "You see?" "I really don't see that image." "Boy!" "I don't see it." "I know that I need to see it." "I know it." "That I'm making it far too hard." "And really unnecessary." "That, uh..." "What would be the best for me is that I would realize that it's okay like it is now." "It doesn't matter." "And that what I do now and who I am, that it's all okay too." "I would love best to return to the state you're in when you're a child." "You drew, you played." "You wrote stories." "Everything was possible and you didn't think too much about it." "Yes, that's a certain tranquility." "QUIET MUSIC" "QUIET MUSIC" "I always thought:" "I'm such a quiet and sober person." "Psychiatric things don't happen to me." "But, well, it can happen to anyone." "Could you have imagined how intense that would be?" "No, I'd have thought that such a thing could never happen to me." "And when you found out that it could?" "That it did happen to you." "Yes..." "I sometimes thought then:" "You're such a weakling!" "But, yeah..." "Once it starts, even if it is psychological..." "And you don't really know, then it's difficult to reverse that." "Do you never think it's strange yourself that you're 25..." "That you're 25 and are in the prime of your life and you live in ONE of the richest and safest countries of the World and that you're scared." "That is strange." "Yes, that's very strange." "But... that's why I think it comes from myself." "And not from outside." "For all factors are just fine." "What have you got to fear?" "Well, nothing, really." "But isn't it ultimately just a bit of whining?" "Luxury problems." "It's definitely a luxury problem." "But a luxury problem isn't any less bad than a... than any other single problem." "It's got the name of problem." "And the fact that the word luxury is in front of it maybe makes it sound like crap." "But it's...just a problem." "And if you were to move to Africa." "Would you still have the same issues?" "Haha, yes, but then..." "Burn-outs don't happen in Africa, as far as I know." "Because those people at any rate have worse things to worry about than a burnout." "Ehm..." "But it happens I do not live in Africa." "I don't think it'll make me happy to go to Africa." "Even though my problems will there probably appear Very silly, basal and unfounded." "TECHNO MUSIC" "I went to a psychotherapist and immediately had to cry very hard." "That lasted two hours and I've done that a few times." "Until the tears ran out." "Then I thought:" "I'm simply done." "A while later, a few years later even, I thought:" "This isn't right." "It's not working." "I must do something about this." "I want something for this." "So then I went to the doctor with that story." "He said:" "There are people who think after 10 years of psychotherapy if only I had taken those pills before." "That it takes you 10 years before you accept those things." "Because you do not want pills." "Ehm..." "And that..." "Yes, when I thought like..." "Then now I will take pills." "For a while I had it that I had compulsions while drawing." "That was very specific that I had to put certain lines double." "Or touch the paper a number of times again with my pen." "I then drew a line in my head:" "This really isn't permissible, because this affects my work." "If I'd loose that, if I couldn't do that anymore then I don't know what I..." "I think it would kill me." "I went to the doctor first." "He has referred me to a psychologist." "Then it was quite obvious that I immediately got antidepressants." "Because I've taken them for so long, it's completely common practice." "Just like, say, brushing your teeth." "On the one hand I feel very strongly you must be able to do without pills." "It feels partly as a failure if you do not." "On the other hand, I think I'm living pretty healthy." "Sometimes I take a drink, but don't use drugs." "I go to bed on time." "And then that bit of stuff that you pour into yourself that chemical addition..." "Well, I drink diet coke too." "You do have the feeling that you have to defend yourself." "Yes, ah..." "A little." "Yes." "A little bit." "But I don't mind." "In the beginning, I used to be like  I wanted to tell it people quickly because I thought:" "Isn't it OK?" "Can't I have one side that doesn't work?" "Once, when the panic attacks just started and were the fiercest I got pills from my doctor I could take if it was the worst." "Then I realized pretty quickly such a pill isn't the solution." "It's only an suppressor." "It's not a solution for my problems." "If you just singlehandedly create a life that's apparently chaotic to you or restless... and therefore to take antidepressants..." "I think you just have to adjust your life then." "It's not worth so much to me that I am going to take that kind of steps." "Suppose something happens so that you cannot reach your medication." "Would that be bad?" "If it is for a long time:" "Yes." "Could you function normally?" "No." "I could not function normally." "I might function, but not normal." "Without medication, I would lose much more energy to anxieties." "So have less energy to spend on other things." "I would become more introverted, I think." "I do have the feeling that the drugs have changed me." "I don't know if that's my real me, or without the drugs if that is my real me." "Now I do just as many things as before." "The difference is, I think, I experience it all a bit easier." "And less heavy." "I can get things off my mind faster." "And continue." "I feel calmer about that maybe I'm not perfect." "As a person." "Yes." "Sometimes I think that it's all too big and too scary." "It also lies inside." "Now I have to realize that I'm myself my biggest limitation." "I do not know." "Today I was, um..." "I find this very difficult." "I do not know, I, I..." "In one way or another..." "It's awfully annoying." "I talk negative about it, but it is something I've had so long..." "So it's part of, so to speak." "It might be much less." "But for me, it doesn't necessarily have to go." "It does give me a certain structure, or something." "It would be weird, maybe a void, if it would suddenly be gone." "That may again be another kind of fear." "I wouldn't know what would happen if it would suddenly be gone." "Maybe I've learned that in recent years as a freelance director." "I have focused so much on that and wanted to excel that I now just want to take it more easy." "Now I think that I should stay a bit closer to myself." "I get round to more things that it's all about for me." "That's drawing." "ONE of the big things that I do now in order to deal with stress is looking how I can change my life." "For example by taking up tattooing, just to have regularity." "Not drinking too much, every day to bed at the same time." "Geting up the same time, eating well." "Sport." "And I sleep better." "Before, it took me 1.5 hours to fall asleep." "Now I fall asleep in five minutes." "I don't know how it's going to go." "Maybe I'm considered as a generally good tattoo artist." "And I'm very happy with that, but well..." "If I do, I want to do it very well, that people say:" "You must go to him, he does nice things." "Now I find myself thinking the same things again." "Now I'm doing this and must matter within a short time." "To be ONE of the best." "Maybe as we get older, we think:" "It does not anymore." "You do not accomplish anything." "That someone sees this and thinks:" "Oh, girl anyway." "It's not so bad." "Just wait till you're 50, ... then you'll realize that you don't need to worry so much." "Hopefully we can forget this whole conversation and start again." "Then we say hello again and we introduce ourselves to each other." "Then you can start again." "(* All we ever wanted was everything)" "(* All we ever got was cold *)"