21st of December 2012 was predicted to be the end of the world. Like so many apocalyptic predictions before and even since, it clearly didn’t happen. At the time I was extremely disappointed. I wanted that zombie apocalypse like nothing else. I was in a pretty crappy place in life. I had been working in the film industry since 1994 and for a good ten of those years, I wasn’t enjoying it. In fact, I was at a point where I just couldn’t do it any more. My soul was crushed and I was looking for an escape.
Ever since I visited Universal Studios at six years old, I had always wanted to make movies. It was my passion. I’d read endless books on making movies and was obsessed with how visual effects were created. In 1994 the stars aligned and the possibility to become a filmmaker became a reality. I joined a community television studio and began studying at University. Will-power and passion pushed me through and in 1999 I reached a point where I could make my own movie. One that would take four years to complete.
Although it didn’t take me in the direction I’d hoped at the time, completing the movie opened a number of doors and my professional career as a filmmaker began. I worked predominantly as an editor and visual effects producer on feature films, commercials and corporate videos. It was at this time the passion began to dwindle. Not so much mine, but everyone else around me. It seemed as money became the focus, rather than the joy of making a film, the passion disappeared.
Dawn of the Dead
Fast forward a number of years and my passion was gone too. I was constantly dealing with complete arseholes (the industry term for that is ‘Executive Producers’), sociopaths (producers), directors who’d given up, and in a series of commercials I worked on, a sickening distortion of the truth for the government’s propaganda to justify their financial interests. I was done. I was so totally done. My very soul protested the very idea of being part of this disgusting industry any more. The mere thought of making films on any level was so debilitating, my body would physically get sick and cease up at the prospect.
So the end was nigh. It was the end of 2012 and thanks to a misinterpretation of the Mayan Calendar by Michael D. Coe in 1964, we were at the end of the b’ak’tun, a 144,000 day cycle of the calendar. Instead of seeing it for what it was, a cycle in much the same way as our 365 days is a cycle of 1 year, Coe wrote that “there is a suggestion … that Armageddon would overtake the degenerate peoples of the world and all creation on the final day of the 13th [b’ak’tun]. Thus … our present universe [would] be annihilated … when the Great Cycle of the Long Count reaches completion.” You can read more about the 2012 phenomenon here.
Bring on the Zombies
Although I’d done my research and knew it was all bullshit, I wished for it to be true. I prayed for the coming apocalypse. I dreamed of a time where society as we knew it would crumble and we would get to live in a post-apocalyptic dreamland. Okay, so I’m sure that for most it would’ve been closer to a nightmare land. For me, this was my ticket out. My way of not having to deal with the monstrosity of the world I was living in. To me, a zombie apocalypse and a daily fight for survival were more appealing than the shit I was in.
Needless to say, it didn’t happen. The surprising thing was that even though I knew it was bullshit and wouldn’t happen, when it didn’t, I was incredibly disappointed and upset. You see, for 20 years or more, I’d been fascinated by the apocalypse, even the movie I’d made back in 1999 was a post-apocalyptic story. It was only now, however, that I realised I had actually been waiting for it. I’d placed so much of my life on hold because I expected it to happen. Before my disillusionment of the film industry, it had been my disgust with humanity over the whole 9/11 affair, before that, it was the prospect of working for the rest of my life in crappy jobs because I was a high school drop out, before that it was being stuck in a schooling system that didn’t cater to my mind or way of learning in one bit, before that, I was a happy child.
Lost in a black Earth
So December 21st 2012 came and went and everything stayed the same. Although I’d survived some 67 end of the world predictions since my birth, this was the one I laid all my hopes on. On the morning of December 22nd 2012, I woke up to a post-apocalyptic-failed-prophecy world and I felt completely lost. Everything I’d been waiting for hadn’t happened, and for the first time it was clear to me, it wasn’t going to. I’m sure to many and even myself as I write this, it seems totally irrational to have had these beliefs. Even if you’d asked me before the non-event, I would have told you it wasn’t going to happen and that everything would continue as normal. Consciously I knew it wouldn’t happen, yet unconsciously I had bet my entire future on it actually happening.
I had spent years and years filling my mind with stories, books, movies, ideas, predictions, philosophies and survival guides of the apocalypse. I had programmed my unconscious mind to be ready, that there was “no real point in doing anything substantial in this modern society as it would be meaningless when the apocalypse happens.” and it wasn’t until the days and weeks after, that all of these beliefs and mindsets came to the surface and revealed themselves.
A new dawn
Over the next few months, everything began to change for me. My mindset was no longer waiting for some external event to happen before I started living my life and sculpting my world. I realised that if I wanted to change within myself, change within the world, it wasn’t going to come from a comet passing too close to earth or zombies rising from the grave, it had to come from within. I was the only power capable of making the changes I wanted to see.
So the changes began. One after the other. Tiny ones at first, hardly even recognisable as a change, then slowly, they grew bigger and bigger. As the inner changes took place, I noticed the outer world was also changing. The world that had been so dark and oppressive to me since that first day I started school, was beginning to lighten, to loosen its grasp on me. Of course, the world wasn’t actually changing, but as I changed, my perception of the world changed.
No longer was I waiting for anything. I was taking control of my own destiny. The more control I took, the more control I realised I had to sculpt the destiny I wanted. As my mindset changed, so did my approach to life. For the first time, I took complete responsibility for my own existence. I realised that everything that happened in my life, good, bad, whatever, was of my own creation, even what may have seemed accidental, bad luck or misfortunate events. I had created the environment for them to take place and unconsciously invited them into my life. It took hindsight and a lot of self-analysis to see it, but it was there. The future is as bright as you create it to be.
So I’ll ask you these two questions;
