We recently connected with SANTYI and have shared our conversation below.

SANTYI, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

If happiness was achievable, the wealthy and their infinite pool of promising markets would collapse. It would crunch their spine inward like a Junji Ito uzumaki character. Luckily for them, happiness functions quite differently. Like sadness, it lies on the temporal plane. Fluctuating in our bodies for a few fleeting moments. Finally, it withers. There, we flow into our truths again. For creatives like myself, only the delusions of our craft can kiss us and make us romantics. But, if they are really like me. They don’t know what a regular job is. They’re trapped by a golden cage. They run from themselves. Maybe into substances. Maybe into mental health awareness. Anywhere but themselves. If I imagined a regular job from my Mexico hometown, I would probably be selling bread door to door with two-holed shoes. Instead, I’m in a cozy room panicking at the end of the month. My poor cortisol levels.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’ve been here before. Resting my head on the statue of my own limitations. Years ago when I was but a pimply teen, my subconscious would spew out into photographs and films. The homiest of homies would support all my fiending for creativity. Driving to the mountains or painting our faces, we did anything to capture the shot. Still, shit was going to hit the fan at the end of my college years. Even though I had directed a few films and won some awards, I had reached the edge of my playful youth. I could not get a regular job being undocumented. I laid there grieving. The only job I picked up for a while was construction. I had done this at 12 years old, so it had started to feel like none of my educational pursuits had mattered. I was tiredly deserted, but this time in my own head. Long warm train rides to work, feeling envy towards my pupils in the film industry. A tired look. Once a blue moon, cool wind would calm my heavy work week. One time, my uncle was telling our family a joke in our backyard. As I walked in, he stopped telling his story and held my shoulder. Wisdom from my earliest ancestor birthed on his tongue. “We’re all underwater”, he said pointing to my family of broken English and spirited fighters. “You jumped and grabbed the net above and saw the other side”.

It was like he had carved a tattoo into my brain. My ancestor who had taken over him vanished and he looked back at the family to continue telling his joke. Something about the way he said it burned over me like an invisibility spell. My ego flew with wings far beyond the countryside. I pushed my business past graduation shoots and headshots to what it is today. Presently, I own an artist label called REDREDGREEN. I release my own music through it and several creatives help me shoot the music videos. In this label, we also host wellness workshops online. Here, we practice self awareness by posing journal prompts. Aside from that we have a podcast called DREAMCORE where I take a psychological deep dive into people’s dreamworld using some of Carl Jung’s research. There’s more happening, but this label is here to redefine how we serve artists, all artists. Imagine a tailored experience where you can interact with your community through mental health and more. That’s us.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Let’s talk about love. When you see me do you really see me? Who can really see me? If I operate from anything other than love, how will I know to communicate my boundaries? I used to disappear from my relationships and each demand would wither my whole. Love is a teetering balance weighing my spiritual interoception against my two extended hands who await your saddened heart. I appear like a magician with fireworks and smoke or sometimes with the piece of paper you need.

In the love that is the day you’re in, I aim to help my community become more self aware. That is through the wellness workshops I host. Mental health services like therapy can be very expensive. This is why the workshops are free. In our most recent workshop we explored the history of the ego, the neuroscience behind forming identity, and how to know when to choose aversion over your identity. Through the session we are journaling about our specific experiences on our dedicated notebooks.

In none of my childhood was I ever exposed to resources that taught me to emotionally process or to communicate my internal world. For so long, I was subconsciously identifying with being an anxious person. Spiraling into the depths of my mind was how I coped with conflict. Beating my inner child again and again and again. I was used to handling those emotions with substances. After a breakup, I found myself experiencing that spiraling behavior. I crawled out of that cave and started reading and became an amoeba absorbing knowledge to finally hug that inner deserted boy.

When I came home, it came to me that this way of loving who I was was never something my community learned. While I am no expert, I do my best to teach what I’ve learned at these workshops while also expressing that my information can be incorrect. I’m not afraid to be wrong, I’m afraid of not learning.

So, love is the approach. Open arms. We understand we will never be able to help everyone, and at the same time we move forward as if we will. A freeing contradiction.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

What does it take to be heard? Let’s talk about a moment of pulsing fear. Whirling lights flashing into my widened retinas. Distorted voices spitting into a microphone telling us to disperse. Panically touching riot shields asking for a way out. Contradictory orders from opposite ends of the entrapment demanding us to leave and stay. Two houseless folks, one man going to the store to grab diapers for his kid, an elderly woman, two photographers, a national lawyers guild volunteer, and two immigrant kids (me and my friend). Horses, shotguns, riot shields, and a prison bus. Three faceless authorities ran into the wall of authorities rounding us in. The elderly woman was taken first. One by one, fear ate us. I saw my friend before they grabbed me and put me on the wall where a bright light filmed my body. Then on a prison bus. The national lawyers guild volunteer stood tall in between the bus seats and asked us to memorize the phone number on his hat. Deeper into that night, we were let out in an underground facility hosting more than 10 prison buses.

Freed. The lawyer from the non-profit who intentionally got arrested with us won our case, and no charges were pressed. That incident cut deeper into my understanding of being undocumented. I was one “wrong place wrong time” moment from never seeing my loved ones again. We had wandered too close to the protest against Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I feel like That’s So Raven the way I dissociate into these traumatic experiences. Remembering my parents almost being deported after attending a family party or police raiding our home at 6AM looking for my brother.

Back when I couldn’t escape my bed, my therapist said “what often looks like resilience to others is really suffering for the individual”. I was feeling the worst of Eckhart Tolle’s pain-body concept. I started rewriting my experiences. Abandoning my identity of being undocumented and inhibiting the new flesh I create with. Dr. Manhattan on mars, a true alien I have become. Wisdom I spit like Yoda. Failure, I make love to her. Diamonds from pressure. Life from death.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://santyi.myportfolio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/santyi_._._/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/santyisan
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@megacrispythought

Image Credits
Santiago Sanchez Gage Stahlberg Red Chua