Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00What's up? I'm Vic Mensah. I'm an artist and I'm here with Ebony.
00:03Chicago shapes my approach to community building in that it's a place of so much
00:12cultural currency and so much need at the same time. Chicago is an incredibly influential place
00:22and has shaped so many facets of culture from jazz and the blues to hip-hop and drill and
00:36Islam and literature and at the same time it's like an incredibly segregated
00:45impoverished city too you know it's full of this rich rich culture and a lot of poor poor people
00:59you know straight up like it's like that and so it gives you that perspective to see that
01:05you know there's always work to be done. I've just been studying social media and thinking about it
01:13differently and realizing how an artist and a following is a relationship and relationships
01:23are built on trust and communication and vulnerability and that's always been the
01:31underlying theme in my music or one of them and just recently I started putting it on social media
01:41and you know in an attempt to just strengthen and build the relationship you know and I've just
01:51found that it's been well received and beneficial for people. I think it is probably kind of a breath
01:59of fresh air sometimes for people to see like moments of reality and
02:05mental health is in many ways it's this great equalizer because it doesn't really matter who you are
02:15socioeconomically racially geographically
02:21um everyone deals with their mental health and interestingly the same things help and hurt
02:32everyone you know what I mean like addictions tear us all up and many of us seek pharmaceutical
02:44industry solutions and sometimes those help sometimes they don't um many of us seek meditation and
02:55you know spiritual paths those seem to help everybody sometimes people just seek religion that seems to help them
03:06um and uh like plant medicine is something I've been talking about a lot in my conversations on mental health
03:15because that's something that's been so beneficial for me and has you know helped me to
03:21be in this process of rewiring my brain because it's definitely still a process and it's like
03:27sometimes I'll be sitting there making a video about mental health and I'll be like
03:32you know my mental health don't feel great today
03:36it's not just coming from uh some like healed place it's just me sharing my daily process because
03:47every single day is a process and um some days are better than others but I do believe like when
03:53you lock in on you know certain um healthy behaviors that like the good days start to stack up
04:01you