You are the news.

As humans, we love giving ourselves labels. 

As someone who is multifaceted in my creative endeavours, the idea of labels and categories when it comes to them is truly the bane of my existence. 

I’ve chosen a lot of words over time to help me figure out my creative identity. 

Storyteller. Writer. Activist. Videographer. Photographer. Educator.

Documentarian. 

The truth is that they’re all accurate and exist in one way or another in the work that I do. There is always a crossing of these in my work that has created a truly dynamic approach to the way I tell stories — both visually and via the written word. 

Documentarian though, is an important distinction. 

The stories I share, amplify, and create, are not works of fiction. 

They are not stories that live arbitrarily in the worlds of our imagination. Instead, they are raw and our realities. 

A few years back, I applied to be a Next Doc fellow and was honoured to be chosen as 1 of 16. I spent time that summer surrounded by other young documentarians of colour, with the incredible experience of learning from other award-winning documentarians and filmmakers in New York. 

While it was incredible learning from some of the best — including Khalik Allah, one of the cinematographers on Beyoncé’s Lemonade (and yes, that absolutely means I’m just ONE degree of separation from the Queen herself), what has been one of the most impactful lessons that I have taken away from my fellowship and the community was the importance and role we all have in documenting our own stories.

In fact, to a degree, we are all documentarians — citizen journalists of sorts. 

In a recent IndieWire interview with documentarian Stanley Nelson, he reminds us that “It’s important for documentary filmmakers at this point to understand that we are the news.” 

Which leaves every one of us — as citizen documentarians — to recognize and reflect hard on what it means for us to be the media, and the importance that is tied to both the sharing, and the archiving of our truths. 

So what happens when we give people both the power and the ability to become their own documentarians? What happens when you start re-thinking the way you see and conceptualize the documentation of your journey — whether that’s personal or business? 

I film and document often, and always. The footage sits on hard drives and in cloud storage — elements of this journey that I am on, a documentation of both this revolution and of my story. 

So for you, if you’re new to understanding the importance of all of this, I leave you with one thing to remember: 

This is your journey. 

You control this narrative. 

And the more you document, the more power you give yourself to include your story in the archival of a new, well-rounded version of history.  

And that’s pretty freaking incredible.