Why a Halifax filmmaker and artist keeps some images private

In What We Carry With Us, friends Amy Grace and Megan Piercey Monafu explore how we choose to curate and revisit our memories. This CBC Creator Network series reflects on different ways we capture moments of ourselves and our loved ones, and the process of learning from mementos from our past selves. 

In the third and final episode, Amy Grace speaks with Halifax filmmaker and artist Kayla Flinn. Warning: this episode touches on issues of suicide and self-harm. 

If you stumble upon Kayla Flinn's Instagram page @asaucypan, you will find a living visual journal. You will see a wild and truly creative woman and filmmaker capturing moments of herself and others through images and words that pause the external and internal lived moments.

But not everything she captures lands online. 

"Most people in my life are like, I trust you, document anything, you don't need to ask permission, I still ask permission," Flinn said. "I started this thing, where I started this book. Everything in this book will never grace the internet. If I have a party, people can look at it, but it's photographs I have taken of people or myself, but the people wouldn't want it on the internet."   

It's challenging to capture a moment or a feeling. The way a person laughed or the way the sunlight played on a blade of grass while a feeling was coursing through one's veins. Kayla is doing this. Through her photography and personal videos, we get to see how she sees the world, "a world full of woolly and wonderful creatures."

We are all aching to be seen and known. Kayla finds beauty in those around her. Beauty in the pain and the joy.  

When I talked to Kayla about her work as a filmmaker and her love for documenting those who make up her world, she took a breath and made space for herself and those who may hear and then she began sharing her very real and raw encounters with death. Kayla's raw honesty about what drives her, her father's near-death, the self-harm and suicidal experiences she has had sheds light on her work and invites us to understand just a bit of what she is inviting us all to understand about life.

Life is messy, unpredictable, sexy and provocative. Life is grace, love, loss, and life is fear. And life is a desperate question mark we are all trying to understand. 

Kayla Flinn is a creature of wonder herself, and her heart for making sure she works hard to capture those she loves and cares for accurately and movingly makes me as a writer hope to do the same in my capture of her.

If you need help, there are services you can call: The Canada Suicide Prevention Service line is 1-833-456-4566.
Also, you can reach Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868.