Context
My work is based on a fairy tale from Yugoslavia that I heard as a child, "King Donkey Ears".
The story is about a king of a country who has a secret - he has donkey ears, and only he and his hairdresser know this secret. So the king threatens the barber, "If you tell my secret, I'll kill you."
Knowing this great secret, the barber repeatedly thought every day, "The king has a pair of donkey ears. The king has donkey ears!" He kept the secret to himself and could not tell anyone, and finally became ill.
So he ran to the mountain and found a tree hole, and he felt much lighter after telling the secret to the hole.
A few years later, a shepherd boy cut down the tree and made it into a flute. When the shepherd boy played the flute, the sound of the flute sang, "The king has donkey ears".
So everyone in the country learned the king's secret.
We often have secrets that we don't want others to know about, but we find it hard to keep inside, so the "tree hole" has become very popular.
With the leap from paper to online media, online tree holes have become a convenient option for people to talk about their privacy due to their secrecy and convenience.
It is actually a "microblogging proxy", equivalent to a public account, with a shared password on the profile so that anyone can log in and tweet. You will not be "exposed". It's an excellent way for people to tell their secrets and spy on others without revealing their personal information, so it's popular.
Everyone has secrets, and secrets are powerful; they can be hugely destructive and constructive sometimes.
So whether it is a tree hole, a partner, a friend, a psychologist( therapist), or a stranger, it is a bond to be there all the time. People need an outlet.
Why are so many people willing to leave their secrets in a "tree hole"?
A 19-year-old Internet user who has known about the "tree hole" microblog ever since often tells it his secrets when upset.
"It's a lot easier to talk about it. I want people to know the other side of my life, but I don't want to pay for it." He said.
I have a strong desire to talk when I am under pressure as well. Because there are things I can't tell my parents, which would make them think I'm complaining and dissatisfied with them;
I can't tell my friends because most of them are the same age or even younger than me, and they have hardly ever experienced life and death and would not be able to give me any feedback, but it would scare them.
So I'm more willing to tell a stranger what's bothering me because by telling a stranger this, I don't need to worry that he'll tell my secret to someone else - because we won't be in each other's lives at all, and there's no one we know in common.
I think that's why Snapchat is so popular: READ and BURN, and the psychological mechanism behind it.
I learned from my research that one of the most important therapeutic tools that a counsellor can use when communicating with a patient is to let him "talk". At the same time, it is much easier to say it, like the king's barber, whether the matter is resolved or not.
Two versions of the story's ending
Through my research, I learned that this fairy tale from Yugoslavia has two versions of its ending - a comedy and a tragedy.
- The king kills the barber. When people hear the song, the laughter shakes the palace, and the king hides inside, afraid to come out, and eventually dies inside.
- The king found that having an extra set of donkey ears is to listen better to the people and facilitate his ability to govern the country better and be a good king, so the country becomes more and more prosperous.
Analyse and Reflect
I think it's just as essential to confide to listen. Just as the barber in the story couldn't bear the psychological pressure of the king's secrets and needed to find a hole in the tree to talk to, I hope I can be a 'hole in the tree' for some people who need to speak.
For my Unit 2 project, I chose to be a secret keeper, collecting secrets from different people, collating them and then creating them. Afterwards, it seemed that this fairy tale made me feel empathy for the first time as a child because I heard the happy ending; but as an adult, I learnt that there was a completely opposite version of the story... Perhaps this is the norm in our lives.
So I chose to go back to the story itself and present the two different versions of the ending in drawing from my own perspective.