(Editor's note: The is a guest post by The Fully Sick Rapper about his involvement in YouTube's special Life in a Day project, announced today).
Life in a Day is a unique collaboration between YouTube, Hollywood (director Kevin Macdonald, producer Ridley Scott) and the YouTube community, to create a documentary that will capture one day in the life of thousands around the world - July 24, 2010.
After being asked to help out, I have submitted a video to help promote the launch of this global collaboration, by capturing one day in my own life, and showing YouTube users an example of the kind of thing that they might like to submit.
I suppose my experience as a YouTube user is a unique one, so I tried to capture that with this particular video. For the first six months of this year, I have been living within an isolated negative pressure room in a Sydney Hospital, and have been using social media to stay connected to the world. A large part of this has been through YouTube, as The Fully Sick Rapper. This started as a way to give a few mates a laugh, and keep myself busy, but it fast became a way for me to keep myself distracted from the health issues I have been facing, share my experience with the world, bounce positive energy off people going through similar circumstances, and escape the four walls of my quarantined room. Over the six months I spent in hospital, I posted about 12 videos that racked up around 1.5million views on YouTube alone.
My videos before this one have all been comedic, and have been made just as much for my own laughs, as for the laughs of viewers. However, this particular project made me think about what it would be like to show people what a real day in my life involves. Yes, I have fun, and I dress up funny, and try to make myself and others laugh, but that wears off very quickly, and in the times when I'm not dancing around in front of the camera, there is a lot of very quiet, very lonely, me time. I believe that I used this time as best I could for self-reflection and personal development, and I feel as if I have come out the other side of this time in hospital having grown a lot as a man, but it hasn't been easy, and there has been times throughout my stay that I have looked at myself in the mirror and thought that I couldn't handle it any more.
This video captures my 180th day in quarantine, and is set to a poem and a piece of backing music that I wrote and recorded, from within my isolated hospital room. At the stage I made this, I had no clear picture of when I might be going home, and in fact it was only three days later that I was told the wonderful news that I could return home and spend a couple of weeks in isolation within the comfort of my own home, before being able to return to the community.
I have had some awesome support from YouTube viewers, and I plan to continue making videos to share online. In my time in hospital, I have also been working hard on a web-series called the "Fully Sick and the Side Effect Project" with my brother, which we plan to launch on YouTube soon.
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