Convergence

The stories behind Fractured Mag

I believe that everyone is a product of their environment. My story begins in Jacksonville, FL where my childhood really informed who I am today. Florida is a special place in many ways but certainly to me. It definitely has an infamous reputation from outsiders that I would say isn’t all untrue, but as for a place that shaped who I am, I look back at it very fondly. One large part of who I am has to do with water, whether it’s being a competitive swimmer or being a massive surf fan. I find the most comfort in the water.

I began competitively swimming at the age of seven years old. I joined a club swim team with whom I would spend most of my childhood practicing and competing with. The thing about swimming and particularly being a good or fast swimmer is that you must swim a lot, there’s really no other way around it. That is the recipe to being great, so from a very young age I swam a LOT. This would cause quite a conflicting journey for myself. When you think of child athletes who dedicate their lives to a particular sport, you often see parents who may seem to want to see their child succeed more than the child themselves. That was not the case for me. I chose to swim and I definitely chose to quit many times. That is not to say that when I had practice and didn’t want to go, my parents still made me go. I mean I get it now, they were spending a lot of money on this activity so if I was going to do, I was going to do it. As for my journey with swimming, like I said, it was a conflicting journey for me. Growing up swimming you would typically go to school and go straight to practice afterwards, not leaving much time for other endeavors. This is where my quarrel with swimming began. I would always complain that I wanted to just go home after school and hang out in the neighborhood like the rest of the kids. So this would begin my endless cycle of “quitting” swimming often. I would stop for a practice and then inevitably return the next day. I would always scream about not getting to explore and try other things because I had to swim. So from 7 years old until high school I had probably “quit” a dozen times.

The year is 2016. I’m underground, buried by ten feet of snow in a small, prison-like hotel 300 miles outside of Reykjavik. I’ve spent the better part of two months in this place, gaining six minutes of sunlight every day. There’s dozens of us staying at this hotel, every single room filled with someone working on the film.

We’re in Myvatn, Iceland, working on Fast and Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious. We spend twelve hours on set each day and return to our respected dormitories, walking off the frozen lake, hopping in a van and driving three minutes down the road to our hotel. Myvatn is small. Very small. There’s our hotel, the hotel down the street, the other ‘hotel’ which is more bnb than anything, the pizza place across the lake, the burger place that lets you watch the cows as you eat, and the hotel lobby bar. The rest is volcanic, snow-covered rock that juts out everywhere you look. A forest of impassable stone, leading off to nowhere.

Then high school came, the same inner conflict for myself still present but elevated. “Why do I have to do this?”, I would ask myself. High school is when I really began to have troubles mentally. I was always a good swimmer, but never great and that added to my pressures because now came the next step, collegiate swimming. Since I began swimming I never wanted anything other than to swim in college. I had no Olympic dreams, I just wanted to be a collegiate athlete and especially Division 1. As I began high school in Florida things were good, I loved my high school swim teammates and especially my club swim teammates, but I began to doubt myself and doubt if I could make it to be a college athlete.

My sophomore year of high school I had a lapse in judgement that would cost me the ability to go to the state swim meet. A big deal considering I was the only one from our high school to even qualify for the meet. I was devastated and my inner doubts began to rise to levels I thought I would never surpass. I owe everything to my parents. When this happened their support for me never wavered, but ultimately these issues led to us moving to Atlanta. A place my parents were happy to return to and a place I was excited to have a new start in.

I hoped that being in a new place and getting a fresh start would be what I needed to succeed but it wasn’t that easy. I didn’t realize how much I loved growing up and living in Jacksonville until it was gone. I got to my new high school and was often known as the “Florida Kid”. Moments didn’t feel real. They felt like from an overdramatized coming of age movie. I vividly remember sitting alone at lunch for a week, coming home and crying for weeks feeling so lost. Thankfully I found a group of people who I could identify with. My new club swim team.

Now… I’m being dramatic. The experience I gained from working on this film, traveling to Iceland, Cuba, New York, Ohio, Atlanta, were and are some of the most memorable moments of my life. But still, I was depressed.

My room is getting darker by the day as the snow piles higher and higher. The beds are uncomfortable and the other stunt guys have resorted to stealing comforters from the linens closet. So much so, that the staff pad-locked the door. I spend most nights drawing, writing poetry, taking photographs while the stunt guys build their make shift gym in the hallway, lifting water jugs and doing pushups, adding to the prison-esque vibes I’m getting.

I’ve always felt insecure on set. At this point, I had been doing stunts professionally for about four years, but the problem was that all my free time was spent creating art, mostly photography, but a multitude of outlets. This job was a jump start that pushed me towards a career in photography. I’m lucky to have the support of friends and family who told me, ‘if this is what you are truly passionate about, do it.’

There was about a group of five or so guys on the team all about the same age and all gunning to swim in college. These were my people. They were able to push me and keep me on track so I could hopefully become a D1 athlete. It was great and it started to happen. I felt like I was going from a good swimmer to a great one. Then came senior year of high school. When you start to look at schools you tend to begin talking to them the summer before your senior year of high school, that way you can plan a recruiting trip with them that fall. While my peers began to have four to five schools planning trips with them, I had zero. This began to raise my doubts in myself again. It was then spring semester of my senior year and many of my friends already committed to a school and I had only visited two schools, both only because of favors of coaches I had, not because those schools were particularly interested in me. I felt like the dream and goal to swim in college was over.

Feeling lost and filled with self doubt, I didn’t know what to do. Until one coach of mine did me a favor that I could never repay him for. He was able to connect me with the University of Georgia and I received a spot on the team. I was officially a Division 1 athlete.

I thought this would be the beginning of the end. But It turned out to just be the beginning of it all. I got to UGA and starting out I loved it. I loved being a college athlete, I loved the freedom of being away from under my parents radar but that all seemed to be a little too much for me to handle. I can’t really tell when it all exactly began but somewhere during my freshman year I began to spiral. So thankfully again for a incredible coach of mine, I received the support I needed. This would be my first interaction with a therapist.

She was great, she would listen and would really help me feel better. The main trouble was I didn’t feel like I belonged and my answer, just like in high school was to run. So that’s what I ended up doing again. I transferred.

Reed competing for the University of Georgia

I was on the film for about four months and I was itching for a break. Not a break from the work, I truly love working on set, being part of a team, and getting the opportunity to perform on camera but I needed a social break. Stunt guys love to talk shop. Which drift car do you have, which dojo do you train at, did you catch this race with this guy who won this thing, blah blah blah, I honestly can’t even make up a realistic scenario because I’m so far removed from that world. I have experience in a lot of stunt avenues from gymnastics to parkour, stunt driving to motocross, scuba diving, high falls, etc, but success is derived from passion and I didn’t feel very successful in any of those endeavors. I take photos. I like taking photos. I like talking about taking photos. I like art and emotions and vulnerability and these guys, and gals, are just not the ones to give it to me.

After arriving home from the film, I looked for my first photo job to switch things up and follow my passion. It was a tough decision to deny the next job with my family but instead, I found a job on craigslist as a photographer for a dance convention. I showed up at the interview with my portfolio and resume which the girl promptly slid across the table and said ‘alright, so what you will be doing is…’ That should have been a red flag right there but I was just excited to be hired.

This next step, as many people would say without any context, was the best decision I have made in my life so far. I transferred to the University of Hawaii. An island that I will now forever call home. But this did not cure all my struggles, as I did achieve more success in Hawaii than I did at Georgia in swimming, I still had a huge inner conflict brewing inside of me. Every summer thinking of quitting swimming for good because now a new crossroads presented itself, life after swimming.

During my college swimming career I think the hardest part was balancing hard work and play time. Because on one hand yes, I was a division 1 athlete but on the other, I was a young college student living on a tropical island wanting to play a bit. This would cause some troubles for me along the way and would make me resent people and coaches for quite some time.

I have found in my life I have been very fortunate to have great people to guide me and help me when I am desperately in need. Whether that is my family, coaches or mentors I have met along the way and in Hawaii this was no exception. I had an academic advisor that was such a great mentor for me and truly guided me when I needed it the most. It was now my Junior year of college, I was taking classes strictly to just graduate with no purpose at all, until I was recommended a course that at first was just an “easy A” but turned out to be one of the most influential courses I have ever taken. It was Theatre 101: Intro to Acting.

I was awful. Like truly awful, I was petrified and I took this class with friends so they can vouch when I say this. But for some reason I loved it. I had always had an affinity for movies but this was my first experience into the world of an artist. Needless to say, I was hooked.

That turned out to be the worst and most exhausting, difficult, and unfulfilling job I’ve ever had. I traveled to 28 cities in 28 weeks, flying out from LAX every Thursday morning at 6am and returning Sunday afternoon around 10pm. I photographed upwards of 20,000 images a weekend as the sole photographer. At the table, I needed elbow pads for my sixteen hour shift. I stacked Red Bulls, coffee, snacks, I listened to audio books, I zoned out, I did anything to forget where I was. I was stretched very thin over those months, sleeping very little, drinking very much, having breakdowns in multiple cities, unknowingly coping with bipolar disorder, depression, and addiction.

But ya know what? Every Monday through Wednesday, on my days off, after 20,000 images captured, I continued to shoot. I knew then and there that this was something I had to pursue.

The next year, I applied to the New York Film Academy to study Photography. I spent nearly all of my money to study, work, and live in New York. But through all that, the greatest thing I gained was the discovery of my people. Artists. Weird, eccentric, unemployed, struggling artists.

From that semester on, I would take almost exclusively theatre courses for the rest of my college experience. The theatre community was one that I identified with and felt at home with. They were quite different from the athlete world I was used to but were so welcoming and accepting of me as I came. I still was a college swimmer though, working hard to reach my next goal. NCAA’s. That is the pinnacle of college swimming and I had a chance to make it. Our team began to come together my senior year, we seemed to begin to put our differences apart and really push to achieve our goals. I began for the first time ever to feel like I knew who I was and felt like I was doing the right things. No longer asking myself “why” I was doing any of the things I was doing.

A new goal presented itself to me my last semester of college, I was on track to minor in Theatre, which I wanted more than anything. All I needed was to be a part of a school production, which I was more than happy to do anything to be a part of. But at the same time, our relay team was about to qualify for NCAA’s. Both goals of mine ended up on the same weekend. I could either go to a swim meet and compete and hopefully qualify for NCAA’s or stay in Hawaii and work on a production to receive my minor in theatre. A cross roads I never saw coming.

But once the pandemic hit, I was forced to leave New York and the connections I had made. I worked on Black Panther 2 in Atlanta as I had no job and nowhere to go and it re-solidified my decision to pursue photography. Atlanta became the place I call home today and because of that, I met Reed at the climbing gym we both worked at. He was my people. Weird, unemployed, struggling with mental health, and willing to do whatever it takes to pursue his art.

I believe you are the people you surround yourself with and trying to fit yourself into a whatever-shaped hole is draining. Reed and I are at the same point in life, unaware of what the future holds and excited by the endless opportunities to build something. This magazine is all about discovering identity, defining success, and searching for happiness. I can’t pretend like I have any answers, so I’m asking around. I’m looking for them.

When I made my decision, it was the first time I would Identify as an artist. My swimming career was now over. I helped work on the play and my relay team had a replacement for me and ended up qualifying without me.

A hard realization for me but I never regretted it. I was now on my journey to become who I am today.

Fast forward a few years, I moved back to Atlanta to pursue acting as a career. I had a day job at a climbing gym in Atlanta and we got a new hire. He was a stuntman from California or something, as I was told. We worked one shift together and we wouldn’t shut up. But it wasn’t until we went on a climbing trip to the Red River Gorge where I knew this was another one of these people in my life that would inspire me and help me grow as artist but more importantly, a person.

Austin and I began Fractured Magazine because we both identified with the struggle of pursuing a career as an artist. I think we levitated towards the name fractured because we could tell we both were fractured individuals trying to find our way in our life. I think in life we have these special individuals who are there to inspire you and guide you on your journey, whatever your journey may be.

Florencia Villa

Danny Kim

Fractured Magazine