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Suffering from mental health issues can be like walking on eggshells. Without even wishing to, you are constantly on the lookout for things that might trigger you; not as a pursuit but as a cautious exercise that might help you be away from it. However, the said pursuit or the caution leads you to the triggers anyway. In Elizabeth Ayiku’s debut feature “Me Little Me,” which premiered at the 2022 SXSW, the protagonist Mya (A’Keyah Dasia Williams) feels like a pro in dealing with the issues that hurt her. With post-it notes and scribblings all over her life, you can sense that whatever is bothering her has been recognized and is being dealt with with a careful outlook. But, you can only be so cautious. Mental health is something that needs constant care, understanding, and support and when you are dealing it with all alone, it becomes all the more difficult to not fall back into the spiral that breaks you down to smithereens. A place where you have to rebuild yourself from scratch.
Mya works at a car rental company and is one of those employees you would put up on the wall every other month as the best you’ve got. She is careful, and hard-working and is almost always eager to do as much as she can. She has been waiting for a promotion for quite some time now, but when it does come her way, it also brings on added pressure. When we first meet her, it’s obvious from her face that there’s more to her than this 9 to 5 job. The constant journaling is enough to make a viewer understand that like most of us, she is fighting with the demons in her head. However, her issues are slightly more prominent and to be completely blunt – less represented in mainstream media and art. She suffers from an eating disorder and for that, a major chunk of her day is spent with fellow community people who are there to help her deal with it as a unit.
Director Elizabeth Ayiku should be lauded just for trying to bring focus to eating disorders. As much as we have developed an interest in understanding mental health and how to deal with it, eating disorders are something that is still frowned upon as something that can be ‘fixed’ by just making a person have a strict routine. While that is right to an extent, the disorder is more complex than it seems on the surface. The triggers are of course rooted in trauma that a person has carried with them all their lives, but the relationship a person has with food and their body in general, varies from person to person.
I appreciate the effort Ayiku has made to bring the issues up. However, I also feel that she only touches the surface and is unable to penetrate through. While I understand that her approach to making it more naturalistic and subtle might work for some, I expected a more structured and intimate look at it. The character sketch at hand is really muted, with little to no leeway into Mya’s life and her issues, beyond what is shown to us. While that feels like a conscious choice to not delve into the root of her issues, it also takes you away from the character and her arc in general.
A’Keyah Dasia Williams’s vulnerability and dedication to making Mya as available to us as possible is one of the strongest aspects of the film. But as mentioned above, there is very little on paper beyond her characteristic traits that allow us to be really invested. More compact writing that had sequences written or re-written while keeping her in mind rather than just following her along would have greatly helped the overall impact of the film. Additionally, the characters sketched around Mya are pretty unengaging and one-dimensional which makes the overall impact of her crisis and her eventual breakdown feel less affecting anyway.
That said, “Me Little Me” leaves us with the righteous message of being kind to the little person that is within us. The little person who was hurt at a time that made the wounds so deeply inflicted that it became a part of us. And for that alone, I’d recommend watching it.
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