2023 Mission Statement of Motivation and a Declaration of Creation and Accomplishments
Photography by Leslie Chung
Well, here I am again renewing my Medium membership in an effort to see if writing on this platform will actually manifest itself to be financially and soulfully rewarding to me.
Looks like the last time I believed in making the effort was when I wrote and published my first article June 20, 2020. I made a long and derpily awkward title. Have I written any more since?
NO.
Did I continue to pay Medium money?
YES.
Did I lament in the darkest of hours in my day about a future life where I satisfied my creative needs and made the effort to do so?
YES.
I haven’t gotten anywhere really in putting any of that into pen on paper, but I’m not going to give up. I’ve spent all that time living and creating and building memories and planning for the future. I’ve poured hours of blood sweat and tears both literally and metaphorically into my day by day. While I berate myself on accomplishing nothing in the language that I thought would quantify the value of my conquests, looking back I can see that I still made many a thing happen.
Since June 2020 I have achieved the following:
- Won an Emmy for my VFX work on Star Trek Discovery
- Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of my career that I didn’t even aim for. To have received any recognition in a show that managed to even get shortlisted required so much luck and talent on so many fronts, I cannot BELIEVE that this happened. It is truly an honor and a privilege to have been so blessed by an amazing show with a crew that is nothing short of a dream come true.
2. Bought a house in upstate NY to turn into an investment property for financial and soulful gain.
Something that we had dreamed up on a whim; having a retreat to run away to has given us more joy than we imagined. Especially during the pandemic when there was nothing else to do but hole up and nest. Our vacation home gave us a destination and mental release and creativity that was otherwise untapped for us.
If we even just break even on the mortgage my husband and I made a vow to consider it money well spent for the priceless memories it has given us and our families together.
3. Planned a DIY wedding in our backyard. Since my now husband and I are terrible at planning, we figured hosting a small covid wedding in our new vacation home’s backyard would be the perfect thing for our busy lives. It wasn’t going anywhere so could totally work with our haphazard and last minute schedules.
4. Deepened my relationship with my bestest friends and came to terms with letting go and distancing myself from relationships that felt shallow or did nothing to add meaning to my life. Time spent with the ones who don’t matter simply steals time away from the ones who do and yourself.
5. Learned to invest. and took a big step forward in understanding my financial present and future. I am now actively managing my own funds and pouring the time I spent at night in bed reading garbage on reddit to understanding what all the words letters and numbers mean! Super super proud of this!
6. Built an instagram following for my vacation home. Our house now has 1400+ followers and generating a growing amount of somewhat passive income for us to help make the property pay for itself.
7. Froze my eggs (embryos)
8. Hung up 5 pieces of art in our home. I am sorry to say 4 of those took 4 years to put up, and had been gathering dust. But it took a visit from out of town family to give us that extra push.
9. Mastered making a cream sauce. I’m such a sucker for cream sauces in pasta. Now I can make it on the fly and it’s so cheap to do!
10. Finally hired a cleaning lady. My work on set this year became so all encompassing that I didn’t have any time to clean even the little bit that I do. The husband does the dishes. I occasionally vaccume. I even more occasionally declutter.
What broke the ice for me? I’d been thinking about doing this for years. It was my sister in law saying that even as a stay at home mom, she too hires a cleaning lady. She’d rather spend her time doing other things and it wasn’t that expensive in the grander scheme of things.
Having someone focused and dedicated to making your home free of dirt was game changing. Best $100+ dollars ever spent. I want to see what else I can outsource in my life.
I’m sure there are some other accomplishments I can brag about to feel better about what I DIDN’T accomplish since June 2020. I was, after all supposed to write the great American novel and paint a series of jaw dropping paintings when the pandemic shut us all in.
That’s ok. I should list number 11 as being finding more ways to better forgive myself for my perceived failures. There’s certainly more good than bad in my efforts and I need to show more appreciation and celebration of it.
What I hope to achieve next:
- To write in an effort to empty my emotional reserves
- 2. Paint and draw a little more in an effort to empty my emotional reserves
For those of you who stopped to read this, thank you for the click despite the extra cheesy title once again. I re-read my first post and while I didn’t cringe like I thought I would, it gave me a reminder of what my writer voice can be like.
And I didn’t hate it.