It is finally so god damn close to 2020 that I've packed away my 2019 diary, never to see the light of day again and have moved on to a better year. Nothing against the diary itself (it's a beautiful rainbow printed one with an "M" on the front) but everything it stood for: all the plans that were made and then shattered by people and life events.
It's been a heck of a year, full of life lessons and figurative punches in the face. I have learnt about red flags. Things that are laid out it front of you, to warn you against danger, that I picked up like flowers in 2019, collecting a bunch of them and filling vases in my room. Looking at them thinking, "What intriguing little things, I wonder what they mean?" It doesn't matter what they mean, it's not for you to find out. I intend to leave red flags alone for the rest of my life. It took 27 years to teach me that lesson. Well, well, well... the message has been received.
I've learnt that where I live really impacts my emotional wellbeing. Some people may say "Toronto is beautiful", "Toronto is a cultural hub", "Toronto is a fun and wild city to live in". Those people may be right. Unfortunately it is also a city full of homeless people, workaholics, bike thieves, alcoholics and drug addicts. The weather is beautiful- sometimes. People commit suicide because of the cold. Four times, while riding the subway, the train was stopped because someone jumped on the tracks. It's a city that suits people who are able to hold their head high and ignore all the bad stuff. I was walked home by a homeless man who couldn't take the hint I wanted him to leave me alone, I avoided streets that were full of people tweaking and there wasn't one day that I wasn't privy to someone yelling at the top of their lungs to no one in particular. Suffice to say, the city didn't suit me and although I made some wonderful friends, Toronto will haunt me forever.
I recently finished "The Goldfinch" which ends with a bad character talking about how - paraphrasing here - you can be a bad person and good things will still happen to you, and you can be a good person and bad things will happen to you. So it doesn't matter what you do, good or bad, life decides. So the next life lesson I have learnt is BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. I'm a good girl... always have been. I am uncomfortably optimistic and see glitter floating through the sky when the sun shines. But bad things happen. I achieved a life long goal of donating eggs, which would be deemed as a "good deed" and what I got was an emergency operation removing a necrotic ovary by the end of it (which means I cannot donate again). Also fun fact - if the doctors didn't remove the dead tissue from my body in time, it would have infected my blood stream and I would have died.
Other life lessons include but are not limited to trusting people too easily, that I have high expectations with friend/ love relationships, that I need money to achieve my life goals that acting/ filmmaking is not currently able to provide and that I rely heavily on my family for my emotional/ mental wellbeing which is hard to do when you live in different timezones.
So with all those life lessons and more, I've got a 2020 plan. I'll be sure to update my blog with the full "Life Goals" segment but for now, I'd like to clue you in on the biggies for the next year.
I'm finally getting a degree. After years of putting it off, wanting to be available for acting auditions and my big break, it is finally time for me to sink into a Bachelor of Social Work. One of my hobbies in my teens was running kids camps for disadvantaged youth and I've always wanted to do more in that sector, so after four years, I hope to be working with disadvantaged youth as a social worker.
My film will be distributed. This one is a long time coming. Zombie Bro is in the final stretch. I've failed a Quality Control test so have to fix some bugs here and there but in the early part of the year, when it's passed it's second QC, the film will be signed to a distributor for the next decade or so. Hopefully that means some sort of passive income in the future.
I will be going to Egypt. I don't know when, and I don't know who with but it's been on my goals list for far too long so 2020 is the year. I will be cruising down the Nile river, I'll be buying Papyrus art for everybody and I am gonna ride through Cairo on a goddamn camel. The excitement levels are high. So far, a many number of people have straight up said "no" to accompanying me to Egypt but I've got two "maybes" and that's all I need.
And that's the update for this month and the last for a crazy year. Thank you for reading/ listening to my journey so far. I hope you and your families have had a wonderful christmas and that you start the new year with big dreams and achievable goals to make them come true.
Much love, May