New Beginnings, Kinda

2/4/2022
12:05PM

It’s a light drizzle sort of a day today. It doesn’t look ominous like one of those dark and stormy night type of a mood. Instead it’s refreshing. We had a lot of snow this past week, and we could really use this nice cleanse of rain. 

I’m sitting in my living room on the couch glancing back and forth at my window and computer screen. I’m working from home. However if you haven’t heard, I’m no longer employed at Na:eun Hospitality Group. I was doing social media management and marketing for their restaurants Atoboy and Atomix, until their management left a really bad taste in my mouth. I did what I could to bring change towards the situation, but ultimately decided to leave the company. I realized that it just wasn’t worth my mental health, and I wanted to be part of something that accepted me. 

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Life isn’t easy, and things happen to even the best of us. In order to pursue that role, I made the difficult move to leave my wonderful company of 4 years, PixleeTurnto. It’s one of the top in their industry, had supportive people there, and even paid more than the job I moved into. However, I decided to chase my dreams and pursue something that I thought I wanted to do. So yeah, this isn’t a success story, but maybe it kind of is. ??????

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When I was about to quit Na:eun, I decided to reach back out to PixleeTurnTo to explain my situation and see if they may have anything open. It turns out they had something part-time, which was JUST what I was looking for.

With all this happening, I couldn’t help but feel like this were supposed to happen for a reason. Ever since I received my first paid gig in photography back in 2016, I really never intended to go into being a photographer full-time. Sure there was the whole “not making enough money” thing, but more than anything I didn’t want photography to end up being something I resented. I didn’t want to lose my passion for it if it were to become the breadwinning tool. However, after doing it for many days post work hours or on the weekends, I never seemed to lose energy when on gigs or after them. Most of all, I was always happy. I was happy capturing memories, creating smiles, and delivering images I was proud of. 

Before I made the nerve wracking decision, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being rash either. I consulted a number of my friends about this, many being freelancers themselves. I had hours of conversations and received much reassurance whether it be to my hard work ethics, my status of age, or my so called talented eye for things. If it ever failed, I could always just hit the drawing board and go full time under a company again. And so I made the decision to go full throttle to dedicate my time and energy to making money doing the thing I love most.

I was going to tell my parents perhaps a year later. AHA However, I ended up surprising myself and told them 2 weeks after because I felt like they would actually understand me. To an even bigger surprise, they supported me. It made me truly happy that they just wanted to be happy and that they believed that I could make it happen. For them to not just accept it, but to support it, moved mountains for me. It really allowed me to release that burden in feeling like I would disappoint them. We never want to disappoint our parents, but I believe that having an Asian culture, it really hits differently when we say the phrase. It’s this sort of an invisible pressure. Anyways, this just may have been the final catalyst I needed to my career kickoff formula. 

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It’s approximately 36 hours since I started writing this blog post and I’m finishing it up at about 2:00AM. I know the journey will be rough. I’m going to have my successes and I forsure I’m going to have my failures. I’ll pick myself back up. I’ll have a community to help pick me up and I’ll be there for them whenever they need it as well.

I’m really excited guys. I’m going to give it my all as always, but let’s see what these next couple months have in store for me. You can wish me luck, but by the time you’re done wishing I’ll be on to my next project. I’ll be doing this for my parents, my culture, my community, my friends, and most importantly for me.

Forward to success. 

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Seen below are some of my most recent work I’ve done these past few months. I want to add them to remind myself that I’m putting out good work and that more work will continue to come.