Month: January 2021

Living Without Regret

Everyone has some sort of regret in life. The car you never bought. The video game you didn’t play which turned out to be the next best thing. The date you never went on. The 14 beers you drank last night at a party even though you have to work the next day. But is it possible to live a life regret free?

I would say yes it is. There isn’t a day that goes by where I regret a decision I made. I’ve learned to accept my past for what it was. And more importantly I’ve learned to see how past events shaped my future. I learned how they made me a better person.

My biggest regret for a long time was being a screw up in school. I went to a university straight out of high school and screwed around. I didn’t focus on school work and my grades tanked. I didn’t get kicked out, but I was close. I really only did just enough to get by. I left the university after my freshman year of college and went to community college.

There I focused more on my schooling. I actually tried and I did well. The following year I went back to the same university. I was determined to do it right this time. And while I did better, it still didn’t matter in the end. My screw up from before meant I wasn’t able to get financial aid. No financial aid meant I couldn’t pay the tuition from the previous semester to be able to register for the next one. And that meant I was to return home again. This time for good.

It was a hard lesson to learn. One that took several years to finally understand. I don’t consider it a screw up anymore. I consider it a stepping stone. As an 18 year old I didn’t know what I wanted to do anyway. I went into college undecided. After that, I changed my major about 5 times. I wanted to do everything from psychology to journalism. But nothing seemed right. It just didn’t feel right for me.

I finally landed on movie and TV production and it’s something I have a huge passion for. I love telling stories and I love acting. This is something where I can tell stories and act. And more importantly I can create characters. Characters that reflect who I am and who I was. Characters that feel. Characters that can almost be real. And best of all, I can have these characters be the things I could never be.

To me, movie and TV production allows me to be the person I was always meant to be. I don’t have any regrets about the path I’ve taken. Because years later, I can see that without it, I don’t think I’d be where I am now.

2020: The End and The Beginning

2020 was some kind of year. It had its ups and downs. It seemed like for every positive thing there were about 10 negative things. Not to mention that March to about August seemed to last about 20 years while August to December went by in the blink of an eye. But was 2020 all that bad? From my own personal experience, it really wasn’t. Sure some things got thrown off track because of Covid, but overall I did have a decent year.

My year started off amazing. I was in Colorado for our annual skiing trip. We went to Winter Park and spent a week skiing before returning home. It’s a trip I look forward to every year. Sadly we won’t be going this time around. Covid is to blame. But life will go on. We will return when it is safe to do so. In the meantime, we will jusy have to go skiing closer to home.

April took a dive downward. I wound up with Covid with the rest of my family. We all recovered from it, but it was definitely an experience I won’t forget. It was not fun. For me, it lasted for about 10 days. While I was fine enough to go outside and walk around the house, I didn’t leave the property. I was not going to put others at risk and it was a long time after I had it that I decided it was safe for me to even go to the store again.

2020 has opened the door to many new friendships as well. I’ve met a lot of awesome people through Discord and Twitch and many of them live a world away. If it wasn’t for Covid, there’s a good chance I never would of met any of these people. I was only able to meet them because I was stuck at home for 2 months and spent a good chunk of my time online.

August brought another sad moment. I had plans to go to Sweden in August but we cancelled that trip because of Covid. It was going to be my first international trip. It was going to be such an awesome experience and I was so excited. But safety comes first. And while we didn’t go, we plan to make up for it with a trip to Germany in September of 2021.

As the year came to a close I couldn’t help but smile at all the things I was still able to accomplish even with the world in a state of uncertainty. I continued to take classes and I spent 2020 learning German. I’m not completely fluent in it but Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch.

2020 was also the year where I was able to bring myself out of the massive debt hole I was in. I’m not 100% debt free, but I’m in a much better spot than I was 12 months ago and that alone calls for celebration. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do it but I did. And I’m so happy I did. It feels like a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders and I can’t wait to start 2021 in a much better place financially.

Along with all the chaos I also wrote a new LEGO animated film as well as created a new comic series. I’ve spent a decent amount of time doing creative things like that as well as video editing. I needed to keep busy and I definitely did with those projects.

I’m excited for 2021. The world might not be back to normal, but there’s plenty of things I want to accomplish. I want to film the short film I wrote and my new LEGO animation. I want to read at least one book a month. I want to do more video editing. There’s plenty I can do this year. All I have to do it set my mind to it.