Featured
Stories

Neema Ejercito (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

I have a dream. On my fifth round of working through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I declared that I wanted to perform on stage (dancing, maybe?) with my multimedia artwork all around me and people freely watching me and walking around my works, experiencing my dance and my art as they pleased at the Globe Theatre in the UK. I had no idea how I would raise the funds for this logistical nightmare, and when I first verbalized it, I felt that I didn’t have any artwork to speak of.

That was 2017, if my memory serves. Fast-forward to today, when I have been creating art and participated in my first community fundraiser exhibit. None of the five pieces I donated sold, and I think the gallery owner only put two of them up. One she simply disqualified because the frame was banged up, and she couldn’t find any remedy for it.

It wasn’t exactly my dream fulfilled when I first thought about it. But if I truly pay attention to what happened, part of my dream did indeed come to pass. And when I pay it even more attention, it didn’t just happen to me. I made it happen. I created things that expressed my thoughts and feelings, I applied to the gallery with my pieces, I submitted them and I even posted about the event on my social media. None of that would’ve happened if I hadn’t bought some marbling paint from Opus and experimented with it, or if I hadn’t gone with my husband to an amazing photo workshop at BenCab’s gallery in Baguio back home with our amazing instructor, Tilak Hettige.

And these are just a few of the things I did to make my own luck. When I was little and read about how the people I admired got to where they were, a common theme was, indeed, the word “luck.” You have to be at the right place at the right time, know the right people. And how that worked eluded me. Now though, as I listen to more podcasts of people I admire, I find another vein running through all of them, which is that they worked their butts off.

They weren’t necessarily stepping on other people in a rat race, though there were those who did, and I would grow out of love with these personas, not that that mattered to them. The hard work seemed more often to come from just working on something because they were arriving for something more than just paying the bills. What kept them going, in spite of the ridicule, rejection, booing and even the sh*t thrown at them (both literally and figuratively), was that they had a bigger goal in mind. They faced all this not for crowds to sing their names, or to have their names up on billboards (though of course, those never hurt). What kept them going was that they were compelled to do what they set out to do, and that they had to give their all to it.

I had prepared a lot of other stuff, noting ideas that came when I was running errands, jotting actual material I thought would be perfect for this article. And I feel I’ve gone elsewhere with what I’m writing now. I guess it is just like making my own luck. I could make all the plans in the world for something, only to find that I would have already “arrived,” had I only taken the time to pay attention to what was all around me.

—

Ever since watching Better Man with her second son, Neema Ejercito has not stopped listening to Robbie Williams’ Live at Knebworth album on Spotify. She even writes to it (much to the joy of her loving husband, who has told her to stop so that he doesn’t hate him and his music XD). She is a mother to two other humans and a bunch of plants, all of whom she adores and loves watching grow.