These past couple of months, I have been giving some thought into the next direction I want to take.

Where do I want to take my writing? What kind of interviews do I want to keep doing? Do I want to be performing or creating music? But I’ve always loved sharing my own work? How can I monetize it? How can I make a living from this? How can I make my passion my work?

If you read my last update in “Signs from the Universe,” I was beginning to pay attention to what I knew all along — it was the affirmations of others that helped propel and encourage me to follow my bliss.

As I’ve been home for a complete year now post-college, I can say with confidence that you need a year to get lost to figure out what it is you really want to do.

I’ve always felt my interests were scattered and I never knew how to focus in on them. I just did what I did and worked hard to get whatever little things I wanted. And I paid attention to and observed a lot of my elders and mentors to learn a thing or two. But as I am now starting to realize that my life is driven by my passion and I cannot live without it (sometimes stubbornly), I would love to fuse the things I know best with the things I get excited about it.

I am hoping to somehow “rebrand” or launch some sort of new project in the coming months. I am realizing this shift within me to let go of the comfort of my part-time turned full-time barista job distraction and refocus that energy onto things that I actually care about — my work, my life, my loves. So whether that’s focusing on putting out more quality content, upgrading my videos, engaging in more collaborations or even launching a new website, blog, magazine or what-have-you… I am excited to work and engage with the things I’ve always loved again!

This new video compilation was created as an homage to the people who have followed me on YouTube for quite some time but have not seen much material from me (I want to let them know that I am still here, I am still playing, and I am always learning and growing and continuing to find my “sound”; I just engage with the Instagram world moreso than YouTube now. P.S. The Instagram guitar world has been insane!). Also, as this past year has been a bit of a cluster-cuss of continually searching and doing and finding things to feel inspired about, I feel this new energy inside of me…

• I’ve quietly written songs and demos in the past year that I would like to have developed and reimagined.
• I’ve been engaging with the Bay Area a little bit more (even though my heart is still set on moving back to SoCal), and have plans of joining a new local band and engaging in new projects to propel my Filipino-American voice within the movement occurring today.
• Also, I’ve been returning to my love of attending shows and events and interviewing those artists and featuring them on my blog. (Even though I am learning to be my own artist, I figure there’s always something new to learn when you’re engaging with different individuals.)
• Lastly, I have been coming to peace with this fickle point in my life. (In fact, life may always be fickle.) I’m young with a hopeful heart and there’s a world that inspires me. I’m figuring it out along the way, just as the rest of you!

I figure, when you do anything with love, you’re doing it right. As someone once told me that luck is when good preparation meets opportunity, I figure you just keep on working and keep on working hard. Focus is everything. But a good heart keeps focus intact.

Listen in at 10:45 in the video for my message to you all!

With love and honesty,

Rachel