I didn't realize how much my life pivoted on these words, which seemed so small at the time but had such an impact. My college drama teacher, an actor, heard me criticizing a play and then asked me, for the tenth time that semester, to focus on what I liked. I told her "why?" and she said "If you are critical, that critical voice turns inward. And you'll be unable to create." She was so right. And I remember it every day. A healthy dose of criticism is great, but as a writer and actor over the years I realized that the thing that separates you, the thing that makes or breaks you, is your willingness to fight against the critical voice, the one that tells you you can't do it and you're not good enough. And the more you criticize others, the bigger that voice becomes. The way you talk about others suddenly becomes the way you talk to yourself. That fall, after two years of criticizing other people, I had to direct my first play. Every day I fought between encouraging myself and criticizing how bad the show was. I remembered what my drama teacher told me. Over and over again I reminded myself to keep the critical voice at bay. The play was a hit, and I still remind myself that today. In the six or so years since she told me that I've really built a life for myself I'm proud of. That turning point helped me to end so many bad habits in my life. We are so conditioned to trust criticism and skepticism that we forget every once in a while to believe, generate, and create.

"Don't have a waste mindset, have an investment mindset." I used to punish myself endlessly if I wasted money. If I spent $11 on a bracelet that broke, or a book that sucked. I would punish myself by eating cheap groceries and feeling like crap about myself. When I began reading content from companies like Ellevest, BrokeBlackGirl, and other women who discussed financial literacy, I saw that I wasn't alone: shame was such a huge part of female financial literacy. Across the world, women are taught to be ashamed of their spending. This shame was present in those Seventeen Magazine articles I read as a kid that would say don't waste money on t shirts, don't waste money on this, subtly insulting women who didn't follow these rules. In college I found out tampons and pads cost like $20 and nice fitting t shirts that don't rip cost $25 each. It seemed like the world had pigeonholed me: you are an idiot for wasting money but also everything for girls is expensive so you're going to waste money anyway. Once I saw how much of a waste mindset I had, I reshaped my belief. I don't emotionally spiral if I waste money or overspend: if the "return" on my overspending was a good day with friends or a good mood, it was worth it because it made me more productive and kinder. I discovered that my mental health is just as important for sticking to a budget as my physical health. If I over spend, I'll make it up in the future. I have a much healthier attitude towards money now, an attitude that helped me secure scholarship money and get my student loans in order! No lie: the investment mindset really changed my life. 10/10 would recommend.

Cool for You by Eileen Myles. It's poetic yet blunt, bitter yet charming epic yet personal all at once. How did they do it all? There's a lot of books I could've picked because so many writers are just witty as hell and satirical without veering into a malevolent spirited critique. But Eileen manages it best. They just pepper in beautiful emotional passages with shocking, snarling critiques of class, gender, binary sexuality, and all sorts of crap that silences people, the crap I can't stand. But it's her life. Their life, my apologies. I began reading their stuff when Eileen identified as "she," which has still changed. But my view on her story has only evolved: it's alive, breathing, and so wonderfully rebellious. I could quote them like a snob or compare them to other great books, I'm not sure what this essay wants. But the best story I can think of about Eileen Myles was a time I brought them up to a Chicago Professor, who mentioned he had actually seen them perform. I was so excited, because I had only watched YouTube videos. He said they were "off putting." The performance was off putting. I found it hard to believe the author who crafted heartbreak, grief (they watched their father die) and feminist critique into a beautiful dance of Cool For You was off putting. But I realized, that was the point. I love that book because it simply doesn't care what you think. It's cool. For you. But barely. There's an anger underneath that men don't love to death. They call it off putting. It's not a neatly packaged rebellion they can love and call cute. It is a true, fiery, retort of the shit that is sexism and misogyny.

Hollywood was once labelled a "manless Eden." When a screenwriting teacher told me this two years ago, my whole life suddenly made sense. I had lived in Los Angeles for a year and a half and watched millions of unqualified, couldn't-spell-for-their-lives men obtain agents and writing positions while my very talented Ivy League educated female friends workshopped their stuff in writer's groups and struggled to make rent. When I was a kid, the friends in my neighborhood interested in putting on plays and telling stories were mostly girls. When I was studying at a prestigious predominantly white university, the theater and film studies departments were 80% women, POC, LGBTQ+ individuals. Why the heck, when I began working in theater and film, was everybody male and white? My graduate studies at NYU, like my work as a writer and filmmaker, will explore this intersection between Feminism and Film, how the structure of Hollywood filmmaking and the studio system inherently pushed out women and POC from its conception in the 1920s. Charlie Chaplin's female collaborators, themselves writers and directors, were increasingly pushed out. This lack of behind the scenes control has had an extremely harmful effect on Women of Color in this country. I wrote in another essay that the reason even average men psychologically are able to build effective habits to succeed in society is because they are effectively empowered by the millions of representations of them on screen from the moment they turn on the television. Representation is the insidious, invisible X factor ingrained into our perceptions of gender roles. Just last week, I watched my niece receive a baby doll as a gift. My nephew? A Nerf gun. The message was clear: my young niece, who is scoring at the top of her first grade class and a supreme athlete and performer, must foster emotional connection and provide care. My nephew, who can often be found on his iPad, can shoot and violate whatever he wants. Pursuing a film degree will allow me to radically change the way women and Asian people perceive themselves onscreen. I'm a writer strongly invested in the universal themes of the human condition, how we humorously respond to our own powerlessness and our own ambition. How we can change for the better. I may write some very satirical things, but I never let cynicism have the final say. I joke with my friends that even though the stories I write are harsh and dramatic, I inherently create a benevolent universe for the audience, because I think that this optimism will allow the change we need in the world. I'm sick of watching films that "acknowledge the pain of the female experience" by making us watch torture porn and feel sad. I'm sick of watching films that embrace "girl power" by letting one slender, chill, conventionally beautiful cis-woman character do awe-inspiring things for their male cast members. There's a happy medium where we get to be the mainstream ensemble, we get to create reality. And I intend to create that. I intend to change the way we think. Not challenge. Change. Inception did it. Get Out did it. Crazy Rich Asians did it. I intend to create a world where all the things that a male-dominant society hates about women, our humor, our bluntness, our emotions, our disregard for beauty standards, are front and center virtues, because I simply can't take another day of watching women contort themselves to avoid conflict with men. When I was twenty, I resolved to spend the rest of my life doing it, and I'm still doing it today.

The first thing I was told when I stepped foot in Los Angeles was to take advantage of being Filipino. "Write about your family! You're so lucky! People love the Asian thing right now." These people didn't care (and they made it quite clear they didn't) if my family may not have wanted to be written about, or if there was anything else remotely interesting about me, like my skill as a basketball player, my struggle as a middle child in a biracial family, or my love of epic fantasy stories like Star Wars and The Last Airbender. Chris Nolan, to them, was a "genius" who "excelled at articulating the human condition." To them, I was a Filipino girl who could be Filipino and gain access to grants, financing, and explain to them, through film, what the Filipino American experience was. And by the way, yes they asked me about financing. I got a call from a white producer asking that because I was "half Flip" if I knew of any family members in the Philippines interested in financing a horror film based there written by a Korean screenwriter. Watching old Tina Fey shows, where all Asian characters are oversexualized, looking for green cards, and speak with accents, recently reaffirmed to me the significance of expanding Asian capabilities on screen. Last summer I, along with all Americans, watched as women who looked like my grandmother and my cousins were assaulted and even in one case shot by police. People do NOT, as that producer said, "love" the "Asian thing" right now. They believe the Asian experience is one to be looked down on and commodified for money. It's an insidious and harmful form of racism to extol the virtues of a culture without fully understanding the expansiveness and variety of it, or how universal its themes truly are. I loved Crazy Rich Asians because of all the amazing talent on screen by some of my favorite Asian actors. But in my opinion, the more amazing thing about it was the way it reinvigorated the romantic comedy with real emotional stakes: what do you do when marrying the woman you love will make you an exile in your own family? What is it like to be a young woman born with nothing who had to work her whole life? It's likely someone of Asian descent would best understand the struggle that Nick and Rachel go through, but it's a human struggle nonetheless with deep emotional stakes. Chris Nolan, a white guy, is not the only one with a handle on universal experiences and themes, but we act like white screenwriters create the human norm and diverse screenwriters create the sub-norm underneath that. We don't. I believe social justice for Asians is best expanded by increasing our cultural presence in the mainstream, by demonstrating the significance of our realities and our anger, pushing against all the typical depictions we've had onscreen. As a half-Asian filmmaker studying film at NYU, I want to continue to expand and push against norms by pushing to create more platforms for Asian representation. I've begun by assisting with the Filipina led short film Witness to a Devouring Monster (an amazing depiction of rage, abuse, and beauty) and writing a script about Filipina basketball players trying to get recruited by D1 schools. I hope to continue to help more Filipina filmmakers push their work to the center of our culture, where we belong.

If you can't see it, you can't be it. A simple phrase, but an effective one. The reason even average men psychologically are able to build effective habits to succeed in society is because they are effectively empowered by the millions of representations of them on screen from the moment they turn on the television. Representation is the insidious, invisible X factor ingrained into our perceptions of gender roles. Just last week, I watched my niece receive a baby doll as a gift. My nephew? A Nerf gun. The message was clear: my young niece, who is scoring at the top of her first grade class and a supreme athlete and performer, must foster emotional connection and provide care. My nephew, who can often be found on his iPad, can shoot and violate whatever he wants. Society must effectively push against the disempowering gender binary if it is to make any progress in female empowerment. It's not enough to show women doing it all, and it's not enough to have Mulan and Rey kicking ass on screen. Dismantling binary stereotypes that affirm women's roles as caretakers and secondary characters will be the key to effective equality and empowerment. It begins at home! The amount of times I see my nieces and students on their phones or talking about television shows they watch, similar to me and my friends at that age, has reinforced, in my mind, the significance of cultural representation. We must be mindful to what girls and boys are reading and how they see themselves in relation to that. But even further than that, this extends to the Hollywood film industry, which is STILL to this day dominated by men. Executives are the invisible power grabbers, and they are not mindful, considerate, or at all careful of how they depict gender to young girls. When I interned in development in Los Angeles, I watched female producers promote men over women because male writers "wrote some great stuff that [they] liked to watch growing up." Though female writers can more accurately dismantle representation and give the female perspective weight and veracity in the mainstream culture, they are still under-marketed, not paid enough, and treated horribly. The ignorance is widespread, and the lack of awareness is why many of my young female students date boys who don't respect them and have a tougher time instituting boundaries or affirming their unique personality and skills. Though they grew up with the feminist kick ass characters, they struggle to articulate their emotions or resist performing for male attention. They are still used to watching Marvel films where women are cool, not talkative, and hang with the boys. Men get to be funny, diverse, and exist in multiple ways. Rose Tico of Star Wars, a female character who was quirky, shy, short, vocal, emotional, and worked as a mechanic, a traditionally male profession, completely defied the slender, chill, female norm. She was ridiculed online and completely cut from the third film. It sent the message to young girls that if you behave in a way men don't like, you are annoying and should shut up. Not all girls want to be leaders and bosses, and that is okay. But it is psychologically important for them to believe they can be whatever they'd like, that men can reject or dislike them and that that does not define them (men DO NOT decide society). Girls need to know that they are the decider of their own lives and futures. They are not second.