Hello dear reader, I am back. Even though this short column isn’t able to encompass everything I have been up to in the past two years, I am sharing with you one of the biggest lessons I have realized during this time away from this container. The realization that I have completely devalued and misweighed everything that I have done and built in comparison to immediate survival pressure and things I have yet to accomplish.
Even now typing this, I am baffled at how I myself did not see this. I know it is deeper than just my own life experience. I am aware it’s epigenetic and definitely connected to the war traumas my lineage has endured. And I would argue it can also explain why so many brilliant Estonians are not able to achieve the success they deserve on the global stage.
Let me take you back to 2016 when I had just got my permanent residency in Canada and was auditioning as an actor and things were going well. After the extremely stressful process of finally getting my papers in order to stay here and the lessons learnt through the whole ordeal, I segued into studying Immigration: Laws, Policies and Procedures at UBC. I was already advising others on their immigration process and I might as well have charged for it. The plan was that this would support my acting career during the breaks in between projects.
Well, that was the plan. And you know what they say about plans and making them.
Somewhere along the way, COVID happened and I took a break in acting to temporarily “build my business,” but it was so stressful that on many levels I started resenting the whole thing. I was constantly giving too much, carrying too much, charging too little and even woke up computing in my head how I could strategize someone’s application better. I was living for immigration and it had taken over my life.
When I realized this, I made the decision to close the business. And I have been trying to, for over a year now. Until about a month ago.
My website had broken down and since I was going to close it anyway, I let it slide. But then, playing around in vibe coding, I rebuilt the entire thing from scratch in one day and found a suitable host and now the site looks amazing. What I didn’t realize is that the inner work I had been doing on myself, the realizations I had had around other topics, and the boundaries I had set seeped into this new website build.
I started to ask myself: “Why do I follow the lead of most RCICs and immigration lawyers who don’t publish their prices?” I know why they do it. Many have different price lists for different countries and I do admit, there is logic to that. But my clients are not from Asia. Most of my clients are Europeans, Australians or Americans. So I sat down and wrote out the entire price list and published it. Then I realized/remembered I’d given a TV interview for CityNews Vancouver regarding immigration matters. And I put that on the website. This was the start of me reclaiming and owning what I actually have accomplished and giving it a place to live. The TV interviews, the expertise, the experience and my technical capabilities have lived as bursts on my social media profiles but they’ve never had a solid place to accumulate. To compound. That, in turn, makes it very easy even for myself to dismiss the years of proof I have accumulated and return from the equation as “not ready yet,” “not enough,” “not famous yet,” “more work needed.” Not to mention the confusion of others who are just looking at it from the outside and seeing disjointed bursts, but no coherence.
The truth is, I have been carrying the true architecture and where everything belongs, in my own field, in my own head and having to rebuild it from scratch every time I post or share something. To start proving why I am the expert or why people should trust me. And that is exhausting.
Now the website is doing the work for me. I don’t have to negotiate my prices in my emails and justify why I charge what I charge and the proof of my expertise also lives there. Boundaries. What a concept, eh? For someone who is familiar with business or grown up around it, it may be a given. For me, whose grandparents were prisoners in Siberia’s concentration camps, and who actually should have had accommodations growing up due to my neurodivergence, it was not a given. This is not taught in schools and I followed the best practices of other professionals who I thought knew better. But that wasn’t the framework that worked for me. Not for my brain, not for me.
This whole realization opened a Pandora’s Box like no other. It’s as if I woke up in my body and in my life with a completely different perspective. I have done so much, how have I not seen it? I have been looking at an empty gas gauge and making that the focal point, not realizing I am driving my dream car, which was on my vision board for years and which is now paid off (yes, actually).
And so all of a sudden immigration became light again.
Perspective.
In Part Two I will share how this realization has played out in my acting and my journey as an artist here in Canada (I guess that’s also something I haven’t shared?). Well, brace yourselves. I am so happy you are here to witness this.
