Becoming Caryn | #1

Having courage to become the agent of my own life

Hi friends, writing from Puerto Escondido in Mexico where we just finished a beautiful and soulful retreat with the writer collective I am building (Foster.co) . This is a pic of the view from where I am hitting publish.

Last week I qualified as a deep tissue massage therapist.

I knew I wanted to train in this modality since 2018 when I had a taste of it while training as a yoga teacher. But I didn’t for another five years. At that time I thought the only option I had was to conform to norms about my career. I thought the only way was for it to fit the mold of a traditional narrative.

My job at the time was to assess the impact of artificial intelligence on culture and society. I was leading a team building algorithms to measure the bias that other algorithms would have. My oh-so-important-white-collar-job had me thinking that I was fixing big world problems and this massage nonsense seemed silly in comparison. So every time the desire to register for a massage training came up, I pushed it away and parked it to the side. 

In 2021, I took nine months out of work. I’d hit rock bottom and really needed to assess the work that I was doing and how it was no longer working for me. I took time out because I’d forgotten what it meant for me to be human. I took time out because I’d moulded myself into the type of human that my mum and dad could be proud of, that society could cheer and celebrate but I, the person who was this human, couldn’t bear to be anymore. 

It wasn’t that I’d become unrecognisable to myself. It was more that I’d always known that the real me was far from this person I kept trying to be and I never, ever honoured that. I never, ever had the courage to be the real me. The real me, whose hobbies and multi-hyphenated talents sat across completely different fields,  was left dormant.

At rock bottom with nowhere to go, I decided to give her a try. I started hanging out on Twitter and freelancing for gigs I thought were interesting. It was through this courage that I found out about Foster.

Foster was my initiation to becoming the agent of my own life. It was the first time I got to experience such a life-giving and expansive community. I was surrounded by people who showed me how to not only accept my quirks but to experiment with the curiosities I felt called towards and most of all, to be proud of my unique self.

Foster is a community for writers willing to hone their craft. More than that, we are a group of people willing to be raw, honest and vulnerable about really hard shit and endlessly generous in supporting and exalting each other’s writings and truths.

I took a baby step in sharing my ideas and it resonated. I took a bigger leap in sharing more ideas and they resonated even more. This eclectic group of people were nodding affirmations to little buds of opinions and positions I had on the world. And they were allowing those flowers to blossom out of me. 

My potential slowly unleashed. One of my pieces was accepted and published as part of a printed anthology of short stories on waterfalls. That was the first time I was paid for my writing.

The doubts I was told to have about myself started to peel away. And all the things that had been waiting to come out slowly bobbed to the surface. Like how I really wanted to learn how to paint in oils. And how I’d always wanted to train as a masseuse.  

And slowly, I gravitated towards ways of being and ways of living that I’d always felt called towards. I was finally allowing myself to have, be and do those things. 

From the first day of the massage training I could tell that bodywork and the power of touch was something that I was so intuitively attuned to. I didn’t need to memorise the sequences we were taught, I didn’t need to over-intellectualise, I could just feel the wisdom and understanding surfacing from the bottom up. The inkling I had about becoming a masseuse back in 2018 after training as a yoga teacher was right all along. 

I found an art studio with a wonderful art director who took me under his wing and gave me truthful encouragement not shrouded in falsity. I told him I felt called to paint and he said “do it if you have the energy”. I have been painting a lot since and feel my practice in oil painting blossoming exponentially.

From the moment I decided to step forwards with courage towards being the person I knew I wanted to be, all the things started to fall into place. I became a paid writer, I became a part-time painter and I started my journey towards healing myself and others through bodywork.

I realised that this narrative will never make sense for a lot of people especially the traditional and mainstream ones. People I was trying too hard to please and people I was trying to make sense to. When I realised the choice was mine as to who I made sense to, the heavy burden of expectation fell away. I became free to explore my own identity for myself. I became free to choose how I spend my time. I became the agent of my own life. 

I am excited and proud of who I am becoming. I am going to further my training and knowledge in the healing touch and bodywork. I already have a vision of what she will look like. I am painting relentlessly with love and awe for the process rather than an obsession for the outcome. And I am sharing my journey with you of how I am becoming closer and closer to my authentic self. I know this is the person I am meant to be. 

This is my journey of becoming Caryn.