Special Edition: Pitstop on my way to safety | #12

This is probably the most vulnerable essay I have shared on the Internet to-date!

Some of you know that I have been part of a transformational writing collective for the past two years called Foster. A couple of times a year, the collective spends a season together — an intense five-week community experience honing our writing. I pledged to publish a piece to mark the completion of the third season — enjoy!

In my late twenties, I realised that I was living a much smaller life than the one I was supposed to be living. The majority of my big life decisions had been, as it turns out, made out of fear. I came to this realisation when a writing workshop I attended taught me that choices are influenced by one of two things -- fear or truth. Fear sits behind resistance and oftentimes is the reason we don’t even make a decision, which is also a decision. And it is usually much harder to make choices out of truth. 

Truth demands a deeper level of self-awareness, it requires vulnerability and going where most others dare not venture in their lifetime. It pushes the boundaries of what we believe we are constrained by to live the biggest, fullest and best version of our life. It is simply the ability to say with quiet confidence and a knowing nod: ‘I am living my best life’. 

When I realised that my decisions were made out of fear, I crumbled at the thought of answering to the dying-bed version of myself. What would she say to the smaller than could-have-been-life I led? 

Here is an even trickier thing, it is hard to tell if someone is living their best life by easy-to-quantify metrics. In my case, I was travelling all the time for work and pleasure. I had a full social calendar and freedom to do all the things I wanted to. I was climbing the corporate ladder fast, I trained as a yoga teacher, I went on fun holidays and I saw friends all the time. Hell, I was living in London and life was at full throttle. On the surface, all of that seems like ingredients for living my best life. But, in truth, I was constantly anxious, unable to relax and struggled to maintain long-lasting relationships. Oh, and I was also incredibly lonely and sad, but these feelings were buried so deep, it took time to become aware of them. 

I later came to realise that being creative was core to my identity, but because I’d been a chronic self-denier of my need to express myself, they were unattended to. I’d always enjoyed drawing in charcoal but it was never something I was encouraged to take seriously. 

While it looked like I was living my best life from the outside, I was actually quite far from it. It took many sessions in therapy, a yearlong breakdown, another year rebuilding, a community of Internet friends, and a lot of writing to feel safe enough to step towards my best life. 

Safety, belonging, community and a sense of connection are things I have struggled to find my whole life. For years and years, I thought it was because I was different, maybe a bit special, and people just didn’t understand me. And then for years and years later, I started to unlearn that belief and realise that I had caused the struggle unknowingly. The distance I put between me and any person I was relating to was the stretch of my loneliness. I had created that gap to be far and wide on purpose. I had done so unconsciously time and time again. But it seems a dubious claim to say all people are inherently unsafe. Rather it was because I had, as a consequence of several childhood experiences, come to believe as fact, that this was what I needed to do to maintain safety.

Whenever I’d get too close to people, I’d panic and push them away, hard and far. All the time, I would believe that they weren’t good enough, or they were encroaching on my personal space or something else. My mind was creating different excuses each time that I thought were fact. As in, I actually believed I was in danger whenever I got close to people. I only felt safe being ‘close’ to people who I could have intellectual debates with and with whom I could just use my brain but not my heart. And I’d chase after friends and lovers who didn’t have time for me or were themselves emotionally unavailable. Making myself unattainable felt safe, and chasing unattainable people was also a roundabout way of keeping myself ‘safe’.

I did a lot of solo travelling in my late teens and early twenties. As an extrovert filled with hunger and thirst to see the world, it fitted me perfectly. I could hop from city to city, accountable only to myself and meet lots of interesting people on the way. And best of all, I didn’t need to truly know them. I didn’t need to get close to them because we were ships passing each other by, on different routes, with different timelines and towards different physical and metaphorical destinations. I look back on these travels and it hits me square in the chest that I was, in fact, lost and desperate to find a place of belonging. Home hardly gave me the safety I yearned for so unconsciously and through the guise of adventure and youth, I went out searching for it. 

I searched in other ways too, on my semester abroad in France; on my year abroad in China; in my hop from community to community when I settled to work in London. I attended business school then part-time law school, was deep in a yoga community, joined a cold-water swimming community, while often travelling solo most weekends across Europe. I moved down to the English coast during the pandemic and then back to Australia and then back to London. I ached for ground beneath my feet; my body desperate for a place to finally rest in ‘safety’; my actions silently pleading for belonging. I was adamantly shouting but without my knowing, into an empty void. For years and years. 

Before my voice grew hoarse and my hopes waned, I found Foster. 

As a writing collective, we show up to help each other further our writing. We collaboratively edit and support the drafts that come through our collective, providing encouragement and constructive feedback. And yet, so much more happens.

I joined as one does with such things, without much thought. I was excited by the accountability this group of people were giving me to write more -- something I’d been meaning to do for a while. Two years later, on the cusp of leaving my paid job at Foster, it strikes me that Foster had acted as a vehicle for transforming my life. 

Initially, it gave me the courage to share my thoughts on the Internet, from short pieces to longer form personal essays. It gave me readers and cheerleaders who turned into friends. They kept showing up for me, in the sidelines of Google Docs commenting on my writing, cheering me on, encouraging me and building my self-efficacy. Often when I was down and sharing my self-doubt through my writing, they were there. Their continued faith in me and unconditional care for me rewired my belief of safety in relating to other people. They gave me hope to trust others. If I could trust random strangers on the Internet to do kind things for me time and time again, I could learn to repair my trust issues with real life relationships too. 

It incrementally gave me salvation to redeem myself from choices made out of fear -- to become who I was meant to be -- through choices made from truth. Foster became my community, my job, and then the infrastructure to rebuild relationships in real life. 

While it was clear to all that I was core to building Foster, what was less apparent was that Foster had become core to building me too.

I wrote, and wrote about my struggle with identity, and belonging, and community, and a sense of connection to a group of people. And simultaneously found my identity, and belonging, and community, and a sense of connection to a group of people. 

Allowing this trusted community to see all sides of me was healing -- the parts I question, the parts I hate and the parts I was still forming. Two years of writing in this way was like taking part in a transformational coaching program I didn’t realise I’d signed up to. I was eventually empowered to find answers to questions I didn’t even know I had!

Writing with the support of the community also allowed me to see who I was, reminding me of the self I’d buried before even having the opportunity to be formed. Slowly, like an archaeological site, I was carefully excavated. Discovered. Uncovered. Reunited. Restored. 

From being a lost twenty-something who was desperate to be found, I sold my writing to a publisher, discovered a deeply buried need to express my creativity through visual art, picked up oil painting for the first time and then sold my first painting at an exhibition. All in under two years. 

But like all pit stops, they aren’t the destination. And like all pit stops, one can stop for a long time but one can never stay forever. 

Eventually, it became apparent that Foster was also a pitstop, and I have to continue on my journey. And so I move towards my calling to experiment with oil paints, and shapes and faces, and bodies and still life and perspective. And to bask in the certainty of uncertainty, which is to make a choice out of truth and to take my shot at creating art for a living. 

With love,
Caryn