The stories that have to happen
The stories that have to happen
to initiate personal shifts, cultural shifts and collective evolution
I’ve reached the mountaintop I’d been longing to reach for so long: graduation. I had a diploma, a title, and with it, a doorway open to the pharmaceutical industry.
What a surprise to find myself a month later passionately going from creative workshop to creative workshop because some impulse made me. I honestly have no clue where it came from. It certainly wasn’t a habit because I hadn’t known myself like this since elementary school.
I experimented with wool, silk, enamel, painting, sewing, dying, and within weeks, I got obsessed with silver clay which marked the beginning of my parallel path as a jewellery designer.
I was a Regulatory Affairs Lead by day and jewellery designer by night. I was reconnected with my childhood passion for modelling shapes with my fingers. The only difference was the material—ceramics were replaced with wax and precious metal. I’ve made many pieces, some of which sold themselves with such exquisite ease, and some are with me until today.
Sometimes I would receive comments like “I don’t understand how you have the energy to do this alongside your job”. I felt the truth instantly. “This gives me the energy for the job.”
After five wonderful creative years with jewellery, I decided to put it on hold and pursue a new direction because healing my eczema and allergies stimulated my desire to serve others in this domain. There wasn’t enough space in my days and nights for both interests so I had to make a choice.
Now I was Regulatory Affairs Lead by day and a voracious student of nutrition, holistic health, functional medicine, food psychology, and naturopathy… by night. I was passionate about everything that was touching even just a corner of this field and I wanted to pour all of myself into helping people create a balanced and sustainable relationship with themselves and their bodies.
Crossroads
During the years of living in these parallel worlds, having all these activities and experiences, outer and inner, I discovered that it’s really hard for me to feel the pulse of creative energy and not be able to follow it. It is also really hard for me to feel the incorrectness of something and have to follow it. This was true since I was little; now I was just living an adult version of it.
It’s not much of an issue to be different than everyone if the question is whether you prefer sautéed or fresh tomatoes, or whether you go to Madeira or Sardinia for holidays… but when your entire way of existing is in opposition of the majority, well, you may start to feel like the outlier.
After struggling to fit myself into the normal rhythm for so long, discovering human design and gene keys in early 2021 hit me really hard. I was petrified. All the major inner conflicts I had struggled to reconcile under the surface of those parallel pursuits were now spoken to my face.
As much as my interest in nutrition was heart-led, I was reoriented. I officially left the field a few months later.
“At every major decision point in our careers, we’d look back to that hodgepodge of a map we’d made to success at 21 and use it to chart our next move.”
Words of
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I’m sure you are familiar with the interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I only needed to go as far as five years ahead to feel as though energy was leaving my body for good.
The rhythm I got sucked into (I didn’t know otherwise) was one of constant activity and plans and activity and plans… aimed at specific goals (that everyone knows) that made me so busy that the time I had left for sensing and savouring the things I love about being alive and having the freedom to follow my creative energy was not enough for the human I am.
I felt disconnected from the state of being that I perceive and recognize as my natural state. My state of homeostasis.
What happens when you are kicked out of homeostasis? Your body does what it has to do to bring you back at all cost and you have very little (if any) power to prevent it.
Keeping up with life as I set it up in the footsteps of the majority, to keep walking alongside my peers, largely meant putting myself into a state of permanent tension, agitation, and suppression while in it, and loads of alone time to recover and pursue my path because I couldn’t not. As it continued–not because I so wanted it to but because I couldn’t figure out how to live like me within this system–my activities and planning were eventually narrowed down to 1. work, and 2. self-care.
#homeostasis
What a surprise to see what began to emerge out of me then.
Self-care for me is not about merely spending hours in a sauna world, oiling my body with irresistibly scented oil head to toe, or reading The Big Book (a nickname I have given to my favourite book). Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy all of that but it’s more about the quality of being underneath, whatever activities it translates into.
And what does it translate into? My creative pursuits.
So from my self-care, things started to materialise.
If you broaden the definition of self-care to encompass everything that your human needs to thrive, you come to see doing the things that make you come alive, and feel love and vitality coursing through you as an act of self-care.
My art has begun as an act of self-care.
How I make myself available for collaborations is also an act of self-care because it allows me to meet my vital need for full expression… while serving the needs of others.
If you took the opportunity to download any of my freebooks or wallpapers I give to my subscribers… you guessed it: self-care.
And because whatever I learn, I turn it around and teach, all my energy, creativity, love, and conviction that were once fueled into my work in nutrition and holistic health are now calling for expression in this domain.
In other words, a new direction and a new definition of the word work literally began to take visible, tangible, and real form, while I was taking care to maintain my anchor in the quality of being I was longing for.
A journey toward inner alignment
If you are anything like me, life has taught you a similar lesson. It will be wrapped in your own unique story, but where our stories tend to overlap is questioning our way of living. Questioning both what and how we’ve been doing… and not knowing how to overturn it. We’re just spinning and the moment our system relaxes a little bit, we feel the incorrectness. What we feel are the consequences of having left out something that cannot be left out if we are to prosper. And because it’s unpleasant, we distract ourselves from feeling it. And keep spinning…
If this feels familiar, I am inviting you to do the one thing many of us both want and fear: taking a moment to pause and in this pause, notice what you are following - your energy or a concept you’ve adopted about how and where to apply your energy that you now try to live no matter what it costs (because the concept comes with a belief that you have no other choice)?
I cannot recommend this kind of work enough, even though what comes up may be uncomfortable to be with. It is the first step. To notice. Then we can begin recalibrating to a new normal.
Cultivating this skill will require compassion and patience, especially if you’ve grown accustomed to imbalance as your norm. But the rewards and revelations this practice brings have been worth it in my experience.
And it doesn’t even need a sabbatical to begin. It can start by stopping avoiding the truth.
There is a call for wellness integration, alignment, return to wholeness… It doesn’t matter what we call it; it’s all the same thing. And if it applies to you as well, you already know it.
What comes next?
Since 2021, I’ve been slowly, gradually emerging with yet again a more refined vision of what (and how) I wanted to create moving forward. And to tell you the truth, it is a challenge because I’m frequently standing up against not just my past but our collective past. It also feels like I’m dancing on an important edge.
I was guided to the path that I successfully followed for many years with the best intentions of my loving and loved parents. I was guided from a place where profit potential was very important (and I understand why) though it meant overshadowing and neglecting other aspects. I was guided on how to best set myself up for life from the knowledge and the foundations of the times when I was making these major decisions. I was guided based on experience that had enabled my parents to give my brother and me the life of opportunities we had, and I was shown a way to create it myself. Therefore, I don’t see any wrongness in the guidance and decisions made in the past.
In fact, I see it as…
“OK, this is what it has been until now. What is the next thing I want to create?
How do I want to use my resources—my energy, my creativity, all of what makes me me and my experience to create the next level of what has come before?
What do I see as the next level?”
The world today is vastly different from the world I was growing up in (and I am not alone) and one of the greatest things we might one day regret is to understand that change is necessary, essential, and important, and yet, use this precious resource that is us to maintain the past as it is.
We’re constantly refining how we do life. We’re refining our diets. We’re refining our skills. We’re refining our relationships. And each step is moving us toward more balance, sustainability, love, beauty, mastery. How we work—what and how we apply our energy—is just one of many areas that are waiting for us to come and do our human thing to refine it.
And just like with anything new to take roots in our reality, we need to build a bridge between the old and the new—we need to apply the gloriousness of our humanness to find ways to anchor the newness in our lives in times when the old way is still a norm.
The space is yours
This is all from me at the moment but I have created plenty of space for you, your own thoughts and stories here as well.
Such wonderful truth!
I soo resonate with creativity as the foundation for self-care. Thank you for sharing your story Klara!