18 | 4 More Sleeps To Go

Have you ever wanted to quit your job and do something more creative? Well, I’ve just done it.

The image is of one of my vintage tambourines of two dancing gypsies. I love these gypsies because I think they capture the essence of youth and joy and hark back to a simpler time in our lives.

The Countdown Begins

Four more sleeps till I leave behind the world of working for others.

Four more sleeps till I enter the world without a parachute.

Four more sleeps till I wake up without the voices of other masters taking up precious real estate in my head.

In four days I will reclaim all the bits of myself that I had hired out to work in and for the world. I will become another happy statistic in the ever growing number of The Big Resignation people around the world who have had enough of jobs that ignore the calling of their souls for something more.

The Mission

The mission will be to design a life to re-member me and who I was before the anxiety, the push, the sleepless nights, the plotting, the tears, the compromises, the holding of my tongue, the neglect of my art, the absence of making.

Two weeks ago I resigned from my job.

I resigned because I want to dance more, draw more, write more, crochet more, read more, learn more, bake more, cook more, pontificate with my nieces and nephews more, see my family more, navel-gaze more, hug my friends more, sing more, speak less but say more, love more and connect with my mob of whackos, creatives & misfits.

I believe that from what my gut is telling me, this, after 40 years is my last ‘job’.

Remembering the WHY of things

I have lost myself but I hear that others around me have also lost themselves. The world sits heavy on our chests, restricting our breathing. We have become caught up in the miasma of a sad and crazy narrative and mistaken it for who we are inside.

In my escape fantasies, I imagined running a creative business but no matter how I looked at it, all the bits didn’t come together. I knew I wanted to make beautiful things but I had forgotten to ask myself WHY I wanted to make these things.

The ‘why’ is to rediscover who I was before all this. The ‘why’ is about putting back some beauty into the world as a resistance to all the ugly in the world. The ‘why’ is to find the beauty makers and work with people who also want to rediscover who they were “before it all”.

Here’s to beauty and to the journey of remembering who we were.

x Toula

Gallery: Remembering The Beauty Of India

For more photographs by Toula Karayannis visit Instagram.