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"I teach primary school. Thirty-one children, all day, every day. I spend my entire working life drawing out other people's voices — asking the quiet ones to speak up, celebrating the ones who take creative risks, making space for every child to feel heard. It didn't occur to me until Saraswati that I had completely stopped doing any of that for myself."
I did the self-led journey because my schedule makes live circles almost impossible. Early starts, after-school marking, two kids of my own. I listened to the audio chapters during my commute and did the practices on Sunday mornings before anyone else woke up. It was the only time that was fully mine, and I came to guard it fiercely.
Saraswati's first week cracked something open in the voice activation exercise — humming a single tone for a minute until you feel it in your chest. It sounds ridiculous written down. I sat in my kitchen at 6am making this low, sustained sound and burst into tears. Not sad tears. More like something being returned to me that I hadn't known was missing.
I'd stopped singing somewhere in my thirties. I used to sing — all through school and university, in a community choir for years. Then life got busy and the choir fell away and I told myself I didn't miss it. Saraswati called that lie out very clearly.
I rejoined a community choir this month. First rehearsal I was terrified. By the second one I couldn't stop smiling. I've also started writing again — not lesson plans, actual writing. Essays about education and what it costs women to always be the ones holding the container for everyone else's growth. I don't know if anyone will ever read them. Right now, that's not the point.
"You cannot keep pouring from a dry cup. Find the thing that fills you back up and protect it like it's your job. Because it is."