How it began

Plunging into this business was scary for me. A complete unknown. It was an uncomfortable and exciting decision that I hope will be the making of me, but it’s fine if it’s not! The future is unknown and gosh, isn’t that absolutely terrifying in the best way possible?

If you don’t know a lot about me or if you’ve happened to stumble across this page or website, then let me tell you a little about me – Ash.

Throughout my life, I thought I needed a plan. To succeed. To thrive. To live. There were always steps and there were always paths to discover, but usually you were guided right? Guided by peers, teachers, and even family. Some people don’t receive guidance and when you do get it, you lap it up and cling to it as if you’re Rose floating on that door in the middle of the Atlantic. Surely all of these people can’t be wrong? Afterall, they have made it this far and look stable enough.  

But really, what if you’re Jack? And all the things people told you weren’t strictly true?  Your decisions aren’t truly right for you, but you make them before you even realise what you’ve committed to. You’re taught to stick to a route, don’t wander, but make sure it’s something you love. Now, that’s a tough, conflicted thing to find but it’s possible right?

It’s also possible that Jack could survive, but Jack doesn’t get on that bloody door (we all know that there’s plenty of room, ROSE!) because if Jack got on that door, then there’s no story. There’s no conflict. No tears. No Oscar.

Me back in 2017 at Barpa Langass, North Uist. At this point, I had finished my masters degree and got my first job in commercial archaeology. We were stuck on Uist for 5 days before the helicopter was able to fly us to St Kilda. We did some sight-seeing!

Why does this matter?

When I was in high school, I remember distinctly being told that I would never succeed if I didn’t learn a second language. I would never get into university if I didn’t have a second language and forget about leaving my home town. Oh no, you need a language. You won’t get anywhere without a language.

Now, I was pretty rubbish at languages but my anxiety-ridden body was like, a language, okay, yes, I can do that. I gave up Art, which I really loved, to pursue a language that to this day I still can’t pronounce the word orange in.

Now, this might seem like a really weird story to be telling you all on my first ever blog post on a website dedicated to candles. Just hang on there, because I swear it relates.

Until I discovered I had the right to chose my own life, I lived like that high-school kid. Always choosing Spanish over Art. Choosing things that were productive and seen as the “right” thing, while neglecting all the things that brought me joy and contentment. I pushed that side of me deep down to the point where I really did start to shatter. I lived with the expectation that it was okay to listen to people telling you how to live, how to thrive, and how to be – even if the same people telling me how to live my life, weren’t really living their own truths. And I never fully realised it.

I never fully realised or considered that the pressure I received was because those teachers were under pressure from a school that needed to tighten the purse strings and was considering cutting the language department by half.

Productivity makes our world run and its supposed to keep us happy. It doesn’t. And hey, I’m an archaeologist, I understand how hard life could be for humans and I also know how societies work. How they thrive and how the worker bees are actually the backbone of that society.

I was a worker bee. And damn, I worked very hard for very little. I worked hard because it was the path I was placed on, even before that day in Spanish class, or when I chose my GCSEs. I was told to and so I did it.

It wasn’t until the pandemic struck and I was forced to stop, did I start to think about how my life was going. And I was confronted by the fears I had been burying with work, with caffeine, and with a blind conviction that I was on the right path.

It was only when my body couldn’t stop shaking, when I couldn’t stand to look my partner in the eye because fear and failure overwhelmed me, that all that crushing weight from all of my experiences hit me.

I felt alone. I felt lost. And sometimes I still do.

When I was told I had to work during the pandemic, that furlough for me wasn’t an option, when I knew I was putting my life and my partner’s life at risk, I knew it couldn’t continue on that same path. I had lost my guide (if I ever truly had one) and I was stuck in the bracken with the dark closing in around me. I felt like everything I ever wanted was lost and taken from me.

The life I had planned for myself wasn’t the life that I was living and it was never going to be. That, my lovely reader, was a crushing blow.

Now, I won’t get into the dark and sad places my mind went during those months. I think if anyone has experienced something similar to me, then you all understand how I felt in those moments. I looked for help and luckily found it. I spoke of my struggles and fears and I agonised over who I was anymore. I wanted to reject the parts of myself that hurt. I didn’t want to engage with archaeology or who I became when I worked in a bad environment. I wanted to scrub it from myself. That rejection of who I thought I was so difficult and it felt very final.

I was torn with indecision. Who would I be if I didn’t have archaeology anymore? My friends are mostly archaeologists, I write and read about archaeology, I spent 16 hours a day surrounded by it, I had studied it and loved it. So why did the thing that I loved most let me down?

I used to find comfort in the moniker of ‘archaeologist’. I always had an interesting story at parties or when someone was introduced to me, they always asked what I did. Well, that was the easiest part about me: ‘I’m an archaeologist.’ The reply would either be ‘Oh whoa that’s so cool!’ or ‘Yeah I’m not really into buildings.’ Or the most dreaded of all replies, ‘Oh I love dinosaurs!’

I relied on that somewhat. I didn’t have to actually tell people who I was. That came with the territory of being an archaeologist. Assumptions were made about me as soon as I said my job title. It was easy and it was easy to hide behind. For me, that part of me felt like the whole of me. People were proud of what I was doing. They looked up to it. I was a real-life archaeologist. Wasn’t I lucky? So, who would I be without it?

I found myself identifying with it so deeply that it rooted inside of me and I couldn’t tell Ash and the Archaeologist apart.

And then I realised, I didn’t want to let archaeology vanish from my life. That’s why it hurt so damn much. Because being an archaeologist hurt me, it was a hard job and it was draining. You deal with a lot when you’re in an industry dominated by older, white men who were friends at University together and don’t understand why a menstruating woman would need a port-a-loo. You’re over-educated, in debt, paid terribly, and most of all you just feel like a cog in the machine. You travel, dig and you toil. And there’s always a spark of excitement when you find something that keeps you going or that second-hand voice that says ‘You should feel lucky, privileged to do this.’ And I did, until I remember consciously – and this might be a triggering realisation to some, so please skip this bit – trying to (more than once) to drive my little Fiat 500 into a tree at 60mph.

But I found help in time. I talked, I cried (I still do), and I made the big decisions to move on. I didn’t understand at the time that I could still be an archaeologist without working in that sector. That I could choose how to engage with the subject I loved the most, in my own way. It was the environment that I hated and what that environment made me feel that I truly disliked, not archaeology itself. I had to untangle the two: archaeology the career and archaeology the passion. Just because I was no longer getting paid to do it, didn’t mean I wasn’t an archaeologist any more. It just meant I had to engage with archaeology in a different way.

And that’s when I found candle-making. See, I told you it would circle back!

Candle-making for me is my medium to express myself in ways that I never allowed myself to do before. I can create lovely, fun candles and sell them to you all so that you all can enjoy them too. I can use candle-making as my medium for exploring archaeology and I can do it in a way that is comfortable and safe for me. I can interact with different sites, settlements, and artefacts in a way that I never thought of doing before. It’s a way to tell people about the amazing parts of archaeology and the bits that I have always and forever loved. It’s a medium that can bring awareness to sites that are not so well known, artefacts that most people only see in a museum behind a glass, or a medium that can support sites that need funding! It has a vast and ever-changing landscape of how we can connect with the past and those stories that breath life into archaeology, but all through the medium of wax. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty fantastic. And not to mention, they smell darn good!

Plunging into the world of candle-making has been very scary and a big risk, for both me and my partner. I still struggle with many of the things that I’ve outlaid in this blog and honestly, I suspect I always will. It’s a path that maybe I didn’t choose, but one that I’m happy to skip along to and occasionally wander from too. I wanted to write this blog in the most honest and somewhat blunt way because I wanted you all, my lovely readers and customers, to know the real, vulnerable me.  And if you take anything away from this, and maybe you see yourself in my words, I just want you to know this: You are never alone in it.

Make your own story. Heck, be Jack but tell Rose to scooch over a tad and make it to America too! The choice is always there, even when it feels like it isn’t. Flip your own narrative and be whoever you wish to be.

Ash x

Flip your narrative, love yourself, and believe in who you are!