Life as a gifted child built up her sense of self. When life goes your way all too often, your world closes in on you. You live in a world that you’ve always wanted to exist in, but that’s just about where it ends. You don’t know what lies beyond it.
It was the destruction of this ego that led to her growth. Receiving a major rejection for a surefire position in her college years may not have given her the opportunity she wanted, but it gave her breadth. Kryz recollects, “I guess the culmination of being a writer started with losing my sense of self in that aspect.”
“Life has a way of unraveling what you think of things,” says Kryz. She got her dream job as soon as she graduated college, and she found herself in Inquirer as an editorial assistant. Beyond writing, she found herself fetching clothes for shoots, grabbing coffee for celebrities; the whole The Devil Wears Prada set up, her very own Miranda Priestly included. The ups and downs that came with this job taught her how to work under pressure, allowing her to stand tall in front of the adversities that accompany her reality today.
It was all part of a necessary sequence. Living out your dream so early in life has its perks, but it taught Kryz that her ideal life wasn’t all there was in the universe. From learning to live with the no’s that life threw at her, she began to embrace disappointments as direction.
Maybe the best things happen when you learn to surrender to the universe. After all, we can only know so much about ourselves and the world ahead of us. Giving up control often comes in the form of discomfort, and breaking away from the familiar.
“If you hyperfocus on the thing you’re good at, there’s a tendency to limit yourself.”
Do the thing. Expand your interests. Do things that catch your eye, just for the sake of it. Try things out and discover if they speak to you. Branch out from the identity, the dream, the lifestyle you’ve rooted yourself so deeply in, and perhaps you’ll discover that there’s more in store for you than what you’ve imagined.
So Kryz did exactly that. After Inquirer, she leaned into her love for design—something she always had an eye for, but didn’t know she could get into. She branched into social media content creation for BLK Cosmetics while still pursuing writing on the side, contributing to publications such as Preview.
In the past six years as a working professional, a key lesson Kryz has learned is this: “It’s not limiting yourself, and allowing yourself to be as creative as you can be and then knowing where you’re good at and balancing it with the perspective that you can try something new every day.” There’s pressure to have it all together in your 20s, but making room for things to happen along the way can be a beautiful thing. “The world is like super limitless, and currently it’s a world that’s really good for artists, creatives,” says Kryz.
The pandemic enabled Kryz to take the leap and build something for herself. The result is Studio Karou. Rather, the studio is a work in progress. It’s nowhere near perfect just yet, but she thinks she’s finding it. Her dream job. Her workdays go past the 9-to-5, but as cheesy as it sounds, she has reason to wake up in the morning. Her job as the head of Studio Karou enables her to be as creative as can be. She is boundless: with creativity no longer tied to her job description, it’s steeped into everything she does, from the way she makes her coffee to how she writes poems into her journal.
“… besides from being an ate or a first daughter of an Asian household, aside from being an achiever, aside from being a writer, there are things—you are a summation of a lot of things.”
She brings this manifesto to the studio. “Creativity is not something you can quantify, that has a price tag to it, and creative living, technically, that’s the point of the studio.”
The concept for the studio was initially a plan for a one-man team, but today Kryz leads a team of creatives. What encompasses Studio Karou are the people that run it, and that’s what Kryz is most proud of. To her younger self, she says, “Hang in there because there’s a studio waiting for you, new people waiting for you…” and comes to the realization that the universe will bring you to people that are meant to be in your life.
In spite of everything that Kryz has let go of to reach this point, there’s still so much for her to surrender. But with everything she’s learned so far, surrender is definitely a good thing: it’s allowing the universe to do its work, it’s trusting the process, it’s trusting other people, it’s living creatively and welcoming growth.