What I Left Suppressed for Twenty Years

There was no single moment.

I learned to sew at my grandmother's house. She kept a closet of fabric and an old sewing machine in her guest bedroom, and I would sit there practicing on pillowcases. Then I grew up, went away to college, became a physician, and put it down for close to twenty years. It wasn't a decision. It just got quietly buried under everything medicine asked of me.

A few years ago, I mentioned that childhood to my husband, mostly in passing, the sense that I'd like to go back to it someday. He bought me a sewing machine as a gift. It sat in a closet for a while. I'm a pear shape, which means I take almost everything to a tailor to have the top taken in, and one day I picked up a dress from the tailor and actually looked at what they'd done, the side seams, taken in cleanly. It looked simple enough to try myself. So I did.

It was slow at first, a whole new language: facing, interfacing, lining, interlining, one unfamiliar word after another. I taught myself from pattern instructions directly, no classes, no shortcuts. The more I made, the more I understood, and the more I understood, the more I wanted to make things worth the effort. I started gravitating toward better fabric, wool, cashmere, silk, cotton, linen, because if I was going to spend the time, I wanted the result to be something worth cherishing.

That search led me somewhere I didn't expect. I came across fabrics I'd genuinely never heard of, made from lotus plants, from banana trees, from aloe vera, from rose bushes. I ordered samples and made a few pieces from them, and they were unlike anything I'd worked with. Soft in a way that got softer with every wash. Delicate enough to hand wash cold and hang dry, which is more than I could say for most silk. That was the actual beginning of Kyaropa, not a business plan, just fabric in my hands that made me think nature had more to offer than I'd been taught to expect.

Starting the brand itself took much longer to believe in than the fabric did. Almost a year passed before I let myself think it might actually be possible. So I started small, one phone call to a manufacturer who could handle patternmaking and sampling for two pieces, one set price for all of it. I kept the samples, had them fitted, sent them back, had them redone. Each small step kept me going toward the next one. I found a better manufacturer. Built a website. Designed a small collection. Had the samples photographed properly. None of it happened quickly. All of it happened because I didn't stop.

Through all of this, I never left medicine. I'm still an OB-GYN. I still love the work, and I feel strong and accomplished doing it. But medicine was never the only thing in me. In college, my favorite years, I took jewelry making, learning to solder, set stones, and create wax molds, alongside art history, yoga, ballet. I loved that side of myself completely. Then medical school came, then residency, then a career, and I put it away without ever really deciding to.

What changed, eventually, was realizing other people had done this, built a second thing alongside a demanding first one, and if they could, I could too. You're allowed more than one dream. You don't have to choose a single side of yourself and call the rest suppressed for good. You can be responsible, precise, by the book in an operating room, and still need somewhere to be purely creative. Kyaropa is where I put the half of myself I'd been quietly setting aside since I was eighteen.