TikTok Made Me Do It

CRYSTAL EDITION

WORDS BY Coby Renkin @cobyhr

ART BY Ruth Ong @ru.thx

The last few months have seen me enter a side of TikTok I never saw coming: the crystal side. I don’t do crystals; they’re not something I’ve ever felt drawn to and if we’re being honest, not something I’ve ever believed in. But it turns out, if the algorithm hassles me enough, I’ll try anything once. After all, 2021 (and this edition) is all about growth.

So I thought about my life. What do I want? Where am I going? Where could I improve?

I’m going into my final semester of uni; I’m working on completing internships, opening myself up to new work opportunities and grinding as hard as I can for what is potentially the last 12 weeks I will ever spend as a student. I decided to focus on that.

So, armed with a little hesitation and a lot of curiosity, I headed to a crystal shop. Put very simply: I bought topaz for creativity, confidence and stress relief, and tourmaline for energy levels, movement towards goals and to overcome external blocks. My hesitation was definitely not eased by friends, one referring to the shop as a “woo-woo shop” and another labelling crystals “just a bunch of rocks”. Admittedly, this, mixed with my own preconceived ideas, delayed any attention or thought I put into my crystals. They sat on my desk for a week, came to and from a friend’s house with me, then sat in a bag for a few days.

Eventually, I realised that this definitely did not reflect the ‘2021 is all about growth’ mentality, and I had to pull myself up on my lack of trying. I did some reading, followed instructions to cleanse and charge my crystals and tried to open my mind up to a little bit of possibility.

I did have a good few weeks. I completed an internship that went really well, I pushed myself to take steps towards my creative career, and I met some industry professionals that could provide me with some exciting opportunities over the coming years.

What I learnt from these few weeks though is that I believe in myself enough to know that I could have, and likely would have, done all of those things without the presence of crystals on my bedside table. I owe myself a little bit of credit for the hard work that I continue to put in to achieve my goals, and I think to grant that credit to something ‘greater’ would be doing myself a disservice.

While I don’t believe that my crystals had any power that directly contributed to any changes or achievements in my life, they did get me thinking. I had to sit and evaluate what I want and what I’m doing to get what I want. At a time in my life that revolves almost entirely around growing and changing, reminding myself of the importance of an open mind and pushing myself out of my comfort zone are valuable lessons that I think will benefit the goals I set for myself.

So maybe, in a roundabout and kind of twisted way, in this instance, crystals weren’t “just a bunch of rocks.”