Altar ego origin story

All it took was someone saying “you’d make a great celebrant!” for me to reconsider my life choices.

It didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen.

The comment was made by a friend who had been privy to my MC gigs with the swing dancing community in Melbourne. Even though I fell into MC gigs as a prominent dance troupe performer and teacher, I absolutely loved it, and was great at it.

Additionally, the celebrant who married two friends of mine in October 2019 was incredible! I thought he was a friend of theirs. But no, he was just really good at his job. That was the moment where I truly thought: “I want to do that!’

Doing “that” takes time, and I really had no more spare. Working full time, a member of two dance performance troupes, improv classes and seeing family and friends whenever I could. People were exhausted just listening to me describe my life.

Then 2020 happened.

My full time job moved to working from home but everything else listed above was not COVID-friendly. I now had a lot of spare time so I decided to enrol in an online Certificate IV in Celebrancy as my personal COVID-project.

I did not anticipate at the time that my COVID-project would turn into a career change. I had always acknowledged my full time job as a means to an end: it provided me with the income to fuel my hobbies and passions in life. For a means-to-and-end job, I couldn’t have asked for better. But working from home removed the most-fun things about my job: the interaction with co-worker friends, ad-hoc kitchen chats and various lunch trains. I needed to do something else, and the more I learned about Celebrancy, the more I wanted in.

So I left my full-time job and here I am doing this! No regrets so far.