The Story Behind: Creative Writing in Cape Town
I didn’t really choose to become a writer as much as writing chose me.
Ever since I was a little girl, I loved stories and was innately creative. I remember playing school-school and always volunteering to be the teacher to my friends. But growing older, when career decisions needed to be made, I actually chose medicine as my career path. It was the combination of a real, genuine interest in the body and how it works, a desire to do my part to heal the world by caring for others, and choosing a path that had already been well trodden and promised financial security.
Fate had other ideas.
When I was fourteen, my father died, and my mother became bedridden with epilepsy. I had to change schools in the middle of the year, moving from one province, one curriculum and one language of learning—a lower-income Afrikaans school in Johannesburg—to another: a middle-to-upper-income English school in Pietermaritzburg.
The grief, isolation, loneliness, chaos of the transition, limited support, and hyper-competitiveness of my new school proved too much for my nervous system. As a teenager, I shut down. Instead of doing schoolwork or participating in school life, I retreated into books.
Mostly fiction. Fantasy. Memoir.
Stories became the place where I could still feel alive when the rest of the world felt overwhelming.
I finished high school having barely opened a single curriculum-based textbook, but with enough reading and general knowledge to earn distinctions in languages. At the same time, I completely flunked every subject that required progressive, linear learning, like mathematics and science.
My APS wasn't high enough to get into university.
It had been such a big dream of mine that receiving those rejection letters felt devastating. I carried the shame of that perceived failure for many years afterwards. And, instead of beginning university alongside my peers, I immediately joined the workforce.
At the time, one could qualify as a paramedic through a series of short technical courses. Emergency medicine and disaster management valued practical learning and on-the-ground experience over theory, academia and research. So I completed a six-week course and began working on Cape Town's ambulance services.
It was a tough environment, organised via a militant hierarchical structure. The shifts were long. The pay was poor. But I learned more about people than I ever imagined I would.
Working across Cape Town, I witnessed the extraordinary complexity of the city. I began to notice how social patterns, inequality and the design of systems shaped health outcomes just as much as medicine itself. The same emergencies repeated themselves in different forms, in different communities, often for entirely preventable reasons.
For the first time, I understood that healing wasn't only about treating individuals. Often, it was equally about changing the systems people lived inside.
I experienced what it felt like to have access to knowledge about how things could be improved, but very little agency to do anything with that knowledge.
As a junior, I would write letters to my superiors asking for a process or policy to be changed with the hope of making working conditions safer and more productive. However, because I occupied a lower-ranked position, it was difficult to persuade anyone to spend any of their time reading what I wrote.
This became my first experience of understanding that well-written words alone aren't always enough to influence change. There are other intangible forces that determine whose ideas are heard and whose are overlooked. I didn't yet have the language for it, but I was beginning to understand that communication is about far more than information.
After six years, the poor pay, sleep deprivation and lack of agency finally caught up with me, and I made the difficult decision to leave.
It was one of the scariest transitions of my life because so much of my identity had become wrapped up in being a paramedic.
The conditions you learn to adapt to in emergency medicine are so unlike ordinary life that returning to the rest of the world can feel disorientating. The cognitive dissonance was immense. But thankfully, the communication skills I had unknowingly been cultivating all along through reading, writing, journalling and self-reflection carried me through.
Looking back now, I can see that writing had quietly been doing the work medicine couldn't.
It had been helping me make sense of grief. It had been helping me survive. Long before I realised it, writing had become its own kind of medicine.
Night Shift in the Southern Suburbs with ER24, Winter 2017.
Leaving emergency medicine felt like stepping off a cliff.
So much of my identity had become intertwined with being a paramedic that I struggled to imagine who I might become without the uniform. Yet somewhere beneath the fear was a quiet knowing that I had reached the limits of what that chapter of my life could teach me.
The communication skills I had cultivated through years of reading, writing, journalling and self-reflection became the bridge into an entirely different world.
I found work in the emerging technology sector of cryptocurrencies and blockchain as a Community Manager and Content Writer.
Because the technology was so new, there were very few established pathways into the industry. One couldn't simply go and study for a degree in blockchain. Instead, the sector rewarded curiosity, adaptability and a willingness to learn in public. Communities formed around ideas, experimentation and education. It was the era of magical internet money, and for those prepared to ask questions and learn quickly, opportunities appeared everywhere.
The biggest lesson I carried away from that time had very little to do with cryptocurrency itself.
It was learning that money is a form of value exchange, not a measure of personal worth.
Until then, I had unconsciously treated financial success as though it reflected my value as a human being. Working in technology slowly dismantled that belief. I began to understand that value is something we create, communicate and exchange with one another. That shift fundamentally changed my relationship with money, with work and eventually with my own creativity.
As my experience grew, so did my opportunities.
My first connection to a paid job outside of Emergency Medicine was made at AfrikaBurn in 2017. A friend offered me a free ticket, and I agreed to go, remembering that new lives and new identities are often shaped by creating new experiences and opening ourselves to the unknown.
Eventually, I discovered another emerging field almost entirely unknown in South Africa at the time: Service Design.
I joined a social design agency in London as a storyteller and researcher, later contracting with organisations and start-ups around the world to help design products and services rooted in a deeper understanding of the people they were intended to serve.
It felt strangely familiar. As a paramedic, I had learned to notice patterns in people's suffering. Now I was learning to notice patterns in people's lives.
Different profession. Same instinct.
I was valued for my ability to synthesise large amounts of research, identify recurring themes and communicate those insights through story. Often, the stories revealed things that spreadsheets, statistics and business reports alone could never communicate.
It was another reminder that stories have the remarkable ability to make complex realities visible. With the financial freedom that came from this work, I began investing in the projects that had quietly lived inside me for years.
I accepted freelance journalism assignments and travelled throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands, learning about indigenous storytelling traditions, cultural practices and the extraordinary diversity of ways human beings create meaning through narrative.
Every country offered another perspective. Every conversation challenged an assumption. Every story expanded my understanding of what storytelling could be.
By now my career had reached a point I once believed would finally make me feel successful.
I had meaningful work. I had agency.
I was travelling. I was earning more money than I had ever imagined. From the outside, everything looked as though it was working.
But beneath the surface, something else was happening.
Facilitating a storytelling workshop at a Language and Culture Conference in Cardiff, Wales, in 2022. By this stage, I had begun to see storytelling not only as a creative practice, but as a tool for research, communication, and social change.
I was moving too quickly. Absorbing too much.
Producing too much. The parts of myself that had patiently waited to be acknowledged since childhood could no longer keep pace with the life I had built around them.
The first signs appeared quietly. Burnout. Depression. Anxiety.
Then, perhaps most frightening of all for someone who had always relied on writing to understand the world, I became unable to write. For almost two years.
What I had mistaken for creative resilience was, in many ways, survival.
Unaddressed childhood grief. The deaths of my parents and later on, my grandparents before I had been able to create enough time and space to complete the grieving process for either.
The accumulated weight of years spent overriding my nervous system. Questions of identity, belonging and the moral complexity of growing up as a white South African.
Spiritual questions I had postponed because there was always another deadline, another client, another country, another opportunity waiting.
Eventually, everything I had outrun caught up with me. And suddenly, achievement could no longer compensate for a lack of inner alignment.
I had spent years helping organisations ask better questions. Now life was asking them of me.
Learning, the hard and painful way, just how essential integration and rest are to sustaining creative work. London, 2022.
So I stopped.
Not because I wanted to. Because I had to. For the first time in my adult life, I allowed myself to become still.
I spent time with the people I loved. I rested. I talked. I grieved. I learned to sit with my body instead of constantly asking it to override itself. I discovered what it meant to work with my nervous system rather than against it.
Slowly, I began to reconnect with myself. I revisited the questions that had quietly followed me throughout every stage of my life.
Why do we write? Why do stories matter? Why do some creative practices nourish us while others leave us depleted?
Why do so many talented people lose faith in their own voices before they ever finish the work they long to create?
The more I reflected, the more I realised that everything I had learned across my seemingly unrelated careers belonged in the same conversation.
Medicine had taught me about healing. Emergency services had taught me about human vulnerability. Technology had changed my relationship with money and value.
Service design had taught me to see systems rather than isolated problems. Journalism had taught me curiosity.
Travel had shown me that every culture carries its wisdom through story.
And writing had quietly accompanied me through all of it.
I immersed myself in learning about creativity, relational healing, nervous system regulation, philosophy, psychology, spiritual practice and the many different ways human beings recover from trauma and creative paralysis.
What emerged wasn't simply a collection of techniques.
It was a philosophy.
Sharing lived experience and the craft of storytelling at the Central Public Library in Cape Town, 2026. A reminder that some of the most meaningful stories are not only written—they are shared in community.
I began designing an eight-week Creative Writing Course that brought together everything I wished someone had taught me when I first began my professional journey as a writer.
Not only the technical aspects of storytelling. But also the relational, systemic and, yes, even the spiritual dimensions of creativity:
How to write with honesty.
How to work with rather than against your nervous system.
How to protect your creative practice from burnout.
How to build a sustainable relationship with your work.
How to communicate ideas with clarity.
How to create value without losing yourself in the process.
How to recognise that rest is not the opposite of creativity, but part of its natural rhythm.
The course became everything I had spent a lifetime searching for. And then something unexpected happened.
People came!
Writers, artists, entrepreneurs. People who had always wanted to write but never believed they could.
People carrying stories they had never found the words for.
People who simply wanted a place where creativity felt joyful again.
Together, we built something far greater than a course.
We built a community.
Hosting a multimedia storytelling event at The Bijou, January 2026. Bringing together people from different cultures, backgrounds, and creative disciplines to explore the same theme through different perspectives.
A place where literary craft could exist alongside emotional honesty. Where discipline could coexist with gentleness. Where ambition didn't have to come at the expense of wellbeing. Where storytelling could once again become a deeply human practice.
Looking back now, I realise I never stopped wanting to become a doctor.
The desire was always the same.
Only the medicine changed.
Even though I never became a medical doctor, I now find myself in the extraordinary position of witnessing stories do what medicines sometimes cannot.
Stories help us make meaning. Stories help us reconnect with ourselves. Stories restore relationships. Stories allow us to imagine different futures.
In their own quiet way, stories heal.
Today, we are entering the second year of Creative Writing in Cape Town. The school continues to grow through our eight-week courses, community workshops, one-to-one creative coaching and storytelling programmes for teams and organisations.
Sometimes people ask me why I started a writing school. The truth is, I don't think I did. I think I simply spent many years following a thread.
A thread that began with a little girl who loved stories. Who wanted to become a doctor. Who discovered that healing takes many forms.
Looking back now, I don't think I ever really chose to become a writer. Writing chose me.
And for that, I will always be grateful.
Stories as Medicine. Rejection as Redirection. Looking back, the moments that once felt like failure became the very experiences that shaped my purpose. Somehow, it all always works out in the end.
If this has story resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you.
Whether you're writing your first page, returning to a long-forgotten manuscript, or searching for a more meaningful relationship with your creativity, there is a place for you here.
You can learn more about our 8-Week Creative Writing Course at:
www.creativewritingincapetown.com/course
Or email me at tanika@hatuakali-storytelling.org to continue the conversation.
