Stylist’s Joanna McGarry reveals how it feels to become a student again after 10 years in beauty journalism

Photography: Gemma Day

Go to the chest of drawers in the living room. To the left of the middle drawer. In a brown envelope marked MISC. CERTIFICATES. Under the bank statements.” I’m on the phone to Isaac. He’s the builder renovating the bathroom in our flat in London and I’m pacing around the pool of our Airbnb rental in Portugal. I’ve persuaded him to rifle through a life’s worth of admin to find my 17-year-old GCSE certificates, which – although dog-eared and yellowing – have somehow remained intact after all these years.

I didn’t expect to be doing this. I should be on the beach drinking caipirinhas. But here I am, filling out an online UCAS form from my sun lounger.

Technically, this is the first time I’ve done it – a kind teacher filled out my first UCAS application to study English 15 years ago. So this is new. Bingo! Isaac hits the jackpot. I then bash out a personal statement, qualifying – in 4,000 characters – my enduring fascination with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and acupuncture. My husband proofreads it and emerged glassy-eyed as he steps away from the laptop.

He – along with a few very close friends – is acutely aware that I’ve been daydreaming about doing this for years.

Eight years, in fact. It began when I was sent to review a big, flashy spa off the coast of China. There, I met a renowned TCM doctor who took my pulse and proceeded to recount – through a translator – every single thing that had ever happened to my body. From the operation I’d had three years prior, to the incessant headaches on the left side of my head. He talked about my liver and how it governed my body (TCM dictates that one organ is always more influential to our energy flow than the rest). It blew my mind. From that moment, acupuncture became a speck in my peripheral vision; growing until it loomed so large, I could no longer look past it.

In the years that followed, I read books, met various acupuncturists – with some astonishing and also not-so-great results – and thought, ‘Maybe in 10 or 20 years, I could do something like this, too.’ But it’s only now – prompted by a nagging feeling of unease that had been my constant shadow for months, as well as my 33rd birthday on the horizon – that I’m biting the bullet. Or rather, swallowing it whole.

Taking the leap

I call Stylist’s editor from Portugal to resign. She’d had no idea, of course. I kept this dream locked away, convinced it was just a bit of self-indulgent navel gazing. It’d be easier if I hated my job. But I don’t.

Over the past decade, I’ve carved out a successful career as a beauty director. I’ve won awards. I have a great passion for what I do. But I need more. Why should my career be defined by one entity? Increasingly, I see my future working life as – and I shudder at this term – multidisciplinary; the weaving together of several different threads. Well, that’s the plan, anyway.

“I quit my dream job to go back to school” How it feels to become a student again after 10 years in beauty journalism