Knowing Your Calling: Lessons from Fringe Artist Olivia Raine Atwood
- What the Fringe?!
- May 15
- 3 min read
S1 E7 of What the Fringe?!
Some people spend years trying to figure out their calling. Others, like Olivia Raine Atwood, seem to keep stumbling into theirs, only to realize later that each unexpected turn was pointing in the same direction.
Olivia’s Multifaceted Journey:
From Comedy to Matchmaking to Fringe
Olivia is a comedian, writer, matchmaker, fitness instructor, and award-winning fringe performer whose career path could best be described as “a series of accidental perfect fits.” She’s taken shows like Faking It, based on her real-life undercover work in hospitals just before COVID hit, to fringe festivals around the world, collecting rave reviews and an ever-growing fan base. Her second solo show, Oops, draws from her years as a professional matchmaker.
What’s striking about Olivia’s story is how she sees the threads connecting her different worlds. Teaching fitness? That’s performance, complete with a microphone and a captive audience to test material on. Matchmaking? It’s coaching, storytelling, and reading people, skills she’s honed both on stage and in the studio. Writing essays? It’s documenting the humor and humanity she witnesses in every job she takes on.
“The parallels to teaching fitness and performing are too many to count,” Olivia shared. “In both, I’m coaching people, keeping energy high, and helping them be their best selves.”
The Intersection of Passion and Performance
The realization that these were not disconnected pursuits but facets of the same core calling didn’t happen overnight. Early in her career, Olivia was focused on acting and comedy. She told stories off the cuff, performed in living rooms, and refined them over years until they became as polished as written material. Later, she experimented with essay shows, only to find she missed the physical comedy and stage energy that defined her style. Faking It became her first intentional attempt to blend writing, acting, and physicality into one cohesive performance, a reminder that our calling is often found in the intersections, not the isolated skills.
Discovering Your Unique Contribution Beyond Skills
Olivia also learned that knowing your calling isn’t just about what you can do, but what you bring to it. As she jokes, she was an unlikely choice to evaluate hospital readiness for a viral outbreak, with no medical training or science background. But her improvisation skills, ability to connect with people, and talent for observation made her effective in ways a checklist couldn’t predict. The same applies to matchmaking: she didn’t set out to become a love coach, but her empathy, humor, and knack for guiding people toward self-awareness turned an Instagram quarantine experiment into a thriving business.
Discovering Your Calling: Key Insights from Olivia’s Journey
Olivia’s experience offers three takeaways for anyone seeking their own calling:
Look for the patterns in your passions. The seemingly unrelated things you do may share core skills or values. Those throughlines are clues.
Follow the unexpected opportunities. The gigs that “weren’t part of the plan” often reveal strengths you didn’t know you had.
Blend, don’t box in. Your calling may be the combination of talents, not a single skill. The magic often happens where your worlds overlap.
Olivia’s career proves that knowing your calling doesn’t always mean having a clear, linear plan. Sometimes it’s about saying yes, paying attention, and trusting that the roles you play, on stage and off, are all part of the same bigger picture.
Do that long enough, and one day you’ll realize you’ve been living your calling all along.
This blog post was inspired by S2 E7 of the What the Fringe?! podcast, and was written utilizing AI technology, in conjunction with human oversight and editing.
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