1 I had a dream. I never told anyone about it. It felt impossible and silly and frivolous. People would laugh. It didn’t make sense. Except in my gut it made total and utter sense. And 5 years ago, aged 43, I decided to listen to my guts and act with them. My guts2 made sure I said my dream out loud. And in turn, that meant it couldn’t be unsaid and I was accountable to myself and the people that heard it. From the step of saying it out loud I started to build a version of my life where my dream felt possible. And in 2023, it came true.
The dream was to perform at ‘the fringe’ - being the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. But twenty years deep into a career in tax meant that dream was well and truly repressed.
Until, that is, I chose to take redundancy from a company I had worked with for nearly 13 years. I had loved the place I worked and people I worked with, but when I looked at the options of applying again for a role or leaping into the unknown, the leap into the unknown somehow, felt the best option at that point in my life. I can’t quite explain it but I had a gut feeling that I wanted to do something in my life beyond work. I was very much a workaholic. And I don’t mean that in a glib way, I genuinely overworked as a way of avoiding other things. I knew I didn’t particularly want to go to the grave with only a career to show for it. 3 So, I started 2019 determined to make something of the opportunity I had to change.
I had no idea how I would change or what I would do, but I was determined not to run into a carbon copy of the job I had just left, which really confused recruitment consultants who wanted to make some money off me. I decided to sign up to an all day life coaching event run by Amanda Brown . It was a day that inspired and challenged me in so many ways, but one question stuck in my head. ‘What would you do if you had no fear?’. I knew the answer but didn’t say it out loud as it would not make sense to any one. It barely made sense to me, except I could remember young me. My hopes and dreams and huge imagination. My spirit. I knew the parts of me that I left behind in pursuit of adulthood were still there. Something about that question made me want to let them live. Let me thrive and become a full technicolor version of myself that younger me would be proud of.
I went home thinking about what I would do to make younger me proud of older me if I had no fear. I put on a ‘you go girl!” playlist and when I heard the lyrics to Defying Gravity 4 , well something changed within me. I took it literally. I decided to trust my instincts and LEAP. Not with a bungee jump or anything like that. My own adrenaline kick was going to come from something very different. I googled ‘how do I put on a fringe show?’. Within 2 hours I had found and booked myself to perform a show I had not yet written called ‘Fly’ at the 2019 Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.
Then, the morning after, I told people. They didn’t understand but they were excited and impressed I was just going for it. They knew I had always loved going to the theatre and comedy shows, including Edinburgh Festival most years. Very few people, other than family, would have known this had been true since childhood when my mum would take us to shows at local theatres and readings at libraries, and Edinburgh Festival. It was part of who I was and I always, always adored it.
From the point of signing up to do the Manchester Fringe I went on a crash course of how to write, produce, rehearse and promote a show. I found open mic nights to rehearse at which led to me starting to write poetry and before long a whole creative community that had been under my nose this whole time opened up to me.
The show itself was a one off. An experiment to see if I could do it. I sold out and got a decent review. I thought about doing it again the next year… but the next year was 2020. So, plans changed.
But my creativity was not going to be pushed away again. No this time, creativity was vital to me connecting and surviving through lockdown. I wrote and painted and shared my work online, before long I was doing open mic zooms and connecting with people globally. I learned more about how I wanted to write and was constantly learning from others I ‘met’ along the way.
2022 was the first year I felt I could return to the actual dream. Edinburgh. But I was now more of a poet than a skit performer so wanted to write something that reflected what I had learned over the last 2 years and I started to write a storytelling and poetry show about how I ended up coming back to creativity in my 40s. How I loved books and poems and lyrics and performing until I was 19. How university stopped that in its tracks. How I lost connection with myself. How it was always still there. How it was a joy to return to it and grasp it with the enthusiasm it deserves. I made poems out of the silliest stories I had told all my life. I didn’t go straight to Edinburgh though. Again, I debuted a the Greater Manchester Fringe to a room full of new friends I had made since starting this new chapter of my life. (My 2019 show was filled with ex work colleagues and family). I took it to other fringe festivals during 2022 before signing up to take it to Edinburgh in 2023.
I was doing the thing ! Like Angela Bassett!
And now it’s over. It was a dream.
I have this photo as my phone screensaver:
It was taken just as I was heading to the C-Venue Cabaret evening for my first guest spot and performance at the Edinburgh Fringe. I remember feeling so excited, so proud of myself for getting myself there. That was the moment before the dream I hadn’t dared say out loud for over 20 years was about to come true.
What happened once I got to Edinburgh?
Stay tuned for more ………….. 5
And I leave you with a poem, called GUTS
Obviously a Crowded House reference:
A poem about Guts incoming !
I wasn’t dying, well, no more than we all are dying eventually. But in a classic case of midlife mortality awareness / crisis this morbid thought spurred me on to make sure I tried something new.
Defying Gravity
The next instalment will be for paid subscribers only.. this is a taster !