How to break the moral of your own story

Spoiler - you always will by virtue of being a human

Over the last two summers I took a poetry and storytelling, ‘Do you remember the first rhyme?’ show to fringe festivals. A story of how I got a second lease of life in my 40s through poetry. It was called ‘quietly inspiring’ which was exactly the brand of storytelling I was going for.

It told the story of rediscovering my creativity in my 40’s and how I jumped in both feet. Making up for lost time the show was a call to never give up on your dreams. The last time I performed the show was in August 2023 at the Edinburgh Fringe. Performing there was a childhood dream fulfilled.

So what next ? Bigger, better? Brighter, stronger? Not quite. It took me 46 years to write that version of my story. And I can’t tell the same story twice.

I have fulfilled a dream, but I don’t live in a dream and don’t intend to try. The joy of it having been a one off is precious. It was a huge focal point and I do want to preserve that feeling of it being a monumental moment for me.

I have kept writing and performing but I don’t have the luxury of time I had when I wrote the show. I wrote it when I worked 3 days a week in early 2022 and had the time to learn it and rehearse it at that time too. I now work more and have more plates to spin in life generally so the idea of going back to Edinburgh Festival is again distant. So now my dreams are starting to feel smaller and I sometimes feel that I am breaking the moral of my own story.

But I don’t feel bad about it.

I am not chasing down every opportunity or connection. Yet every time I go online, dream chasing of some variety is promoted with such urgency I wonder when people who promote the idea of constant self promotion rest. Rest is my favourite way to relax. No relaxation, no writing. When dreams come with the work of self promotion that is something to tread lightly with. The second it becomes work or taken too seriously the joy of what I am in it for seeps away.

I made my promotion for Edinburgh a series of knowing references to how much work my team was doing, always explaining to the reader/viewer that I was the team I spoke of. Funder, PR, social media, PA, sound design (Spotify playlist).. the lot. It had to be fun for me. And it did connect with people I may not otherwise have met and it got a handful of people into the room over the course of my 3 day run. It was probably hours of work online to sell a few tickets. It was hours of flyering on the streets of Edinburgh to sell a few more. 100s of flyers and lots of skin thickening eye avoidance and some incredible stories of how people interacted with me in that experience. You cannot be in it for the money. Or the fame. Because, in the main, there is none.

So once a dream is fulfilled, the main thing I have learned is to enjoy it for what it was. Don’t rush to repeat something that can’t be the same again. Rest. Keep doing the thing you love (for me, writing) on your own terms.

p.s. This is to say, I will be taking the paywall off this newsletter going forward.