Your first show feels a lot like losing your virginity.

And somehow, I have found myself becoming a pound-shop intimacy coach for other creative first-timers who want advice on how to get it up. (Their first public work as a creative).

For context: I have made four comedy shows and toured them between Australia and the UK. I travelled across the world to my first Edinburgh when I was twenty-four with no real financial backing, a producer, or a famous first or last name.

Have you heard of me? Probably not. None of my shows have come anywhere close to the type of success arts festivals like to peddle. They’ve barely even made me money. I’ve been persisting on sheer willpower alone.

And still, I am one of the best people to talk to when you don’t know where to start.

There are already piles of articles written by successful artists inspiring you to make a show. Or write a book, or shoot your first short film. Insert whatever medium you work in [here].

Most people are writing these articles because their first thing actually did blow up. Or their second, or third. Or they’re writing off the back of a career that built up incrementally, over time, eventually paying the dividends they invested into their work in spades.

As someone that expected their first show to experience The Fleabag™, counsel from these people is just demoralising.

I, however, am writing to you from what I am affectionately calling A Fallow Year.

Not only can I not afford to get another show up this year, but I am too burnt out to create. I saw how rotten and bitter I was turning as I watched artist after artist take their first ever show to the Fringe, inexplicably already backed by a team of professionals, and blow up. I knew in my core that it was time to take a step back, recalibrate, and figure out what my next steps would be.

I was acutely aware that everything I had created up until that point had not given me the success I was hoping for. And still.

I am urging you, from the pits of the Fallow Year, to create your first show as soon as possible.

My first was born from a cheerful cocktail of desperation and resentment. I didn’t have any performing work coming up, and I’d just been snubbed to work on a friends’ project.

It wasn’t a disaster. People showed up. I took it to my first Edinburgh Fringe, because I could. Even when an Australian producer laughed in my face for daring to think I could take my first show overseas on my own. From the outside, it possibly even looked relatively successful.

But the things I’d hoped for - a TV deal, a sellout season, even, god forbid, an agent - none of that. And none of that for any of my consecutive shows either.

When I read that first piece back, I am mostly embarrassed.

I was very obviously trying to write the next Flea**g. It’s not my own voice - the one I am meeting more and more with every passing show. The marketing and idea was very early twenties, and I wouldn’t make anything like it now.

But still, I send it to anyone that asks. I’ve submitted it to theatres, writing competitions, as an example of my previous work for a grant.

Because it exists.

Because the second I got that one on its feet, I had my next idea. And the same with the second show, and the third. Knowing I could actually will a show into existence unlocked a part of my brain that was thirsty to do better, and go deeper, and create more things that felt closer to the kind of work I loved to see.

I blacked out and four years later, I had four complete shows. I had been to festival after festival long before I was technically ready. I was a little drunk on the boldness of being in my early twenties, and I did things I would be terrified to do now. I was able to put my work out there because I didn’t know how cruel the industry can be in return.

Because the longer you wait and sit on your unseen drafts, the more you know. It’s why I talk to so many would-be solo performers who are ‘working on their first script’, and three years later, it still hasn’t seen the light of day.

They waited too long and learned too much. The pressure for it to be brilliant got too heavy. And they’re left with a half-finished, shivering wreck of what could have been a totally passable first show.

A show that missed out on the joys of fixing a joke the morning of opening night.

I would rather have finished shows that I wish were better.

Average shows that allowed me to meet so many other creators and get a crash-course in performing and inch closer and closer to whatever the fuck I actually want to say. To know that if I do ever create the perfect show, that I couldn’t have done it without making worse things first.

Make your first show because it will probably flop. Let it be tolerable. Let it be forgettable, because the kindest thing someone can do is forget your fledgling work. Get it out of the way as soon as you can. Pour everything you’ve known up until now into it, so you can discover new things about yourself with the next one.

And by the way: this is the advice I give everyone who wants to create their first show.

Book a venue before you do anything else. Be a part of an arts festival, if that’s important to you. But do it as soon as humanly possible.

It does not have to cost you much at all. If you’re like me and routinely spend your life’s savings, you can pour a little into it. Or, you can do one night at a theatre that takes a cut of your ticket sales and charges you nothing up front.

Ideally, you would have around 6 months before the performance date. Minimum 3. Maximum 9. You want it to be close enough that it’s real. But not so close that you’re pulling a show out of your ass (I’ve done it - not recommended by a doctor).

And you have created the show.

A show doesn’t exist without a performance date. It’s lovely when people chip away at a nebulous script for years, but the show doesn’t really exist until it’s in the room with an audience. That’s the incredible beauty of live performance. It breathes in tandem with the people in the room who don’t know what you’re about to say.

Every joke and turning point and visual hook is theory until then.

Then, you can bask in the glory of a solid deadline. You can know that by September 3rd, for instance, you will have performed your first show.

It really is like losing your virginity. Until you step on stage with your own work, it’s impossible to know what it feels like. You might have experienced shadows of the real thing: scratch nights (handjobs) or table reads (grinding with clothes on), but it’s not quite the same.

When the show ends and you come off the stage, your first time is done forever. You never have to do it again if you hated it. But you probably won’t.

Probably, you’ll catch the same theatrically-transmitted infection every other writer-performer has. Soaking through the sheets as you do it again, and again, until you recreate the feeling of your first time.

Hearing them laugh at something you thought of completely by yourself. Feeling the tangible energy that passes between you at the quiet point where you’d prayed they’d really listen. Your own words, all by themselves.

I hope your first show sucks, because I hope it exists. It will suck by design. It’s your first. You may relatively enjoy losing your virginity, but it’ll pale in comparison to everything that’s yet to come.

Book your first performance date in. I’ll probably be there.

I have a lot more spare time at the moment.

Love from the Fallow Year.

I recently made a small mistake on a form that cost me £500.

I was applying for a new driving licence, and put the wrong return address for both the new licence and my passport.

Dumb cunt.

In my defence, I was moving to a new address. My misunderstanding of where my new flat was, coupled with my complete inability to double check a number once I think I know it, meant that the only ID documents I have in London got sent to a stranger’s house.

After weeks of stress, a cancelled trip to Berlin, and many ill thoughts about my new neighbours who I still believe are holding my passport hostage, I bit the bullet and forked out for a brand new licence and passport.

This could be chalked up to one dumb mistake. Except for me, it isn’t really just one mistake.

Since the dawn of time, I’ve sucked at doing forms. I misread, and misremember, and misunderstand. My application for a UK visa had three giant errors in it. Which I only found out about because I inexplicably sent it to my ex to proofread after I’d submitted it.

I frequently tell people street numbers backwards, or say Saturday instead of Tuesday, or forget entire trips to Italy when I’m asked how many times I’ve been in and out of the UK.

Are you diagnosing me with something yet?

On my thousandth call to my mother to update her on the passport situation, I got frustrated.

I’m not stupid. But I act like a village idiot around forms. I tell myself that it’s time to focus, and to double check everything, and that I need to pay a lot of attention now because I always make mistakes on forms, and then I fuck them up again.

Losing my passport was the final straw. After years of trying, I had to admit: I cannot think my way into being better at filling out forms.

There is something in my brain that fundamentally disallows me from being able to fill them out correctly. I just can’t do them.

And so my mother suggested that quite obviously, I should just fill them out with a friend next time.

Which for me, is truly a last resort.

My entire concept of being an adult is being able to look after myself. I should really be able to change tyres and pay for the internet and travel across borders and fill out a damn form on my own.

In an age where phrases like girlboss and you don’t need anyone are prime, asking my friends to watch me type out my postcode on a Jotform doesn’t feel very Big Clit Energy.

And I hated the thought of asking my friends to do labour. Should I be paying them to look over my forms for me? Should I do their washing in return? A foot rub? I don’t even like using real people for self-tapes if I can help it.

I’ve spent my life believing that I am all I have. That true maturity is to be able to exist entirely on my own. I don’t want to habitualise needing, because other people are not an endless well I can pull from whenever I want. Not like I can from myself.

Friends are for gossiping and dinners and laughing, but we all have go to our own homes eventually.

However. Around this time, I spent a joyful half hour helping my friend decide what day of that week she should see a specific movie. Somewhat ironically considering my difficulty with forms, I am strong at and passionate about admin. We talked through every option, weighing up the pros and cons to figure out which day would be best.

She thanked me at the end for bearing with her through what, for some, would be a typically boring conversation. I couldn’t agree less. Not only do I want her to get the most out of her week, but that type of organisational conversation is very pleasurable for me. It wasn’t work. I liked all of it immensely, because I’m good at it. And I love her.

Believing we don’t owe each other anything implies that self-serving is the norm. That treating someone else kindly is a gift you have personally bestowed upon them.

The louder self-reliance culture becomes, the more we forget that help is something that we can give because we just want to.

For every favour I haven’t asked for out of an aggressive desire to be independent, there have been more thrown my way anyway. Rosie always puts a cold can on the back of my neck if I look too hot on a dance floor. Ellis has read every script I’ve ever written. Sachin offered to drive me to Heathrow at four in the morning because he thought it’d be fun. It isn’t labour, it’s love.

When I updated my friends on my passport woes, three of them self-identified as lovers of filling forms. They were happy to look at my next one. They enjoy it. All men, but what can you do.

Perhaps I’ll reach out to them next time.

As a last hurrah, I did my application for a new passport on my own to see if I was cured of my mistake curse.

It was riddled.

One year ago exactly, I was softly dumped on my doorstep by the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

I didn’t cry. Instead I took myself upstairs, told no one, and went to sleep. Because this wasn’t happening. Not to us. And I stayed feeling that way, for six hours of sleep and three seconds of peaceful forgetfulness before I woke properly the next morning.

I was no stranger to being dumped. This was my fifth relationship, and one of possibly millions (brag) of failed romantic connections.

This split, however, made me realise that what I’d previously classed ‘heartbreak’ was actually a second-cousin-twice-removed of what I was about to endure.

It’s easy to forget the truly incredible pain I experienced the next day, and in the many mornings that followed. Like a mother looking down the barrel of her second childbirth with oxytocin-ridden amnesia, I sometimes catch myself thinking “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

But this was the state of affairs at the time: I didn’t know it was possible to love someone as deeply as I loved my ex. I loved the way his cells divided in his body. I loved the way he ate, breathed, thought, and moved. I loved the things he loved, and I loved the things he hated, because at least he’d thought about them. I loved the way we fought with each other, because it was part of us too. I even loved him as he broke up with me.

After we split, it took me four months to even use the word ex. I was simultaneously aware that I’d lived just fine before him, but at a complete loss as to why I would want to experience a life after. I put off eating a custard bun I saw in a shop window in Soho, because I didn’t want it if we couldn’t share it together.

This isn’t about how to stop loving someone that much.

Before the Breakup™, I was never truly single. I catapulted from relationships, into friends-with-benefits, to secret third things, and took that combo from the top ad nauseam. I wasn’t afraid of being alone, so much as I was afraid of missing out. Everyone was dating. I felt like I was wasting my potential, my best years, if I wasn’t bedding as many people as I could. The thing to do was to have a crush. Every catch up with a friend involved talking about who we were dating.

And of course, I fell in love with being wanted. I loved being able to tell my friends about my conquests, who wanted me, who I had but didn’t want because I wanted someone else. I kept a list of potential lovers in my brain like a salve. Something to smear over the wound of one relationship ending, someone new to want and obsess over and make a different story with.

I also catapulted from obsession, to deep rejection, to a secret third thing. I bought a singlet top two sizes too small the day after I met a new crush. I used to moan that I wanted some space to just think about my career, my health, the state of the world, but instead I was analysing last night’s hand graze with Matt the Manager to the millisecond.

I dreamed of enforcing a Celibate Period for myself. Really get to know who I was, without all the noise. And I set a sexless date for one, multiple times. In three months, when so-and-so moves overseas. After I’ve hooked up with the mime again. But I met someone else first, every time.

My ex quietened the noise. I’d found the person I wanted more than anyone else, forever. I settled into the peaks and troughs of our relationship, content that I had finally hopped off the merry-go-round of noncommittal connections.

And then he softly broke up with me on my doorstep.

For a long time, I was convinced the wrong thing had happened. Like someone had travelled back in time and made one small incidental change, and now the future I lived in was monumentally fucked up. Trump had built an army on the moon. Jeggings were back in fashion. I’d met the one and only love of my life and now I couldn’t be with him anymore. We weren’t really broken up, I was just in the complete wrong timeline.

Lots of friends graciously suggested I needed to “get back out there” in the months after. And I did swipe one last lick of salve over my festering heartache. But if I kissed other people, I’d cry. I’d miss the way he padded on the floorboards.

And genuinely trying to fall in love with someone else while I felt like that wasn’t just impossible. It was unethical. Like hosting job interviews after a series of budget-cut-induced layoffs. When my friends suggested again that I get back on the apps, I found myself answering that I actually really, really didn’t want to.

And so totally against my will, my Celibate Period finally began.

I was so frightened of the space where my lovers used to be. What would occupy my thoughts, and my conversations, and my journal. I was scared to build my calendar around my own appointments, instead of the vacancies of someone who didn’t really want me. I had to figure out what I actually felt like doing, even if there was no one sexy I could tell about it.

What I wanted to do, it turned out, was fill my life with all the things I gave up every time I pursued someone.

To write without pausing after every sentence, because I didn’t have one eye on my phone. Have late-night Chinese with my friends until 5am, because no one was expecting me in bed. Spend a night at home taking off and redoing my makeup over and over for the sheer pleasure of it. Travel to Portugal and read an entire book in a day, because I was eating every meal on my own.

Laugh still, perform, kiss my friends, write jokes, learn to cry again, hear the birds singing when I shouldn’t, wear truly unconscionable outfits, dinner after dinner after dinner, meet new people, not take them home with me, have best friends stay in my bed during an unseasonably hot summer, shiver in beer gardens during a typical freezing winter, to wonder how anyone could ever possibly be grateful for a breakup until one day, I am too.

To decide I want to stay alone as long as I can. For my time to finally feel precious enough to be careful about who I share it with. To know that the lifestyle I was afraid of didn’t feel lonely, but rather like taking a long, slow, breath.

We broke up near Valentine’s Day. This year, I took myself to brunch, walked in the sun, went into work to be around people I truly love. Charlotte came and brought me flowers and we went to see comedy together. I had late drinks and a 3am dinner with my work friends in freezing Soho. I couldn’t have all that if I still had him.

Thank you for breaking up with me. Thank you for this timeline.

I wouldn’t want to lose all this.

If you liked this, you might like the show I’m writing right now. I’m doing a work-in-progress on March 5th at Pleasance, London. Come see.

You fly home to the city you hate for the holidays.

The whole family is coming home for Christmas. The nieces and nephews need to meet. You should spend time remembering how to be a family unit again.

Plus, all your favourite friends have flown home to the city you hate too.

Since you moved, you’ve only come back to Melbourne for work. This is the first time you’re returning jobless and untethered. Lots of free time, you tell your friends.

You don’t share the chats-with-strangers-in-the-street, fair dinkum, barefoot-in-the-supermarket fondness for Australia so many relocated Melburnians seem to have. Your life expanded and improved immeasurably by moving overseas. Being anonymous in a city of millions allowed you to come into yourself, in a way staying in your hometown never allowed.

Flying home, with all it’s ghouls and career failures and old heartbreak, feels like cramming yourself back into a training bra.

You land in Customs, bathed in a thick soup of Australian accents. You and Mum bicker during the car ride home, for old times’ sake.

You’ve been away so long that even central Melbourne smells like gum leaves. You didn’t realise that you never hear birds in London until you’re sitting in your parents’ garden in the afternoon sun. But a pint here costs $16 now, so.

A return to Melbourne is always an overstuffed tasting menu of nostalgia. You hate this city now, but you also don’t want to leave without a sample of everything you used to love. Sometimes literally: you’ve created a highly specific list of foods to eat during the trip.

• Petrol station potato cakes

• 7/11 Slurpee

• Grill’d Impossible burger

• Iced chocolate from Tin Pot

• Fish Shak R-Rated cheeseburger

• Breakfast crumble from Mitte

• Sushi hand rolls

• Guzman’s Quesadilla Plus with Queso fries

• Lord of the Fries poutine chips

• Super Tasty Rooster chips

It takes 24 hours for the melancholia to set in. Coming back always does this to you. Maybe it’s the disjunct of feeling like a stranger in a city that used to be your whole world. Or maybe it’s all the chips.

Your friends say your voice has changed. You let your accent stretch its legs until you break the habit of rounding your vowels.

To ensure maximum quality time, you planned your days scrupulously before you arrived. But Melbourne allows spontaneity, too. You and Alice spend a night walking from one Christmas party to another. One afternoon you go to the pub together and call everyone you can think of to come and join you, because you feel like having a night of it. Turns out Mikhayla’s already on her way to that exact pub. That’s Melbourne for you.

Everyone wants to know if you’re ever going to move back. You give the diplomatic answer - who’s to say? - and then fuck it by calling London ‘home’ one too many times.

You go dancing on New Year’s Eve with your friends from school, because you miss going dancing with your friends from school. And this trip is cultivated with as many experiential landmarks as possible. You put a weird pressure on the night for yourself because you don’t know when you’ll get to do this with them all again. In the rare moment when everyone’s found each other on the dance floor, you think remember this remember remember remember.

You go to the beach with your family after Christmas. The waves pull your hair and steal your bikini because you’ve forgotten how to dive under them while you’ve been away. You keep getting burnt in the Australian sun. You take a walk to the same pier you’ve walked to tens of times with your siblings. You watch your big brother pretend to throw his daughter into the sand like he used to do with you. Remember this too.

You drive to the country. You never get to drive in London. You sing, argue with no one, write essays in your head with bare feet on the pedals. Smile at how a crucial part of learning to drive in Australia is being careful of jumping kangaroos. Some stereotypes really are true.

Angus lives in the Yarra Valley now. He’s so happy here and his happiness makes you happy. You and some of your oldest friends have a lunch that goes for hours and everyone pauses at one point to watch a kookaburra in the sun. Remember that. You should leave at 8pm. Or 9pm. You tear yourself away at 10:30pm and complete the solo-car-trip hat trick of crying as you drive because you didn’t want to feel sad while you were still with them.

It’s hard to picture your life in London after a couple of weeks. When people ask what it’s like, you know intuitively that you’re very happy there. But the longer you’re here, the further away it feels.

You end the trip with a family holiday to the Whitsundays. You can’t get in the sea without a suit that covers your entire body, including mittens for your hands, because it’s jellyfish season and they can kill. Some stereotypes really are true.

You’re back at Melbourne airport, saying goodbye to your brother. You said goodbye already to Dad last night, and your other brother this morning while your niece tried not to cry. Your baby nephew gives you his first spontaneous hug.

Tomorrow, after you’re gone, it will be 40 degrees and everyone’s nervous about it. There’s nothing more nerve-wracking than the threat of a very hot day in Melbourne. There’ll be bushfire smoke, dead plants, no going outside that day. But hearing about the weather after you leave makes you jealous.

You’re used to missing London like a limb. But right now, you’d rather melt under an air conditioner indoors tonight than get on your plane. You were on the cusp of understanding something about your city this time. Just one more night, and you might get it. One more day sitting in your parents’ home with your ageing dog.

Your brother drives away, and you and Mum are the only two left. She takes you to the airport Grill’d.

• Grill’d Impossible burger

Given her way, she’d come back to London with you. She loves it there in the same way you do. Like you were born there in a different life.

Saying yes to living somewhere you love that much means saying no to here. It means saying no to the day-to-day once you get on the plane, no matter how much your friends and family promise to keep in touch. It’s never the same as just being here.

It means saying yes to insufficient chats after too much time has passed, loaded with the unknown of when you’ll meet again. Yes to melancholia, because the place you grew up in doesn’t fit for you anymore. Even if there’s dancing with friends and long lunches and waves crashing over your head. Saying yes to hating it for a while, until it felt safe to grieve.

But your plane back to your other life leaves at 18:20, even if you’re hoping it’s cancelled. Nostalgia should be brief. But you can miss this city now for as long as you need to. Probably always.

A few months ago, I was having the Breakdown of the Century because I knew my career was over.

I’d thrown all my hope, creative energy and money at a project that wasn’t returning the bountiful industry opportunities I’d hoped it would. The combination of a particularly hard show day and five glasses of wine found me sobbing in my bed like someone had died, knowing that I couldn’t possibly bounce back from this one.

I’ve written before about how growing up, my mental health toolkit was best described as Getting On With It. And like all my other mental breakdowns, this one was inevitably cured by admin.

Not long after coming home to London, I finally had to renew my passport. After an eye-watering payment to the Australian Home Office and a shocking betrayal by the Snappy Snaps photographer, I had a look back through my ten-year-old passport before I binned it.

I got this passport just after I turned eighteen. I was living in Sydney doing drama school, living out of home and unsupervised for the first time in my life. I was drunk all the time and split my chin open at a party later that year.

As a testament to my disposition at this point in my life, there’s a huge pink stain caked on the cover of my passport. Nail polish. I can’t even remember how I did it, but I always used it as an example of how I can’t keep precious things safe.

Dad warned me that some countries won’t accept a ruined passport, and I’ve felt a decades-worth of nerves at every border control that I’ll be refused. But they never did.

My fresh, blank passport became covered in my twenties. It has the stamps from my first backpacking holidays. It has clearance from LAX from when I visited a lover and didn’t tell anyone, because I knew my friends would kill me for seeing him again. It has the tourist stamp from the first time I came to London as an adult.

It’s extra-beaten up because I take it every time I travel, even if it’s around the same country. My family’s dotted around the globe, and Mum taught me to keep it with me at all times in case of an emergency. I never needed it. I didn’t make it back to see either of my grandparents before they passed. But the habit’s hard to break, and it’s been my domestic travel companion too.

I wish I could personally hand my fucked up passport back to my eighteen-year-old self. Like a trailer for the rest of my twenties. She’d look through the stamps and try to guess what brought me to each of the places I’ve gone. She’d wrongly assume the trip through Los Angeles was for a flashy acting job, but at that age, the furthest she’d travelled for sex was Coogee Bay anyway. So at least it’s a story.

If I was allowed to stay and explain some of the intricacies of my passport, I would point out my UK visa. To Present Me, it means constantly worrying about money, asking our landlord for double-glazed windows so we don’t freeze to death between hospitality shifts, wondering if I’ll “make it” enough to justify the price of the healthcare surcharge. But to my eighteen-year-old self, those mundanities would sound like they were coming from another universe.

If I could tell her about crying over my career, she wouldn’t be able to believe I had a career to cry over in the first place. At eighteen, my biggest dream was to just get paid one time for an acting job. I’d get carried away then. I’d tell her she’ll forget her exes, but they’ll never stop watching her stories. I’d tell her she’ll be wearing a hearing aid by her mid-twenties, and to enjoy using both ears while she still can. I’d tell her to wear some fucking sunscreen.

I wouldn’t tell her not to worry. Eighteen year old me isn’t worried about anything, because she’ll be having coronas at a Sunday Session soon. And anyway, the life I have now wouldn’t seem fathomable to her. Not because it’s astonishing, or particularly impressive. Only the other month, I was sobbing over how mediocre I found myself.

But the things that seem normal to me now, like living overseas, or being a professional actor, were so difficult to imagine then. They seemed impossible and slightly fantastical, like meeting the Grinch.

It’s expected that our dreams will grow as we get older. I’m glad I want more out of my life than I did when I was eighteen, mostly because I really wanted a septum piercing.

But it comes with bigger disappointments. The gap between what I want and where I am feels harder to bridge than it did then, because I know so much more. I’m not impressed by myself now. But I think I would be impressed with myself if I was eighteen again.

Then I would take the older passport back to the future with me, to avoid continuity errors. I would tell younger me that a lot of the next ten years will feel like nothing’s really happening, but that I’ve gifted her with evidence that it is.

She wouldn’t be listening anyway, because her housemates are about to do a drag show in the living room. And she’s never been very good at trusting the future.

Without overly patting myself on the back, my career breakdown from the summer was premature. Something good came my way within a month, and all the hand-wringing I’d gone through suddenly seemed deeply dramatic. But dramatics are something I’ve never grown out of. That’s one thing my eighteen-year-old self will definitely be able to believe.

I always thought of public crying as an annoying and snivelly thing to do.

This isn’t to say I was totally insensitive. I was and am an emotionally thin-skinned person. Even as a child I was prone to melancholic mood swings, where I would lie very still and stare at the wall for an hour. I wasn’t a tantrum child, but I was a sad one, who’d fall into fits of believing that everyone she’d ever met wished her ill.

This precocious tendency to mourn behind closed doors is probably why I found public criers so irritating. “That’s private”, I’d think, slinking off to smoke a tea leaf cigarette out my bedroom window and lament being a teenager.

Crying openly felt like shitting myself in public - so I avoided it at all costs. This was difficult when I started training to be an actor, and crying became a valuable currency. I was suddenly desperately jealous of the open-hearted, vulnerable performers in my class who could tear up at a musical phrase.

Sometimes at home, I would think myself into the scene and find myself sobbing for my terrible circumstances. Brilliant! But as soon as I got in front of an audience, I literally and figuratively dried up.

Then one day, during an emotional scene (Constellations, you’d be a devil not to) I broke mid-sentence. Even as it happened, I was internally rejoicing about how fucking awesome it probably looked. But a millisecond later: total embarrassment. My internal hatred of sissies kicked in, and I was composed by the next line. It was so quick. There was no active decision-making between:

→ Start crying; and
→ Stop it freak

I was so pissed off at myself. Years of training myself out of big public outbursts, side-eyeing anyone else that hadn’t got the memo, was going to totally fuck my career.

During lockdown, I attended a series of Zoom acting classes (who didn’t) run by a cult leader acting teacher from LA. Much to my delight, there was an entire lesson devoted to crying on camera.

He told us all the usual hocus pocus for grounding ourselves in the circumstances, and then stopped and said: “Of course, none of this is going to work if won’t let yourself fall apart in real life. If you can’t cry for your real circumstances, you’ll never be able to do it in a room full of people for given ones. You have to practise.” So I did.

My friend cries at marathons. She finds the overwhelming positivity of a group of strangers cheering for other strangers emotional.

I get it.

But crying at happy things is easy for me. It never felt overly dramatic.

I remember my Mum trying to get me out of the cinema as I stood and wailed at the closing credits of Stuart Little 2. Happiness is an obvious thing to have big feelings about. If all my acting jobs consisted of scenes where people are reunited against the odds, I’d never be unemployed again.

I reject crying at sad things because I find it difficult to give into hopelessness, and even harder to let other people see me doing so.

I’ve talked myself out of crying so many times because it didn’t seem worth it. Don’t cry over her, she’s an unhappy person. Don’t cry over him, he’s a stand-up comedian. Don’t cry over not booking that job, it was titled Enthusiastic Performer (Must Have Driver’s Licence!).

Holding myself together like this is hard to balance with the fact that I am a Sensitive Sally. I feel things deep in my toes, but because I don’t like crying over them, I end up wearing my feelings around like a chainmail overcoat. Until recently.

A few months ago some Big Sad Things happened to me and finally I got it. Sheer willpower stopped working because I had such big emotions that they had to spill out, and to my horror, they had to spill out around other people. I realised that people aren’t crying in public because they have no sense of decorum. They’re crying because life didn’t stop and the sad thing is still true but they simply have somewhere to be.

During this period, I had to get on the Tube. It came to my attention that whether I liked it or not, I was about to cry on the journey. I sat as far up the carriage as I could and still there was a woman in my section and I felt terrible, because now there was a quietly crying person near her, which is one of my worst nightmares because I never know how to help, but now I was doing that to her because in this scenario I was the crier and the nightmare was me.

I wept all over London during the worst of this. At one point I cried so hard I had a nosebleed, which made me pause to Google haemorrhage symptoms. I cried in front of coworkers, on the bus, on the phone to my parents back in Australia. It was as terrible as I imagined this much crying to be, because the fact that I was crying at all meant that it was real and it was happening to me.

But when the flow slowed down and the chainmail overcoat came back on, I missed it. Crying feels uncontrollable and frightening to someone like me, but I’d enjoyed having somewhere for the sadness to go. There is a reason we have a physical manifestation for grief. I’d love to know the actual biological explanation, but I don’t Google before I write for religious reasons.

I swore off crying in public early because I found it humiliating to admit that I cared about something enough to look ugly over it. Every time I cried over someone treating me poorly or missing out on something I’d really wanted, I’d scold myself for getting too attached.

Look at yourself, I’d think. Crying. Do you really think they deserve you crying over this?

But I wasn’t crying for them - I was crying for me. My heart hurt and felt full and it needed to leak for a while. A therapist said once that emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and by forcing myself to skip the end and get over it I was doing myself a massive disservice.

Really, I was doing everyone a massive disservice. It is a massive disservice to every human connection to pretend not to care too much. I couldn’t count how many minutes I’ve spent crafting texts and emails with the perfect lackadaisical tone to get across the sense that I’m disappointed, but not too disappointed, because I’m actually pretty popular and hadn’t given it that much thought anyway, actually.

I’ve given up on pretending I don’t want things. Everything I pursue I want really badly, even if it’s a one-night-stand or a £150 per day commercial gig. When I went for my Talent Visa I decided to tell just one person about it, and then suddenly accidentally told everyone, and I regretted it every time because if I didn’t get it it’d be mortifying because everyone would know I’d really wanted it.

Life feels 10% riskier and far more satisfying when I’m honest about that. It makes me a better friend and a gutsier performer because it costs more. It’s a blessing to have loved enough and lost enough to cry over something. And for soulless fucks like me, it’s a blessing to be cried in front of too, because it’s brave to roll over and show your soft emotional underbelly.

So if I cry in front of you sometime soon, know that I’m hating it and needing it in equal amounts. And also, you’re welcome.

Today, I’m thinking about a kid I taught years ago.

Here’s a take that’s never been given before: it’s hard to write at the moment. My Substack and my show ideas feel like frivolous little indulgences when the world is literally and figuratively on fire.

I know! I hate being a downer.

I am typically annoyingly optimistic. I worry and fret about every single aspect of my life, but I’ve always had an overwhelming sense that things will generally work out. I am not a doomsday-thinker at all. It’s what allows me to pursue a career in the arts and keep my faith in the ozone layer.

I grew up in a family of pragmatic doers. We didn’t wallow in our feelings so much as bullishly fix them. My mother tells me even still that I must always have something to look forward to, lest I contract depression. My entire life has been filled with thinking ahead to whatever positive thing is coming up, which is how I found myself going to the sauna last week. I have a clear roadmap of how to improve my general mood, when I am feeling personally stuck or uninspired or heartbroken.

So this new hopelessness is foreign to me. I don’t know how to fix the overarching apocalyptic worry I feel when I open my phone. Sweating in the sauna is a temporary relief amongst a very real fear about what’s going to happen to us all. It feels too big, and unfixable, to just readily assume that the powers that be will put everything right again at some point.

I don’t believe in good and bad people. I think it’s simplistic and dangerous to see anybody as inherently evil or virtuous. Bad person do more bad thing. I find it almost excuses the behaviour - as if their wrongdoings are out of their control.

I believe in good and bad choices. At any point, we can stop making bad choices and start to make kind ones. Associating all our behaviour with the “type” of person we are removes autonomy, shifts blame, and if anything, eliminates any possibility of redemption. (This is a big reason why I hate star sign culture. Sorry!)

So it’s confronting witnessing people consciously choose to consistently and shamelessly destroy human lives to get what they want. It’s a level of selfishness I find so appalling, it’s almost fascinating. It’s the same feeling I get on a small scale when a customer walks to the front of the line to demand I serve them first. It is making it so easy to lose faith in human kindness. It makes me want to unplug my own brain. It’s destabilising and challenging and sickening.

So instead today, I’m thinking about Max, a kid I taught years ago. I used to mentor small groups of kids for their creative writing. I still have absolutely no idea what I imparted upon them, considering I don’t really know how to teach someone how to write, but I liked being around the kids, even if their plots were holey and I didn’t know how to fix them.

I helped run a holiday workshop that paired me with a group of 10 - 13 year olds (god-tier age to teach). As a group, these kids were switched on as fuck. We had to create a clan to send into battle, complete with a flag and individual character profiles. My kids begged me to make our clan’s flag the Pride colours. One of the girls wanted to make her character non-binary and checked with us all on the right pronouns to give them. It will come as no surprise that this workshop group of social justice warriors was taking place in Melbourne’s inner North.

When I remember that class, I think about Max the most. He was in Grade Six - nearly eleven. Our Pride clan flag and non-binary hero sparked a group-wide conversation about the queer community - what the kids knew, the types of people they’d met, how certain people present.

Max told me that his school doesn’t teach them about gender and sexuality. The concept of queerness and being trans just wasn’t something his educators thought kids needed to know about. So instead, he and his friends took it upon themselves to learn. He told me they used “outside sources” to teach themselves about the queer community that had been more or less erased by their school. They made a point of celebrating Pride month, even though their school didn’t. Just because they thought it was the right thing to do.

I think about this when I worry about what our world is becoming. I think how caring is painful, because there’s so much wrong to care about right now. I think how much easier it would be not to. To focus instead on being young and self-progression and having a good time.

I think about another teenager who used to give me recommendations for LGBTQ+ books aimed at young adults. I think about the kids who would pick up rubbish at lunchtime to combat climate change and who taught me some sign language so we could communicate to a deaf kid who’d started with us. I think about Max and his friends, and how this world is all theirs to inherit.

That they chose to care, despite needing to focus on being young too. That despite what the political landscape looks like and a holey education system and a world where hatred is at an all-time high, they’ve chosen to care when no one has told them to. Some people turn inwards, but lots of them don’t. I think how each little prong of hope can easily be dismantled - just read the news and see how bad it’s getting, babe - but remembering these little things is something to actually look forward to.

And if all else fails, I can just try writing something a little funnier next time.

I recently had the biggest panic attack of my life at a production of Waiting for Godot in London.

I wish I could say that this was to do with the existential crux of the play, but I was actually just a bit bored. I usually have them when I’m unstimulated and feel trapped in a room - or in this case, an aisle. This is not a jibe at the production itself, least of all Ben Whishaw, whom I once had such a romantic dream about that I woke up experiencing actual grief it was over.

Between seat-bound frenzied searches for the nearest exit sign, I kept thinking: What is the point of this? Something about God. And existentialism. That can’t be it - it’s too obvious. Nothing is happening. There must be something else. I should’ve paid attention to the Beckett unit in class. Nothing is happening. I should’ve read an essay to prep. There must be something more. Everyone thinks Beckett is a genius. Nothing is happening. I must be dumb.”

I am sure someone reading this will have much more to say about the play, and could probably direct me to an essay that will convince me that Beckett is a mastermind, and I am a simpleton. I know there’s more that can be found in the text. But the point is that I felt nothing of note, and I felt confused, and worst of all, I felt stupid for not understanding the brilliance straight away.

My generation is ridiculed a lot for our ruined brains. We’re often told how much entertainment we need, that none of us can focus, and that we don’t have the patience for the classics. Everyone loves to blame the TikTok-addicted, ADHD-riddled Gen Z-ers for the overuse of “high-octane” when describing modern art. It’s hard to imagine any contemporary performances being fossilised and revered in the way that Godot has for generations.

Cue Wicked. I am a theatre kid. I am actually a music theatre kid. If you owned multiple CD soundtracks (Hairspray, Wicked, The Lion King for me), you were probably also a theatre kid. I graduated from a Music Theatre Diploma, did a few cattle-call auditions and then went into plays and comedy, but I can never change where I’m from. Musicals are the reason I perform and the first thing I really loved.

In all my twenty-six years, I have never seen a musical hit the global lexicon like the Wicked movie. My Mum knows about Wicked. My dentist knows about Wicked. A girl came into the cinema I work at and asked to get a ticket to Wicked, without asking a) the showing times or b) whether we distribute it (we don’t). That’s how big it is. Whether you’re planning on seeing it with theatre-loving friends you feel safe crying in front of (me), or boycotting it because there’s too much singing, you know about it.

It means so much to us partly because it has never been trendy to like musicals. Music theatre kids are seen as way too much. We’re loud, and we sing a lot, and often our passion for this one genre bleeds into other things (I’ve been told that my music taste is “very music theatre” - I was listening to The Killers at the time). There’s a big difference between just appreciating musicals and being an actual music theatre kid. When you are the latter, it becomes a part of your identity and the way non-MT people relate to you. As someone that grew up with a lot of friends that weren’t into the razzle dazzle, I can say one thing for sure: it is definitely not a cool and mysterious trait to have.

I’ve always felt a little bit of shame around the work that I really vibe with. Musicals are not exactly seen as high art. I like quite basic music (very musical-y), and I prefer digestible contemporary novels. I tried for a long time to engage in headier classics. I really persevered with art that was described as “dense, but worth it.” I undertook anything philosophical, or poetic, or old but well-lauded, because I figured that even if it didn’t strike any kind of chord within me, it was masterful and I was the fool for not being struck. The problem is that I’m stupid and obsessed with jazz hands. If I wasn’t on my phone so much, I could enjoy Proust. It doesn’t matter that I’m barely reading any more - it matters that I’m giving my soft brain a little challenge.

But I saw Wicked, and I was totally engaged for the colossal 2 hours and 40 minutes. I took mental notes on the acting, whose singing I enjoyed and why, the cinematic techniques, and why the story had stood the test of 20 years. I wasn’t just numbing out to a mindless musical. And it’s not because Wicked is better than Godot. It’s because I just care about this more. It’s because I will never be someone that engages with writers like Samuel Beckett. At the end of the day, the best value judgement we can give art is our own personal enjoyment. We can technically break it down, compare originality and assess the execution, but the most important thing we can take away from something we’ve ingested is whether or not we enjoyed it.

I spent a lot of time trying to engage with multimedia that didn’t agree with me because I had an innate belief that what I really enjoyed was inferior. I forgot that our time here is very limited. I don’t want to watch a play that I need to read an essay to understand - I want to see a film where everyone claps in the cinema after it’s done. Art that makes us work harder is not necessarily better. Some of the most creative, funny, engaging work I have ever seen was made for TikTok.

My biggest shame is assuming that music theatre is lesser because it attracts loud, obsessive, passionate people. I love watching people unabashedly love things. I love watching people paint themselves green for the cinema because Wicked was the soundtrack to their teenage years, and now their favourite musical has been given a seemingly unlimited budget. It matters that it’s holding up now. It matters that it fills people’s hours with joy. It’s okay that it’s simply written and entertaining and easy to understand. For me, it turns out, that’s a prerequisite.

I get a lot of satisfaction now from admitting to myself that I did not engage with something I was told I should love. Creativity is personal. If I can give myself that grace for the reception of my own writing, I can give myself that for the other things I love too. I will always adore high-octane, ADHD-catered work. I will always hate slow dramas.

I have lots of recommendations for things you might enjoy if you’re like me. But also - if you want to see a play where nothing happens, nobody comes and nobody goes, there’s a show currently on at the Theatre Royal Haymarket you’ll love.

It feels bizarre and self-aggrandising to begin with an apology.

But I am an Australian relocated to Great Britain, and apologising is in my DNA. So, I’m sorry this monthly newsletter was not-so-monthly this time.

What vaguely happened: an aggressive reminder that life will not stop even if I want to make something fun instead.

What actually happened: a month at the Edinburgh Fringe, a new housemate, moving rooms, redundancy, a new job, an interview with and painful rejection from yet another potential agency. Being alive recently has felt like picking up after a to-do list-shaped bomb.

And with it all comes the keen feeling that this isn’t really how I should be living. I worry that I’m not doing enough of the Actually Important Things (AKA Writing My Substack) while I’ve been shovelling away at my own insurmountable slush of tasks. My slightly overcharged phone bill. A mismatched pair of socks. A call that can never get organised with an Australian friend.

My friends. I feel a constant tug of grief over not keeping up well enough with the people who’ll hopefully attend my future wedding. So many of the people who make life worth it are scattered and far from me. I’ve spent my adulthood in Melbourne, Sydney, and now London, and I am lucky enough to have left pieces of myself in each place.

When I visit each city, I get to slot back into the lives I shared with my friends for a bit. Comfortable as the times where we saw each other most days, with none of the familiarity of the life they lead now. There’s new houses, boyfriends, breakups, habits, routines. I had coffee with a friend in Sydney this year who goes to pole class now. I kept thinking about how I would probably have taken the class with her if I’d still been living there.

It’s acutely painful becoming a visitor in the lives of your closest friends. Brief trips to the cities I lived in remind me that I probably won’t get to hear how the trial acting class went, or the trip to the Gold Coast with an ex. I’ll arrive home in London to keep building a life I love and the slush will return, and three months later I won’t have written my Substack and my friend will have missed out on a job she badly wanted, and I won’t have been present to hear the minutiae of it. I’ll get the dot-pointed version, amongst a million other things to cover in a two-hour (max) phone call or a voice note, and that has to be enough for now. I can’t teleport to the people I love, no matter how much I bring up I want to multiple times a day.

When people ask me if I miss the city I grew up in, I tell them that the Melbourne I knew no longer exists. Melbourne was cycling to university with the friends I grew up next door to, returning home from travelling to house parties full of people I knew, and driving 10 minutes to my friend’s parents’ house for dinner. The house I grew up in has been sold to a new family. So many of the humans that made it home for me have moved, or plan to. Or our priorities have faded, changed, and we don’t have the same amount of time we used to amongst the slush. We work full-time now, or stay at home more to look after ourselves better than we did when we were younger. The love is the same, but the worlds we’ve made for ourselves have shifted.

I’ve been coming to terms (slowly, begrudgingly) with the notion that the comfortable routine of my early adult years has been permanently disrupted. I inherently connect with nomadic, globally-minded people, but it means that the golden years where I could keep everyone I loved in one place are over. For a girl who loves with quality time, it’s felt like a disaster.

So now, I organise calls - and voice notes for the friends that respond better to those. I try to trust that the friendships I’m supposed to keep will stay, sending a small but dependable signal across the Atlantic. I plan trips to old home cities for my Quality Time hit, where I organise big group hangouts and smaller follow-up coffees. When I return to Melbourne for an acting job, I use my single night off to drive to a festival in 37-degree heat, because I don’t know when I’ll next be able to dance with all my friends again. For the times that I can be, I am Miss Present, turning up to everything and anything I can to remember what it felt like when this place was my whole life.

In the first week of the worst breakup of my life, a Canada-based friend who I hadn’t seen in person in two years or called in the last 6 months was one of the first people I told. She sent me a loveheart over Messenger when she was thinking about me, so I could wake up to them. My other best friend kept a constant dialogue with me from Amsterdam via voice note, which wasn’t exactly like hanging out, but felt close enough. So now, I remember that small gestures mean enough too.

When I think about each person that made up my life, I miss them so much it truly feels like a hole in my chest. When I miss an important event or party in a city I’m not in, it’s a hole in my chest. I feel full of holes a lot, but I also know how lucky I am to be swiss-cheesed because I grew up with so many clever, interesting people. Friends who’ve allowed me to change and create new relationships with people who challenge me, always offering a permanent safe place to land. There was nothing permanent about the life we used to occupy together - but there is in the spaces we built in each other.

I was in the Scottish Highlands recently with Important People to me, who my other Important People will probably never cross paths with. We were looking at the stars and someone pointed out the Southern Cross. An extensive thirty seconds of Google tells me we shouldn’t really be able to see that constellation in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m not a scientist and some of my friends will hate that I thought I saw it. But it just was the Southern Cross. It’s the only constellation I know. It’s one of the first we’d point out on camping trips or summer nights sat in the park in Australia. I know it.

“We’re all under the same sky,” is one of my comfort quotes when I’m feeling the physical distance from the people I love. In a busy period of my life, littered with undone threads and lacking a spare hour to call my friends, here was a physical manifestation of that quote. Nobody is ever as far away as they feel. Here I am in Scotland, so far away from so many people that made me, and somehow I’m looking up at the Southern Cross.

Since I was thirteen years old, I’ve worried I’m not having enough sex.

It likely began when my tween friends and I drew up an insane scoreboard. Whenever one of us kissed someone, we got a dot point like this • next to our name.

So, the more conquests, the more points.

One of our group was in a proper relationship, and he complained that this system was flawed. He was the only one out of the group who’d had actual sex, but because he’d only ever been with the one girl, our graph made it look like he was miles behind the rest of us.

So, we updated the system to reflect our sexual prowess more accurately. A kiss with a new person got us a •. Anything further than that got us ••, •••, or a whopping •••• for penetration (!). Our sex lives were accurately charted, and we were able to check in on our Notes app and view our personal development pitted against one another with ease.

To this day, we are all a) still very close friends, and b) have no idea what the fuck this was all about.

If I were to make a psychological stab at what we were doing here, I would say it was a misguided attempt at charting our ascent into adulthood. While we stopped doing this eventually, obviously, the urge to conflate sex with doing my twenties properly has never really gone away for me.

Now: how relatable you find this article will depend entirely on where and how you grew up. I shot straight from these humble Notes-app beginnings into the freewheeling, incestuous theatre community. Over half my class slept together during 9 months of drama school, and yet we also still adore one another and speak most days. Sex in my world was always seen as cool, given and taken freely, and definitely supposed to be talked about.

For instance, I was desperate to lose my virginity before I turned fourteen. That certainly did not happen, and it’s difficult to comprehend how much Skins I must have been watching for that to be my priority.

When I finally did start having sex, I began my own Notes app list. I kept a record of the name of everyone I ever slept with - and found out later that a lot of my friends have the same thing. Some of them do it to remind themselves of who was good, some of them do it to list them by country they did it in. For me, it was so I could keep track of the number next to their name. I was suffused with pleasure when I got to add to my list - sometimes more so than during the act itself.

The problem was that my list never felt long enough. I’d tell myself that I’d had enough experience when I hit a certain number. Then I’d reach it, reason with myself, recalibrate, and set my goal higher. Ten years into having an actual sex life, and it still never felt like enough I was doing it enough, or with a wide enough array of people.

Sex, and our relationship to it, is deeply personal and complicated. Which is to say: there were a lot of intimate psychological reasons behind why I felt so desperate to chug down “adult experiences” by the bucketload. But I also think we’re living in a fascinating cultural time that fuels the Never Enough fear I’ve experienced my whole life.

I called one of my intercontinental best friends recently for our biannual catch-up. As usual, we had a tearaway SparkNotes debrief on every fact of our lives, until we got to dating.

I then found myself strangely relieved when she told me that it was hard to admit, but she wasn’t doing it at all. She finally voiced what I’d always felt without realising: how we both felt so much pressure, single and in our mid-twenties, to be experiencing a Carrie Bradshaw-level of hookups. The need to always be dating someone or at least fucking them meant that we both felt more shame around not having sex than we did having it.

I am deeply grateful to be living at the height of the sex-positive movement. Of course, we have a way to go socially when it comes to teaching our youth about safe and consensual sex. But where I grew up, it has never been a better time to be a sexual person. It is acceptable now to scream the lyrics of a Chappell Roan song that describes her bringing someone home to use her sex toys. Big Wett writes music for sluts, literally. I love being alive now and I love that this discourse is available to us.

But I also feel an internal conundrum when it comes to messaging about being in the prime of my life, where casual sex is a major part of the dating lexicon, when I am also someone for whom sex can be difficult and sentimental and sometimes something I find life easier without.

It took me a very long time to admit to myself that casual relationships just don’t work for me. That I find sex very emotionally charged and vulnerable, and not something that feels good when it’s distilled into getting more •••• on a page.

My body count always felt like numerical proof of my likability, maturity and sense of freedom. Which is a crazy amount of pressure to put on a listicle. But it also tells the onlooker nothing about which of those people I spoke to again, who I loved, felt safe with, or even enjoyed my time with.

Unfortunately, there’s not yet a pop star who writes songs about sluts who also need sex therapy and processing time with strong attachment issues. Which is a shame, because there’s some amazing rhyming potential there.

So, if you feel worried you’re not getting laid as much as you should be, my advice is -

Well, neither do I. Hope that helps!

Really, truly caring for myself as a concept has been beating me over the head recently.

I used to work in childcare. We had staff-only Oreos, which obviously upset the kids. When they asked why we got free range on the biscuits, I used to say that it’s because adults know when they’ve had enough sugar, and kids don’t.

Which is, of course, horrifically untrue. Learning when I’ve had too much or need more of something has taken tens of thousands of never agains that’s lasted me way beyond turning eighteen.

I’m writing this piece on looking after myself as I come off a 6-month-long performing contract - which I had to acknowledge is living my dream, even as I gave all of my time to a show for a disturbingly unimpressive paycheck.

And I truly do love the business (read: busyness) of being in a show. Life slides away like butter in a pan.

Sorry I haven’t replied to your text! It was the show.
I’ve eaten nothing but microwave dinners this week! The show.
Did I miss your birthday? Our season just got an extension… :)

A full-time performing schedule allows actors to live in a perpetual fantasy land called After We Close. The real world just isn’t… real. Nothing is too pressing unless it’s my call time! This suits me, someone who genuinely enjoys being worked to within an inch of her life, and then complaining that she has no clean underwear.

I humped over into my mid-late twenties during my contract. Which initially didn’t mean much, except that now I was now allowed to say the perpetually annoying phrase “You’ll see,” to anyone younger than twenty-four. Never tried a dating app? Just you wait, buddy. Unfortunately for me, reinvigorated self-aggrandizing wasn’t all that came with my birthday.

For a hypochondriac, I’ve always been relatively gung ho about my wellbeing. My approach is do now, then panic later and complain unceasingly. I didn’t really exercise, or eat well, or sleep for most of my youth. Six months ago I was telling my castmates that skincare regimes over two steps long were a scam.

“You’ll get it when you’re older,” one of them said. And how! Because the ticking time-bomb of my mortality began, and the relentless show season finally caught up to me.

I developed cystic acne. Then perioral dermatitis. My old ankle injury flared back up, followed quickly by a bunch of other persistent and excruciating bodily aches and pains. I didn’t get my voice back for weeks. I couldn’t sleep, then I couldn’t stop sleeping, and walked around longing for more REM. The only thing more boring than somebody listing their ailments is experiencing all of them. What a drag I became!

Even more dully, it became very clear that the days of “I know I should but I can’t be bothered” were over. The elastic band of my body had been over-twanged.

Of a War and Peace-sized novel of life lessons I learned during that contract, I was reminded that a body that works is a blessing, and that I have to think of future me whether I like it or not. It’s dull, but so is feeling bad. It requires a lot of trial and error. I accidentally saw the sunrise every night of last weekend, and then was cruelly reminded that Sunday Olivia does not like that. What she does like is going to dance class a lot and listening to rain to sleep, which is not sexy but it is true.

When I reminisce on instrumental periods of my life, I like to try and pinpoint the exact butterfly-wing-flap moment they began. A drunken night with a friend became a year’s situationship that left me believing I was amazing at sex, but very annoying to be around. An overlapping tech time at my first Edinburgh Fringe introduced me to one of my dearest and best friends. I performed in a show that should have been cancelled due to the shocking weather, and three months later I was reeling from the heartbreak of loving and losing someone I’d met in that night’s audience.

It’s a comfort that the exact beginning of anything rarely feels momentous at the time. It makes me feel that somewhere in the soup of last week, all this looking after me may have kickstarted an event that could shape my whole year. How exciting, to do my taxes on time for once and wonder if the accountant I just cold-emailed might one day officiate my wedding.

It’s unlikely, but so is everything else. It helps me limit my Oreos (a metaphor!!), because I’ve been alive long enough to know that the sugar won’t make me any less sad about the rejection email I just received.

It’s nice to think that there could be something fun coming from the mundanity of caring about yourself. Something good will come of this. You won’t know it yet - but it’s coming. You’ll see.