Starting Over

We have grown. We have groooooooown.

I have started over. Here I am in my own house, after two years of living with my parents, which followed a couple of months of being effectively homeless. As the world went through COVID and the sense that everything was falling apart, it was for me personally too. So as the world starts over, I’m starting over.

You can take “new beginnings” with degrees of literality. I really am starting a new life for myself, and it seems like a pretty good opportunity to reboot everything about myself.

I had a Comedy Festival show planned for this year called “Reboot”, which I had to call off for various reasons, but the Reboot was not cancelled. In 2023, I’m determined to return to the stage and start my comedy career over again. Because this is the year of starting over.

In 2023, I’ll be looking at the long list of things I still want to do, and facing down the fear I’ve always had of trying to do them, because if I fail it’ll be worse than if I never tried. I’m going to be tackling new writing projects. I’m going to be hammering away at standup, at novels, at TV, at music, at every damn thing I feel like doing.

I am forty-four years old, and I know this is way too old to be starting anything. If I thought about this sensibly and reasonably, I would have to accept that if I have not made a dent in certain of my ambitions by this stage, it’s time to let those ambitions go.

So it’s a good thing that I have decided to not think about it sensibly and reasonably. It’s a good thing that I’ve decided that nearly twenty years after first stumbling onto a stage, and more than three years since the last time I actually performed at a comedy show, there is no reason why a guy in his mid-forties can’t wipe the slate clean and start that career all over again.

It’s a good thing I’ve decided that all the unproduced and unpublished material sitting in my computer has not yet reached its expiry date, and that I still have time for all the ideas that bubble away that I haven’t even started yet.

It’s a good thing that the fact that I’m competing against much younger people in an industry where the accepted wisdom is that you either break through young or never is not going to faze me.

Of course that’s a lie. It will faze me. It DOES faze me. Maybe none of those things are good things. Maybe they are all bad things. Maybe I’m a complete idiot to think that I can still push myself forward and reach a higher place than I already have. Maybe it’s a massive waste of time to not just accept that where I am now is where I have to stay.

Seriously. It might be. I might be a failure who just hasn’t realised it yet. I mean, do you know how many people subscribe to this Substack? I’m embarrassed to even tell you.

But I know that just giving up now would mean just accepting that there are things I will never do, that I will never write, that I will never see come forth into the world. It means allowing all the worlds that exist in my brain will never exist anywhere else. It means saying, “I have so much more to give…but I won’t.”

And I just can’t.

At the age of 43 I came back to rugby, having not played since I was 21. At 44 I’m still running out to play.

At 44 I am still bumbling along trying to learn the guitar. And the harmonica. I plan to try to learn the piano and the drums.

At 44 I am still going to the gym and insisting that there is potential in my body that I still haven’t unlocked.

At 44 I am in love, and learning all over again what that means.

And so no, I will not put away my ideas. I will not gracefully cede the stage. I will not stop writing, stop creating, or stop telling people about what I’ve got to offer.

I don’t know if I really have anything to offer. I am acutely aware that there is a strong possibility that I suck and all of this will come to nothing.

But I’ve made the decision that the life where I let that acute awareness stop me from finding out what’s possible is over. This is a new life.

I am starting over. I hope you’ll come with me.

And tell a few of your friends too - seriously, those subscriber numbers are AWFUL.