A very happy unbirthday to you

on ageing, achievement, and creativity deadlines

I meant to send this out last week but time ran away with me. Time running away with me is something of a running theme - as in artist newsletter, so in life. 

The big news is that my show Gone to the Dogs will be in London in 2 weeks & has been listed in Broadway Baby’s top ten list of things to catch at VAULT Festival!

It comes to town for two weekends 25th Feb - 5th Mar. And if you’re able, any shares and retweets beforehand really help build a buzz and bring it to the attention of reviewers and programmers for future festivals and tour bookings. 

(the patron saint of underwhelming birthdays, Eeyore)

Now to the party (or not)

Last weekend was my birthday, which always trips me up. Every year it approaches like a threat, a monster that does not quite bite, a giant dragoncat snapping at ankles. As the mists of January clear and I stagger into February (IMO the cruellest month, whatever Eliot says), it looms on the horizon, the final adversary I must face after the triple threat of Festive excess, New Year Self-Renaissance, and the grim penury of January which culminates finally in this cornerstone of my own mortality, which apparently I must celebrate. 

We circle each other, a short scuffle ensues, and then we say our goodbyes for another twelve months. I get out unscathed, but a little scratched and scuffed, and a bit more war-scarred. I resolve to be more prepared next time. 

I’ve tried it both ways. Big party, make a fuss. Fun, but I am still left with a feeling of spectacular failure. Then to the other: obstinate refusal to do anything. Pretend it isn’t happening. No matter: it happens either way. I am a year older, and the list of things I haven’t done yet only grows, compounded with interest. 

Are you there yet? 

The sad, unsexy, and drearily predictable truth is - I thought I would have done more by now. As an imaginative, talented, unhappy teenager, I looked forward to a life of Doing Things, of making some sort of mark on the world. 

While it has hardly been an utter failure so far, it is not quite the sensational success I envisaged while staring miserably out of my bedroom window in a small unremarkable village, waiting for time to tick more quickly towards my independence.

the old windmill near where I grew up, which was the only thing of note in our village - apart from the cement works, which they blew up

The problem with time is that we can only live it in the present; but that present is often attended by two foot(wo)men. They are Past Self and Future Self: the person we were and the person we still hope to be. 

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In my case, Past Self is a perennially disappointed youth who lives by the only markers of success she knew without the benefit of experience: beautiful starlets in the Sunday Times Magazine, interviews with literary prize winners, witty talent on TV panel shows. She knew very little about the business of actually living in the world and didn’t have an ounce of the daring or the resilience I have now, but she still stands by me in the mirror most mornings, or whispers in my ear anytime I do achieve anything, in a voice so crestfallen I wish she would simply shout: is this it?

Future Self still hangs close by, a bolster for the bleaker moments. She entertains me as I try to get to sleep at night, offers companionship when I feel totally wrung out. 

Future Self lives in a land of parties and success and usually shows up holding a cocktail (bizarrely, she also seems to smoke, which I don’t; but it suits her). She is witty and droll, always impeccably dressed, and people like her. She has commissions coming out of her ears: everyone marvels at her latest work and all the accolades she has won. She has the CV but also the nonchalant devil-may-care attitude of the impish artist who is not bound by the societal markers of success (perhaps because she conveniently has them already). 

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I long to be like Future Self, so accomplished but so unfazed - but I know there is no way to her except through the me I am being right now. And I also know, much as I gently try to put her to bed, or show her all the other things success might look like in the broad canvas of the world, that Past Self will be coming along for the ride, whinging intermittently about the long hours and the lack of glory, and waving one of the glossy Sunday supplements in my face even as my own image deteriorates further and further from that impossible aspect of perfect beauty. 

Anthem to doomed youth   

A friend once accused me of having an idee fixe with youth. I don’t think he was wrong but I also don’t think I was unjustified in that fixation. I was in my late 20s, about to move out of the London rat race to focus in earnest on my music, and uncomfortably aware that I was embarking on a new career at a time when many of the things which would go in my favour within a hyper-productive image-focused industry - namely, youth, beauty, and energy reserves - were entering their era of decline. 

I’m prepared to admit that I am more hung up on youth than most. I have a deep regret for not appreciating myself more at the time - for waiting until the best moment, even as the best moments were passing. But I think the notion of success - of creativity - having a cut off point is much more ingrained in our society than just one woman’s insecurity. 

I think we think creativity belongs to the youth. I think we worry that there is a window for success and that it comes early, and cannot be repeated further down the track. For all that you feel like an inexperienced fool when you are young (I refer you back to Past Self wielding her magazines and ultimatums), too often it is viewed in retrospect as the only time things could have taken seed. It’s too late, we tell ourselves, even though this is the only time we have left to us. 

But I’m past it

In my own reading on creativity and self-development, I find this notion time and time again of what I took to be my own unique fear: namely, I am too old to start. Or to continue. Or to come into my own. 

Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic details some of the reasons people give for not being able to act creatively. ‘I’m too old’ is a common one. (‘Too fat’ is another - one that also nestles deep in my bones). I don’t know what this has to do with being creative, she writes - but it comes up a lot.  

In her seminal book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about the resistance people put up when she suggests they finally start that creative project or pursue that long-neglected dream. Do you know how old I’ll be, they say indignantly, despairingly, by the time I learn to play the piano/train to be an actor/write that play/do whatever it is I’ve told myself I can’t do all these years? Yes, she replies calmly - the exact same age you’ll be if you don’t do it. 

There’s no time like the present - quite literally. We have to show up, in whatever too-late-too-old-too-fat-thought-things-would-be-different entity we’re currently inhabiting. I gather quantum physics is undecided on the exact dimensions and capacities of time in its universal sense, but as humans, generally the only way we can live it day to day is one moment at a time, usually in a linear fashion. Certainly this is the chronology of actions and their consequences.

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Course correcting and making do

In the time between when I was supposed to send out this newsletter (last weekend) and when I actually sent it out (eg. right now-ish), one of the things I read was this beautiful rumination on ageing and true beauty by Ursula le Guin. 

It featured in the Marginalian, a thought-rich treasure trove of a newsletter which is itself a testament to slow-grow labours of love that yield orchards over time, but which by necessity must begin with arduous painstaking seed-planting over many years. 

There is value, of course, in taking the long way round - in letting things unfurl in the way they must, if not the way you imagined. And there is beauty in ageing - in coming, at last, into your own. 

(just a normal woman doing a normal show about a nation in decline and the dangers of cleaving to a mythic past via war nostalgia, told through the form of a manic Britannia)

The things I am creating now, I would not have been able to do back then. The show I am bringing to London’s VAULT Festival in a couple of weeks, weirder and more ambitious than anything I set out to do when I first started writing the follow up to my debut album, is in many ways an amalgamation of all the past selves who got me lost along the way. Woven round a medley of my own music and classical riffs, it is part theatre, part in-depth research project reflected back in soundscapes and movement sequences. I have always been torn between wanting to be in a library and wanting to be on stage. Trying to reconcile the two was always a huge problem for Past Me - now, much later than anticipated, and not at all in a way I could have envisaged, they’ve finally come together into their own unique hybrid (see above). 

I think, despite all the cumulative dread of the years, things happen the way they have to - and if you want to create things, or try something out, or take the first step towards Future You, this means meeting yourself, wherever you’re at right now, and cracking on. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried - if I claimed not to be self-conscious next to so many other performers who are probably younger, and full of hope (the bastards), and maybe much better (oh god) - and almost certainly thinner. I think in many ways my obsession with youthful success was an attempt to try and freeze time - as if, by achieving something while still young, I could somehow opt out of the ageing process altogether. I don’t think I wanted to have to see pictures of myself onstage when I was not young anymore, which I equated with failure.

I am older, and fatter, than I ever wanted to be onstage - and I feel like I’m only just getting started making the good stuff. But, if I was ever really serious about pushing myself, about trying to find the right means of expression, about achieving anything at all, that was always going to happen at some point anyway. 

The thing about ageing is, it will happen, regardless. You can only go at the pace you go at, make the things you make, and get there when you get there. It won’t look like you imagined, but it will be its own thing, which has had time to grow into its own brand of weird - its own version of you, who after all is the one putting in the hard work of living the life day to day so that you have something to craft your art out of.

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Thanks for reading and rest assured next birthday will be exactly as dreadful, I can philosophise all I like, but lizard brain has learnt nothing from all this. 

(me & B took a little trip to the seaside to see what we can see and calm our nerves before the big London shows. This photo was taken at the exact same time I was supposed to be writing this newsletter)

For you London folk, I (and Britannia) hope to see you soon. Do give me a shout on socials if you’re coming along, and come and say hi after the show (I will be in the bar, obvs) x

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