Where D'Ya Go, Rho? Ep16 I'm Still Standing (on stage)

Hello! I hope you are doing well or as well as can be expected. I am back writing my blog again after a break due to college so I had a wee read back as I am decanting these bad boys into my website (Ooooh, check you, fancy!). While writing these blog entries I at least know there has been movement and not just the nervous one in my gut I have been trying to control for years.

I stopped gigging in 2017 due to one piece of anonymous bad feedback after playing The Stand Comedy Club in Glasgow on a Christmas weekend. Rather than question it as the gig went not just well but killed, I took the feedback onboard and fried the motherboard. Rejection Sensitivity Disorder anyone? I now know it is a sub symptom of ADHD which I am now pretty sure I have after many, many, many days of doom scrolling into it. It’s something I probably have always had but managed to mask pretty well until my hormones decided to bolt due to perimenopause. Now that my oestrogen is MIA the previously in check ADHD has run rampant and one of the ways it has done so is to make my self esteem and confidence nosedive harder than Keir Starmer’s popularity after he whipped the winter fuel allowance off the pensioners.

I have always wanted to return but the fear inside me was unbelievably strong, almost as strong as the new whiff of body odour I was experiencing. Boy, the hormonal imbalance likes to let you know it is off kilter with some cracking alarm bells. Honk an alarm by all means but do not honk ma pits! It reeks like cat wee or strong onion- pee-ew. I had to face the fear though and despite a number of weak willed attempts, this last year I have been putting in place measures to turn things around.

I finally went back to college and decided to complete the remaining modules for my HND. This is solely to satisfy the needy teacher’s pet in me that has always thought that the wee bit of paper counted for something. I don’t take failure well and since stepping off stage when I was at a significant incline in my comedy career, I was not going to add my HND to a growing list of things I had started but not completed.

I study media and communication and thankfully I can see the college everytime I leave my front door so there was no getting away from the reminder that I had FINISH COLLEGE on my to do list. I begged my head of Dept, Fred to come back and swore this time at the first hint of a media job I wouldn’t abandon ship. It’s part time because it’s only a handful of modules to do so workload wise I felt hopeful. Media courses are very practical in nature and the courses require making content and there is no bigger task than the graded unit- the culmination of your two years wrapped up in 2 modules. A unit that is the big daddy of them all. Some write scripts, some do podcasts, some make a magazine…what would I do?

I made a webpage before for my graded unit 1 in first year and while I put loads of work into it I was unmedicated for perimenopause and all off the place symptom wise and I was just hanging on by a thread and my perfectionist self was pissed off at the resulting B grade. The analysis and start-stop nature of the task was Herculean as I liked to create and make decisions at breakneck speed throughout the process. However, for the GU this was not the case. Having to explain every decision in minute detail only cramped my creativity and railed against the ADHD tendency to create beautiful organisation but lack the discipline to keep it that way once things sped up. Consistency is key. Others could do the explanation but maybe not create a fab product but as it has been explained, the end result could be a dog’s dinner as long as you were able to show why and evaluate it. I’d rather plough on, get the job done and the end product be decent but the notes be retrospective as my decisions happen in an instant and the evaluation is in my head but not necessarily on paper, in an excel document and diarised to the nth degree.

The GU2 has to be a larger and more impressive effort than the GU1. My first one was trying to establish me online as a creative and make a window display for my wares with a business card and a webpage but we are asked to do it on no budget so the domain expired, the free hosting trial meant it was there for the project but not able to be used beyond that. I used to be good with technology but somewhere along the line my skills became as obsolete as the equipment I had and the kids at college were now a million light years ahead. I knew my project had to face my fears of the modern ways of working. I had to get involved with social media, an area I loathed with a passion but I noticed many thriving (even with crap content) and shimmying up the ladder of success. I was reminded of Susan Jeffers’ book- Face The Fear And Do It Anyway. I had to put aside my need for perfection (another ADHD trait) and just crack on and face the fear. The phrase haunted me as I realised that may also be the key to a return to stand up comedy. Face the fear. Face the fear. Face the fear. The chant grew louder and louder and the drums in my head played a constant stream of music in my brain like an inner jukebox (another symptom of ADHD rather than the AC/DC it played on repeat). FACE THE FEAR! Nah, na, na na ,na, na, na, nana. I could ignore the will to return to stand up no more than I could ignore the Thunderstruck intro in my head. I had to include this in my GU2.

I decided to go big or go home. For my GU2 I have decided to try and go from social media zero to hero. I had to redo my webpage and even though I made some silly decisions like picking a host based on cost rather than ease of use, I now have a self designed website. I have a unity of branding whereby all my social media handles are the same and this matches my webpage too. This makes finding me easy and links everything together. I then created content and decided on making short form content that had launched so many via TIkTok or Instagram. After a short brainstorm it's clear my distinct brands are comedy and disability awareness so I made a series of self filmed videos called CRIP TIPS using my years of tips I used to give people as a welfare rights officer regarding Disability and put them into little chunk size videos. I also put out posts with jokes and the likes but trying to explain the inner workings of how your mind links two unconnected subjects to create a joke makes the joke divebomb in my mind and makes me want to delete it. Very counterproductive.

I knew comedy had to be the key to a good graded unit and Fred always said we should do what fires us up. We will perspire for what inspires us. These days I perspire hard but it’s hormonal however, I knew what he meant. What did I want after college? I want to work in media and comedy specifically. I thought that comedy production could fuel me and the BBC job I got as an assistant in the team I believe was the step to my dream but turns out it was a bit of a nightmare and my passion was pricked by a couple of balloons. The story of that is for another day but it did teach me that I wanted to create comedy not assist in the creation of the comedy of others. I had to step back on stage, I had to write again, I had to face the fear and do it anyway. I had to go on despite the lack of confidence and brave it out with bravado. Go big or go home- okay then. Do a show at the Glasgow comedy festival. Organise it, market it, advertise it, hell even design the poster and bloody well write it. Do it! Do it!, DO IT!

By coming up with this concept I had no way of backing out, I would be committed and it would kill two birds with one stone. 1. I would have to actually become a stand up comic again and 2. I would have to knock my pan in, create many aspects of media and this in itself would fingers crossed be a GU2 A grade winner. In fact, this may kill 3 birds with one stone- ME in effort.

So with the plan in place I have been plotting since August really. I have been bound by the deadlines of the festival so had no time to lose so while others were not even getting started as our modules didn’t have to kick off until block 2, I was already block 1 out the traps and running.

It’s been scary and tears have been shed. There have been nights of no sleep and panic in my chest throughout and times when by block 2 I thought just go for an easy life and change tack but something in me said I would never settle until I faced the fear and did it anyway- took the road less travelled and went for the harder option. I did a comedy course to get back to basics and dip a toe in. By 15th March 2025 at 9pm I was beyond baws deep in the water and had to sink or swim. I feared I didn’t have enough material but I had more than enough. Was it perfect? Not by a long way but I had achieved what I set out to do. I wrote a personal show that explored fear and fragility. I had a work in progress that showed I had something to work on and sharpen into a decent one hour comedy debut and I had FACED THE FEAR AND DID IT ANYWAY.

Whether I end up get an A for my HND in the end, who knows but in my core I am satisfied that I took on an 8 year fear that was killing my creative essence and passion for life and took the feet from under me. I punched that fear square in the face and I’m still standing and like 2017 I’m standing on a stage.