Living With the Background Noise

I don’t remember a time when sleep came easily.

Insomnia wasn’t dramatic in the beginning. It came in spurts. Long stretches of lying awake, then weeks where it settled. By my early twenties, it felt almost functional. Theatre at night. Home late. Adrenaline still circulating. I told myself it made sense that my brain wouldn’t switch off.

But it wasn’t just stimulation.

It was analysis.

Every performance was replayed. Did I hit the mark? Did that line land? Did I look uncertain? Did I overdo it? I would run the entire day back like footage in an editing suite, adjusting tone and timing in my head as if that could alter what had already happened.

At the time, I thought it was professionalism.

I thought this is what serious people do. They evaluate.

What I didn’t see was that it never stopped.

To this day, I replay conversations.

Phone calls. Messages. Social interactions. Writing I’ve just sent. Something I said online. Something someone else said.

It all goes under review.

I dissect tone. Word choice. Facial expression. Timing. I try to calculate whether I came across as capable, kind, too much, not enough. I construct alternative versions in my head. Cleaner responses. Better phrasing. Stronger boundaries.

Eventually, my brain reaches a verdict:

That was rational. You handled that well enough.

But it’s rarely a faithful reconstruction of what actually happened. It’s reassurance engineering. An attempt to prove to myself that I showed up properly. That I tried hard enough. That I was a good human being in the exchange.

Even when I land on a conclusion, the relief is temporary.

There’s still a sense of something unresolved.

This started in my teens and early twenties and threaded through everything.

It didn’t look destructive from the outside. I was committed. If I said yes to something, I was all in. I believed in the courage of my convictions. I wanted to bring skill to the table. To solve problems. To lift the standard. To make things better.

But when outcomes didn’t match the expectation in my head, frustration surfaced quickly.

I could become sharp. Sarcastic. Demanding. Aiming higher than the room was prepared for.

At the time, I framed it as standards.

Looking back, it was anxiety.

Frustration was the surface layer. Underneath it was the fear of not being enough, not being taken seriously, not delivering at the level I believed I should.

The background noise isn’t loud.

It’s persistent.

A mental commentary running parallel to life. An internal audit that never quite closes the file.

Sleep is difficult because the review process doesn’t clock off. Even now, lying in the dark, my brain scrolls through the day as if something critical might be hiding in the details.

Most people see the performance. They don’t see the edit suite afterwards.

And for years, I thought this was just discipline.

It took me a long time to understand that it was something else.

The Anxiety No-One Sees

I was twenty-one and convinced that if I stopped pushing, the dream would evaporate.

Professional musical theatre. The West End. Not a vague idea — a fixed point. I wasn’t letting go of it.

One of the first open West End auditions was held in Glasgow. Five thousand people turned up. I travelled north for it, long journey, little sleep, cold air biting through a queue that seemed endless. A line wrapping around an old theatre that smelled of dust, velvet, and history.

I remember the architecture more than the fear at first. The opulence. The ceiling. The weight of it all. Those buildings make you feel small in the best and worst way at the same time.

I was lucky — I went with a friend. That helped. On the surface, we were just two young performers waiting our turn.

Inside, my adrenaline was doing hoola hoops.

I did well. I got a recall.

That’s when it changed.

Over the next several months there were more auditions. London. Actual West End stages. Standing where I’d imagined standing for years. The dream wasn’t theoretical anymore.

It was close.

That proximity did something to me.

Excited doesn’t cover it. I was lit up. But underneath that was something tighter. A quiet internal interrogation that never stopped.

Can I actually do this? This isn’t local theatre. This is the West End. Am I about to be exposed?

I knew I was talented. That wasn’t false modesty. I knew I could perform. But knowing you’re good and believing you belong in that arena are two different things.

Outwardly, I was steady. Focused. Professional. I didn’t let anyone see the internal negotiation. No one cracked the armour because I didn’t offer a crack.

I trusted no one but myself at that point. Not dramatically — just by default. I shared very little. It felt safer to be self-contained.

The closer it became to real, the more I scanned for threats.

Will something derail this? Will I make one mistake and watch it disappear? Do I deserve to be standing here?

People would have seen ambition.

They wouldn’t have seen the constant recalculating. The vigilance. The way I rehearsed confidence internally before walking into a room.

The anxiety no one saw wasn’t weakness.

It was the cost of wanting something that big and realising it might actually be within reach.

Carrying More Than I Admit

I was twenty-one when I came out.

I was already married. I had a baby boy.

The marriage lasted a year and a half. It should never have happened. The relationship was wrong from the beginning, and it unravelled quickly.

My son was never the mistake. I loved him. That part was simple.

What followed wasn’t simple.

Life moved fast. Theatre became my world. Rehearsals, contracts, travel. Years that felt unstable and transitional. I missed parts of his childhood.

We haven’t spoken for over ten years.

There’s no neat explanation attached to that. Just distance that became permanent.

That sits with me.

Margaret was different.

Forty years of friendship. Amateur dramatics. Musicals. Shared ambition before either of us had proof of anything. She pushed me toward professional theatre when it still felt unrealistic.

I nursed her until she died in 2024. Eighty-eight. I watched her decline in real time.

Since then, my anxiety hasn’t flared — it has settled deeper. A quiet, steady undercurrent.

She was the person who knew the earliest versions of me. There’s no one left who holds that continuity.

That absence is constant.

Financial pressure runs alongside everything. Planning, adjusting, recalculating. It’s not dramatic. It’s ongoing.

It rarely gets spoken about directly, but it shapes decisions.

I’ve been single since around 2010.

Not casually. Completely.

After enough failed attempts at something steady, I stopped trying. Partly exhaustion. Partly fear. Partly a quiet belief that I may not be someone people choose long term.

Sometimes I imagine what it would feel like to have one constant person. Not intensity. Not chaos. Just presence.

Then I pull back from the thought before it gathers momentum.

Carrying more than I admit isn’t one headline event.

It’s accumulation.

A marriage that ended quickly. A son I haven’t spoken to in ten years. A best friend gone. Money that requires constant management. Fifteen years of sleeping alone.

Individually, none of it looks catastrophic.

Together, it has weight.

Most days, I move as if it doesn’t.