The little girl comes back again

Or how as you get into midlife you rediscover your real self

I know the word ‘authentic’ is one that we throw around the tennis court a lot these days. Authentic this and authentic that. It sounds good. Rolls off of the tongue. Can be used as an excuse to be rude or perhaps a little unreasonable at times. However there is something miraculous that happens as you get older. Something, maybe one of the ONLY things that you can feel good about…the small person comes back again. The authentic one. The one you were schooled to ignore.

I was watching the recent Robbie Williams series on Netflix, and it covered addiction, mental health, and all kinds of things, but what I really noticed in terms of the journey RW has been on is this - he is finally (it seems) willing and able to accept himself as he is. And with this acceptance he has also been able to access some of the qualities he had as teenager, and I presume he had as a kid too. You can see this in his eyes when he talks at the end of the programme. For a long time he was caught in this cycle of trying to please others, trying to second guess what the British media wanted, and then he got heaps of anxiety because he didn’t know who he was anymore. He went through years of trying to be someone else and it caused so much pain.

Flash back to my own example and I’m seven years old. Mum has taken me into work. I am going through a phase where I like to pretend I’m Dolly Parton. I have shoved two balloons up my Snoopy sweatshirt, and am sitting on a swivel chair and shouting at the top of my lungs. Colleagues are staring. I am sweating because I feel like this impression is going down well and I don’t want to stop.

‘Can you please keep it down Nik?’ Mum says angrily, and she’s right of course because she’s working at ‘Amnesty International’ and this is not the right place to be pretending I have massive boobs and am a famous Country singer. This is a serious and difficult place. And yet this phrase - ‘Can you keep it down, Nik’ is used throughout my childhood. I hear it often. When I’m recording my own radio show in my bedroom and acting out the different presenters. When I’m jumping from my top bunk and landing clumsily on the floor. When I’m in the garden on my pogo stick interviewing myself on a talk show (this is one of my favourite things- pretending I am famous and being asked about how I achieved such success). I am TOO MUCH.

Loud. Inappropriate. Hard work.

I get called silly a lot.

‘Just stop being silly will you?’ numerous family members tell me, ‘Just be serious now will you? For once?’

At aged eleven I change. I have a photograph (the photo that I’ve shared here), from around that time. The silly has definitely gone. I have stopped doing Dolly Parton impressions, and have my head in a book (no bad thing). I have also developed epilepsy which means I have fits at night. This means I can’t go on sleep overs with friends, because a change in my routine sets them off. When I’m having a fit it feels like I’m drowning. I call for my Mum and even if she’s there I can’t see her. Like my head is being shoved under water. I link together the idea that routine is good for me. I start to think that the exuberant part of myself has bought this terrifying sickness on. An underlying sense that I need to abandon myself to survive.

Many years roll past. I work, and at work I try and keep the silly at bay. The child that still lives inside me whispers that the guy in the meeting looks like a Weeble, that my boss has a striking resemblance to Jim Carrey in ‘Dumb and Dumber’. I tell this child to go away, and that they’re not wanted anymore. In meetings I sometimes draw tiny penises in the margins of my exercise book but quickly scrub them out. I am a grown up after all.

‘You lack gravitas,’ one of my senior colleagues tell me, ‘You need to work on that.’

I take this advice and I scrub out the very last bits of silly. I try and behave like the people around me. I feel a wave of grey sweep over me, like someone has turned the colour off and I live like this for many years, living like someone who isn’t me.

Then I enter my forties. It was in reality a gradual thing. I noticed that I sometimes laughed for no reason. That I made jokes in meetings, and people gave me strange sideways glances. I started to care less. I felt something (someone) wake up. I started to write. I used the people who had told me to be serious as my inspiration and cast them as characters in my first book. With my second daughter, once the dust had settled and I had got over the early horror, I felt me, the real me, the non-serious one return. She was clutching a pen and a small tape recorder. She had been hiding out for some time.

Today silly is possibly my superpower.

‘Mum you’re so cringe,’ my eldest daughter says to me this morning.

She’s watching a reel that I’ve made where I’m compulsively eating cheese puffs. Later she says the same thing whilst I try and do a dance holding onto one foot - something I’ve seen on YouTube and have wanted to try out for ages. I don’t want to paint this picture that I am like some massive fun time clown. Often I’m tired and grumpy. But still I have unschooled myself. I’ve learnt that this child side of me isn’t wrong, that life is hard, and if you can hold onto your humour, then what do you have left?

‘Be silly. It’s okay. I love you,’ the child says.

You didn’t listen before but now you do.

‘I’m sorry,’ you reply, ‘It’s scary to be who we really are don’t you think?’