7555/20484
Up before 6am, of course.
Smashed the Zoe app today (so presumably I can stop doing it now) with a score of 81 (you're aiming for 75) and the programme promises you that you will feel more energetic and despite my lack of sleep I certainly did today. The experiment might be slightly clouded by the fact that the kids aren't at home. So it could be down to that.
Increased well being usually happens after a bit of healthy eating, but I did a long dog walk this morning and felt properly content and my brain was firing and I felt very good about myself.
Certainly being without the family gives me time to think about myself, for the first time in a long time. And with my body moving and full of good food I did take a step back from myself and consider how amazing I am. It's not something that I do often, possibly because my job is to basically work out where I am a deficient and flawed human being, but I thought about what I have achieved so far and was quite impressed with myself. Which is an alien but OK feeling.
I didn't come from a deprived background - my parents were teachers who worked hard to bring up three kids - but nor do I come from privilege. I am not a nepo baby and I didn't go to public school and I grew up in Somerset in the 1980s where the idea of me choosing a career as a writer or performer was more or less out of the question. I worked hard and did well in my exams and got into a University that didn't favour comprehensively educated kids and that only a handful of people from my school had ever got into and then having some success there in acting and comedy I decided to try and make a go of the career that my Careers Advisor had told me was not open to me (mainly because it wasn't on his form). And I've worked in that career consistently for 34 years and over the last twenty years created more or less all of my own work and a podcast company that generates a guaranteed income and has also funded other projects, not for profit, but just so that they will happen.
And I've still managed to be a husband and father who is engaged with his family and does his share of the chores and the childcare (much to the disbelief of Bridget Christie in our recent interview). And I am full of vegetables and walking through a wood and I didn't die of cancer and life is short and I won't be here forever and yes, I have fucked up a lot and will continue to do so and I AM STILL FUCKING HERE FOR NOW.
It's very much not in my nature to seriously blow my own trumpet and I generally ponder my failures rather than my successes and my successes have been modest and my audience has always been selective. But I've done some stuff and (though it took me a while) got an amazing and I can enjoy the successes of others without too much envy, which seems to be the curse of many performers, ironically many of them objectively successful in their own right, but still haunted by the success of others (that's not a dig at anyone in particular either, I am amazed in RHLSTP how many of my guests are gripped lightly or strongly by those feelings).
Having (at it turned out falsely) thought I was going to lose everything a couple of years back (and only falsely in the short term, obviously, but I assumed I'd be dead by now), I know that my family is the most important thing and so my health is the next most important thing. I can still lose sight of it, which is why I basically fucked up nearly all the good work I did on getting fit in the last year (though still off the booze at least) and why I have sometimes still lost my temper with my kids or not appreciated my amazing wife or thought about having sex with a robot. But suddenly having a few days alone I appreciate how lucky I am to have all I have and to have relative comfort and security (as far as that is possible on this unpredictable and dying planet).
I felt good in myself and about myself and it's unusual enough an occurrence to write about (and I'll be back to my fuck ups and shitting in fields tomorrow no doubt), so there you go. I consider myself the luckiest of people and much of my luck came in not achieving the dreams of my youth (or only partially).
Later a lost soul on Facebook sought me out to tell me that he hoped I was using my time off to become a good comedian, expressing his love of my former partner and his disdain for me. It turned out he assumed I'd been taking time off since 1999 when that partnership ended. If he was hoping to get under my skin he couldn't have chosen a worse day (I am also suspicious of anyone who would find one of us funny and the other totally unfunny as there is at least some common ground in our work).
My favourite bit was where he laughed at the idea that someone who claimed to be famous would be posting on Facebook on a Friday evening. He had no awareness that he was also posting on Facebook on a Friday evening or that I certainly do not covet fame or think I am famous. I'm a 56 year old dad who was looking forward to going to bed at 9pm.
I recognised that to seek someone out in this manner to try and upset them is just a way to deflect your own pain and eventually told him that I hoped he would find the contentment that I now have (having certainly experienced the bitterness and anger that he had bubbling beneath the surface, as well as making snap judgements about comedians I didn't consider cool - not sure I'd have ever sought them out to tell them though) and then he deleted all the mean things he had said, perhaps not getting the annoyed and upset response that he had craved.
Try a day when I am not full of myself, haters. Cheg on.
If you're going to accuse someone of being a failure, you really need to be more successful than them. Or it's a bit of a self-own.
Once my kids are home I'll be a self-hating mess again. Then your facebook messages are going to hurt. Also watch some of my stand-up. I'm OK.
