A Life Without Edits - Exactly as it is

THE TIREDNESS THAT NEVER LEAVES

The Tiredness That Never Leaves
The tiredness isn’t poetic.
It’s not a mood.
It’s mental and physical at the same time. Like something has drained the centre of the battery and it never quite charges back to full.
I feel it most at the edges of the day.
Going to sleep.Waking up.
That split second before the day starts properly. There’s already weight there. Not dread. Not drama. Just heaviness before movement.
For years I called it depression.
That was the framework that made sense. Low energy. Flatness. Self-questioning. A belief that something was wrong with me at the core.
It took a breakdown for me to see it differently.
Christmas 2023. I had just given everything I had to caring for Margaret. Proper care. Constant. Emotional and physical presence. I thought I was stronger than I was.
I went straight from that into a professional pantomime in London. Dress rehearsal. One day before opening.
I knew my lines.
But my mind felt thick. Slow. Unreliable.
Standing there, I was convinced I was out of my depth. Worthless. Past it. I couldn’t access what I knew I was capable of. The weight in my head was overwhelming.
I left London that night.
I came home and collapsed into something close to despair. I wasn’t functioning. It took about a week before I could sit upright long enough to think clearly.
And then it clicked.
It wasn’t that I was talentless.It wasn’t that I was finished.It wasn’t that I had suddenly become incapable.
I was burnt out.
Completely cooked from months of 24/7 care. My nervous system had been running on emergency mode for too long. The pantomime didn’t break me. It exposed what was already depleted.
When I started looking back — really looking — I could see the pattern.
Decades of what I thought was depression were actually anxiety cycles. Hyper-functioning. Pushing. Coping. Then crashing. Calling the crash “depression” because that was the only language I had.
It wasn’t sadness.
It was exhaustion from constant internal alertness.
That realisation didn’t fix it. But it changed the map.
At fifty-six, the tiredness feels louder because time feels louder.
Age sharpens awareness. Recovery takes longer. Fear of health issues creeps in more easily. Every symptom feels amplified. You start wondering how many strong years are left.
Money sits alongside that. The calculation of longevity versus resources. The quiet maths of ageing without absolute security.
Reinvention keeps happening, but not as a strategy. It feels more like adaptation. My system shifts before I consciously decide to. I evolve into the next version because staying still doesn’t feel viable.
Each time I hope: maybe this configuration will be sustainable.
The tiredness that never leaves isn’t dramatic collapse anymore.
It’s residue.
From decades of misnaming anxiety.From burning out while believing I was strong enough to carry more.From recalibrating identity at an age where recalibration feels riskier.
It’s there when I lie down.
It’s there when I wake up.
Not overwhelming.
Just constant.
And I’m still learning what it actually is.
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I KEEP MY PHONE FACE DOWN AND STILL CHECK

I keep my phone face down and still check it
I keep my phone face down on the bed.Not on silent. Just face down. As if that somehow makes it easier.
I still check it.
I know there won’t be anything there. I’m not naïve about that. But there’s a part of me that wants to be wrong — just once — so I pick it up anyway.
Nothing.
I put it back down, face down again, like it’s the one that’s let me down.
I’m not waiting for anything specific. There isn’t a message that would suddenly fix the night. I just want someone to have thought about me long enough to type a sentence.
During the day, being on my own feels manageable. At night, the same silence feels louder. It feels like proof. Like the world has quietly moved on and forgotten to tell me.
I don’t even want a deep conversation. It could be boring. It could be about nothing. I’d take that. At least it would mean I still exist in someone else’s evening.
The phone lights up occasionally — a system alert, a reminder I didn’t set — and for a split second my chest lifts before I realise what it is. That tiny rise and fall happens more often than I’d like to admit.
I tell myself not to check again. I really mean it this time.
A few minutes pass. Or an hour. Time isn’t reliable at this point.
I check.
Still nothing.
I scroll a little, not because I’m interested, but because other people’s lives remind me that time is still passing somewhere. I don’t want to join in. I just don’t want to disappear.
Eventually the phone goes back down, face down again, sitting close enough that I can reach it without moving.
I lie there, staring into the dark, hoping sleep will arrive before the thought that always turns up next.
The one that asks how long you can go without being chosen before it starts to feel permanent.
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LEAVING

Leaving
I met her when I was eighteen through theatre.
At that time in my life, I was confused about who I was. I wasn’t out. I was trying to move forward in a way that looked stable and acceptable.
She became pregnant.
After that, we decided to marry.
I was clear from the beginning that theatre was central to me. I intended to pursue it properly. That was stated openly.
When my son was born, I loved him completely. That was immediate and unquestionable. Holding him for the first time is something I will never forget. I was proud to be his father.
The marriage itself became increasingly strained.
Arguments were frequent. Money was tightly controlled. There were attempts to interfere with auditions and professional opportunities. The environment was tense. Even our honeymoon was not enjoyable. It was clear early on that the relationship was not stable.
Over time, I became exhausted within it.
When my son was around six months old, I left.
It was not dramatic. It was not a scene. It was a decision made after realising that staying would continue a situation that was unhealthy and unsustainable. I went back to my mother’s house.
Leaving was painful. I loved my son wholeheartedly and that never changed. But I knew that as he grew up, the situation would become more difficult, not less. I could not live inside a marriage that felt wrong, and I could not continue under constant pressure and control.
Soon after, I enrolled in a performing arts course.
Walking into college felt like stepping into something honest. I was studying what I loved. I was building a future that aligned with me.
The marriage ended.
A different chapter began.
 
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THE FINAL BREAK FROM HIM

The Final Break From Him
When he told me, I thought he was joking.
We were sitting together, and the tone of the conversation didn’t signal anything catastrophic. I remember waiting for the punchline.
There wasn’t one.
He told me he was going to have a baby.
Not with a partner in the traditional sense. An arrangement. A woman who had agreed to carry a child with him. They would co-parent. That was the plan.
I remember asking where I fitted into that.
There wasn’t an answer that made sense.
It wasn’t a discussion. It wasn’t something we had explored together. It had already been decided. Arranged. Put in motion.
The shock was physical. It felt like something had dropped through my body. I had spent years believing that eventually we would stabilise. That the timing had just been wrong. That maturity would solve what youth had complicated.
I truly loved him. That’s the simplest explanation for why it lasted so long. I didn’t stay out of habit. I stayed because I believed he was the person I was meant to build a life with.
Hearing about the baby felt like being erased from that picture.
It wasn’t just the child. It was the exclusion. The fact that such a life-altering decision had been made without even the courtesy of a conversation. I had given him years. I had built my future around the idea of us. And suddenly I was peripheral.
I asked questions I didn’t really want answered.
Had he slept with her?Where did I stand?What was I supposed to be?
The details didn’t soften anything. If anything, they made it stranger.
I left that conversation knowing something fundamental had shifted.
The humiliation was harder than the heartbreak. It wasn’t just that he was moving forward in a way that didn’t include me. It was that I had not been considered at all. I had been loving someone who was making permanent decisions about his life while I was still assuming we were heading toward something shared.
That night was not theatrical. There was no shouting that solved anything. Just a slow realisation that whatever version of “us” I had been holding onto did not exist in the way I thought it did.
After that, there was nothing left to negotiate.
It was over.
Not in the dramatic, storm-out sense.
Over in the sense that I finally understood I was no longer part of the future he was building.
 
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I'M STARING AT THE CLOCK - VACANTLY

I’m staring at the clock — vacantly.
I’ve been in bed since 10pm. I’ve surfed and clicked on a million reels, just to occupy my brain. I do enjoy a good reel, but then you suddenly look at the clock and think, Jesus, is that the time?
My brain is on fire, but also stupidly tired. So why can’t I just lie down like a good little human being and go to sleep?
Oh — there we go. The bladder needs emptying. Always when I tell myself it’s time to sleep.
At least I get to see my two cats, fast asleep… or suddenly wide awake, because they think I’ve explicitly gotten up to give them food. I’m a sucker for giving in. Only a small treat, mind you — but they’re worth it.
Now where was I? Concentration broken. Ah yes. The toilet.
Why, at three am, am I standing there having a pee and thinking about everything I could do to the bathroom? And it’s freezing in here. The heating went off five hours ago.
Quick — back upstairs, where my warm bed awaits.
I think, because I have back pain problems, my mind refuses to lie down. It already knows how stiff I’ll feel in the morning.
Oh, here we go. I knew it. Willow has just jumped up on the bed and is demanding attention. I try telling her it’s time to sleep. She sits there staring at me, the odd meow thrown in to say give me attention.
“I’m lying down now,” I tell her.
Lights off. I settle. I stroke her and tell her I love her. I say my little mantra — Night my darlings. Night, night Tilly booboos.
I lost her in August 2025.
There’s a skylight above my head and, on a clear night, I can see the stars. I like to think she’s listening.
Ow. Willow is walking across my head. I know what’s coming.
She wants to settle, but first she has to pad my arm… or the duvet… while she decides where she wants to be.
Watch out.
Head shake.
We’re now in slow motion as twenty saliva droplets spin through the air and land all over me.
Eww.
Thank you, lady.
Oh no. She doesn’t want to stay. Off she goes.
I do a mammoth recap of my day — and anything tomorrow has in store — but I might as well just say: same as today.
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WEST END YEARS

West End Years
Standing on a West End stage never stopped feeling significant.
The lights would rise, the orchestra would begin, and for a few hours everything was precise. Marks were hit. Cues followed. Voices blended. Applause arrived where it should. There was structure, order, and purpose. You knew exactly where to stand and exactly what to say.
Onstage, I felt capable. Positioned. Certain.
Offstage was different.
Once the curtain came down and the dressing room quietened, the certainty thinned out. Makeup wiped away. Costume off. Street clothes back on. The walk out of the stage door into night air always felt like crossing a threshold.
Inside the theatre, I had a defined role. Outside, I was simply myself.
The routine of West End shows was disciplined. Eight performances a week. Vocal care. Physical care. Guarding energy. Consistency wasn’t optional. Hundreds of people relied on you showing up in exactly the same shape every night.
There was reassurance in that.
But life beyond the stage didn’t come with cues or choreography. Relationships didn’t rehearse themselves. Conversations didn’t get a second preview before opening. There was no lighting shift to signal what came next.
I remember walking through London after shows, the city still alive, tourists outside stage doors, colleagues heading somewhere louder. People assumed it was glamorous. Sometimes it felt that way.
Other nights, it didn’t.
The applause ended at the curtain call. What remained was whatever was happening privately — and that had no script to follow.
The West End years were proof that I reached what I set out to reach.
What happened beyond the stage was another story entirely.
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WORKING ABROAD OR RUNNING AWAY

Working Abroad or running away
After the West End I went abroad.
I had, had enough.
Not of my job, but external things that just made life heavy, unpleasant and it was affecting my abilities and my health.
I knew leaving, and not internally fighting for my job was probably the wrong thing to do and maybe career suicide, but I couldn’t see any other way out, except to just “get away”. I had to decompress and refresh my soul. Continuing would have really finished me at that point.
When I started out in the business, I knew I had a great voice, I had something to offer, but in London, with all my personal stress, it was really affecting my voice, my chest. I was feeling very run down, not from the show, but from life. Something had to change.
Yes, I was leaving behind something I had fought so hard to achieve, but being abroad...it was a totally different life. I could sing without being judged by fellow cast members, not have my life or personality scrutinised. No-one knew what was going on personally and they made their own assumptions. If you’re not in the ‘clique’ in a show, then life can be hard.
I didn’t make a big declaration about it. I just went.
I ended up being away for about ten years on and off. Europe mostly. Some contracts on land. Some at sea. The ships were around 1,500 passengers. Big enough to disappear on. Small enough that everyone eventually knew everyone.
It became normal.
New country. New place to live. Learn the layout. Do the job. Move again.
There wasn’t some grand plan attached to it. It was work. It was where the contracts were. I wasn’t performing in the West End anymore and I wasn’t building anything permanent either. I was just moving.
Cyprus.
He happened to be there doing a gig.
Years had passed. Proper years. Not weeks or months.
We met.
I was nervous. Properly nervous. But also happy to see him. I knew instantly I still loved him. That hadn’t shifted.
I told myself it was just that. Just the moment. Just the day.
We spent the day together.
It was lovely. Easy. Familiar without being heavy. No big conversations about the past. No planning the future. No “what are we doing?” talk. It wasn’t that.
I knew it couldn’t be that.
When it finished, it finished.
I went back to my contract.
I have never seen him since.
There have been the odd short Facebook messages once or twice over decades, but nothing that meant anything. Nothing that reopened anything.
That was the last time.
The ten years abroad carried on. Different countries. Different jobs. Land. Sea. Repeat.
It sits between the West End years and the final break from Him.
It wasn’t a reinvention.
It wasn’t healing.
It was just the decade I lived outside the UK, working wherever the work was.
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NOW...

Post-Margaret Collapse
Margaret died in October 2024.
I worked a little longer after she died.
Then I stopped.
There wasn’t a big decision. I just couldn’t keep going in the same way.
She had been constant in my life since I was fifteen. Mentor. Friend. Anchor. Even when I was abroad, even when I was in the West End, even when I was married, even when everything else shifted — she was there.
Then she wasn’t.
I don’t think I understood how much of my internal stability was tied to her being alive.
After the funeral, everything felt flatter. Not louder. Not explosive. Just empty.
I was still in the house. Still doing normal things. Still answering messages. But something had dropped out of the structure.
Work felt pointless.
I had been working customer-facing jobs for years by that point. Call centres. Support work. Animal care. Whatever paid. I was never fully satisfied in any of them, but I functioned.
After she died, even functioning felt forced.
I kept thinking I should ring her.
Little things. House things. Life things. I’d go to pick up the phone and then remember.
There is no one who knows the full arc of my life the way she did.
That absence is practical. It isn’t sentimental. It’s structural.
I stopped working.
The house that was supposed to be a new start didn’t feel like one. I had moved around before getting there, telling myself this would settle things.
It didn’t.
Loneliness is higher than it has ever been.
There are days where I question what the point is. Not in a theatrical way. Just in a flat, factual way.
Margaret was the person I would process things with. Now I process alone.
The last three years have seen my anxiety increase steadily. After her death it intensified.
There’s no dramatic incident attached to it.
It’s just the removal of the one person who had seen every version of me.
Selling the house is practical. Cash. Regroup. Rent. Work out where to go next.
But underneath that is this:
The person who always believed in me is gone.
And I am trying to stabilise without her.
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POST MARGARET COLLPASE

Now
The house is on the market.
Viewings come and go.
I straighten cushions. Wipe surfaces. Open windows. Then I sit and wait.
After they leave, everything goes back to normal. Same rooms. Same silence.
There are days where I don’t speak to anyone.
Not because I’m avoiding people. There just isn’t anyone to speak to.
The house is tidy. It works. Nothing is falling apart. It just doesn’t feel like mine in the way I thought it would.
I walk from kitchen to living room to bedroom and back again.
Time moves, but not much changes inside these walls.
When the phone rings, I look at it longer than I used to.
Sometimes it’s the agent.
Sometimes it isn’t.
Evenings are the longest part of the day.
The house sounds different at night. Every small noise feels amplified when you’re the only one there.
It’s for sale.
I live in it, but I am already half out of it.
That’s where things are.
 
 
Living Here While It’s For Sale
I have been in this house for seven months.
It has been on the market for a few weeks.
There’s a difference between the two.
The first few months were about trying to make it work. Arranging things. Telling myself it would settle. It never quite did.
Now it’s for sale.
That changes how I move in it.
I keep it ready. Not obsessively. Just aware that someone might walk through the door at short notice. Cushions straight. Surfaces clear. Windows opened before I leave for a viewing.
Then I come back.
Same rooms. Same layout. Same quiet.
I know I am done here.
That part is not uncertain.
What is uncertain is how long I will still be inside it.
Seven months feels longer than it is. The days repeat in a way that stretches time. Morning coffee in the same place. Same light through the same window. Same walk from kitchen to living room.
There are long stretches where I don’t speak to anyone.
The silence isn’t peaceful. It presses in. I hear the small sounds of the house more than I used to — heating switching on, floorboards, traffic in the distance.
In the evenings it feels heavier.
I sit in a house I am preparing to leave, waiting for someone else to decide if they want it.
I am ready to be out.
The house just hasn’t caught up yet.
 
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COLLEGE AND LES MIS BREAKTHROUGH

College + Les Mis Breakthrough
It’s 1991 and I am 21 years old. I’m at college studying performing arts, and it felt like something had clicked back into place.
There was a seriousness to it that I needed. You had to turn up. You had to be ready. No one carried you. If you hadn’t warmed up, it showed. If you hadn’t prepared, it showed. You were exposed in the room in a way that forced you to grow up quickly.
I loved that.
For the first time in years, I felt like I was building something properly. Not dabbling. Not hoping. Building. Every class felt like another brick laid in the direction I had always wanted to go.
And I recognised myself again.
The version of me who had been obsessed with musical theatre, who could lose hours listening to cast albums, who wanted to talk about roles and staging and harmonies without stopping — he was fully back. There was no split focus. No distraction. I was immersed.
Then someone mentioned an open audition in Glasgow for Les Misérables.
We decided to go.
I didn’t dress it up as destiny. It was an audition. A chance to stand in a professional room and see if I measured up.
It was a different atmosphere entirely. Proper panel. Proper process. No familiar faces.
I got through.
Then I got the offer — the first National Tour.
I remember the shift more than the moment. One week I was a student, still in training. The next I was stepping into the profession I had aimed for since I was a teenager.
It didn’t feel theatrical. It felt earned.
College had done what it needed to do and I am eternally grateful for that.
And I walked straight out of it and into musical theatre.
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