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And I don’t want to say it’s like ‘toll,’ as in just the cost. But I don’t think this is necessarily just about writing creatively as well. I have this with academic writing and other critical writing too.

To work on things that are challenging, difficult, personal, that your body has been through. I want to say that either as your body as we exist now, in this moment, or maybe your body as you understand it ancestrally… …I think to work through that is also… that’s where the power comes from.

And there was some elements when I was performing this, especially the second performance [in Galway], where I just kind of felt this flow of like…there’s something about the embodied…my embodied presence in the performance and trying to literally just have a flow that’s a bit more playful,…

…it’s like an embodied language.

It’s like a…an expressiveness that does feel kind of like animated and playful and a bit lighter, coming from the.. as like a way of trying to release the weight of the heaviness of thinking about these historical traumas.

Yeah, so that’s… that’s maybe the performance and liveness thinking about it there. And that’s part of how to respond to that, I think trying to respond to these weights.” 

 literally just by putting the words on a page, you know, that page is very heavy and it’s a heaviness that has come from you. And it’s not just about creating something durable about the transience of life as well. But it’s really about taking people into a realm where there are stronger forces at play than you might get in your kind of day-to-day life. It just takes you into a realm where you know that there’s….it has a mythic kind of proportionality to it, things that are charged in a way that they are not in daily life and to be able to touch into that power by writing about it and then sharing that power with other people, it’s a fantastic thing, it’s an enlightening thing.”

This is the breath that keeps my heart pulsing, you know, my artwork, the creative theatre making, filmmaking whenever I’m making (I’ve been involved in a visual arts exhibition recently). But whatever it is, it keeps me alive. And it’s the only way I can actually talk truth to power.”

Like, that’s really the first impulse I feel. That’s in the first days, it feels so daunting, because it’s like there’s no place for words almost. There’s no words to describe the enormity of what it is that we’re going through, the horror, and also the horror of realising that, you know, how banal it is, to some.. (again going back to the ideological war.). And so it feels like writing is in suspension, a suspension at that point, because we want to bring a truth out desperately…except what words do you use for that? ….

…….But I definitely felt this moment where we stop and say: do we even have words? And I think recovering language is then the process of dealing with the trauma, as well.”

So with the case of the pandemic, it’s quite easy to say well, we’ve had other pandemics in the past that have had a very different response. If we talk about the HIV AIDS pandemic of the 80s. It was very different. And there’s a lot of reasons why it might have been very different. So we can still talk about the commonalities without necessarily eclipsing the past.I don’t think it should be done to cover up somebody else’s experience, to step on somebody or to talk over somebody, I think it should be used as a way of relating to other people. And yeah, and doing something useful. It’s something that’s constantly being negotiated and navigated. I don’t know if I’ve been lucky, but I think a lot of my experiences with other writers has been that people are quite open to…to sharing space with each other and to hearing other people’s perspectives.

I think it can be empowering as well, to take a step and experiment with drawing some level of equivalence, it doesn’t mean, you’re saying your experience is identical to somebody else’s, because it can never be. But respecting somebody else’s story means you have the capacity to give yourself that same respect. And that same validation, and I think, I genuinely believe that’s the most loving thing that we can do.”

People who consider themselves to be survivors in whatever context that is…you’ve had to overcome something that was very dangerous, or multiple things that were very dangerous to your wellbeing in your life. And I think that carries a long legacy for a lot of people for different reasons. And I think that is why the private writing practice is so important, because it allows me to live with those experiences. And I think that is the most vital thing…it’s not about importance, it’s about a need, isn’t it? Like for me, I need to do that, because I need to carry on. Need to find a way to live, basically.

The thing with sort of more public facing (writing) is that, who knows how that will manifest.. but I do think that humans are creative. I think that’s part of a human desire to be creative, and that that can manifest in lots of different ways. It’s not necessarily an artistic thing, always. But I think that creating something or making something or producing, they’re very important to the survival of humans in general, aren’t they? you have to make stuff do stuff, otherwise, you can’t get your basic needs met. And I think that that’s why often creative stuff, it does have a sort of defiance to it and such a powerful transformative mode, because it’s doing the opposite of what some adverse experiences would want, which is to destroy you. You know, so it’s like, do it, I suppose. It’s doing the opposite of what…of what you think is being asked of you.”

And so I’m kind of writing about that through a character. I’m writing about a character who starts out wishing he wasn’t trans, and ends up being really glad that he’s trans, who starts out thinking that trans is a curse, and ends up thinking that being trans is a blessing

I think that there was a shift in how we thought about ourselves and the kind of knock on effects to where we’ve got now. And I think there’s an inevitability about it, you know, it’s not that we were making these great political strides. But I think, as a community, we were changing. We were changing how we thought about ourselves,…just a sort of different sense of, dare I say the word “pride”, you know, that walking, being part of the trans group on Pride and feeling like, “yeah, I can stand with this. And this is a word that I’ll use about myself.”

and if I didn’t have words for all these kinds of, of cultural messages that come at me as a disabled person?” And then I think…when I think about that, I also think that if I didn’t know what this was, it would just affect me and I wouldn’t have words like it would just be this state of…of wading through these undescribable or unknowledgeable experiences that would just happen to me and that would, I think, feed into this notion of internalisation that,…, then it’s me, then if all these things keep happening to me, then it’s, it’s me, and it’s not the…and I think that that’s what’s so freeing for me about this politicised or oppression driven understanding of what disability is, and also freeing about the survivorship identity in that sense. I wouldn’t say that I use…I don’t use it often to describe myself, I think in general, but when…when you asked me about how I feel, it ties into my, my being and the work that I do.”

I’m not seeing people like me in the theatre and I’m still not seeing people like me on TV. And when I do see people like me on TV, I’m seeing Top Boys, what else is there…the Kidulthoods. I used to think but I’m from that area and I have a story and I want to see myself in those stories. So you know, I’m gonna write a story. And that’s when I wrote my first ever thing called Batty Boy. And the journey has continued. But that’s how it sparked in me, surviving in my world and making sure I survive in my career because.I deserve to have a voice and I deserve to be seen. And I think it’s something I’m still currently going through now, even with my successes that I’ve had.

I think that one thing Short Flicks taught me was: don’t tell the story that you think the world wants to hear, tell the story that’s important to you because that’s what’s going to be good. And I think so much depends on what you’ve been through in life, the knockbacks, especially if the story or part of the story that you’re telling is from so long in the past and insecurity or something that you wasn’t confident about, you do get into this thing of “who’s going to care about me?” And you think of all the negatives but for some reason, there was something in me that just knew that it was a good story.”

And often when I’ve been in these really awful spaces, there’s been a lot of times when I’ve thought, ‘Oh, you know, is this the end?’ Or ‘I’m completely fucked, what can I do from this space?’ That what I’ll do is, I will try and force myself to make something. You know, because at the end of the day – then at least you have made something  – you get left with something. Rather than sitting in this space of nothing, where you’re eating yourself, your trauma is eating you.”