So many times this winter, I’ve just wanted to give up. Curl up, fall asleep, and not have to face waking up in the morning. I’m not suggesting I’ve been suicidal. That would have taken energy that I didn’t have. But my brain would run over the litany of failure that is my life, and try in vain to pull the positives from it. And fail. So, I may have wished that some days a bus would run me over, but I’ve not thought to jump under one. I just couldn’t fight it as the dark days drew in, as my body refused to do as I told it, as I felt increasingly driven into a corner by things I couldn’t fight. Things I couldn’t see, touch, or feel, but which were so very real. How could I fight, with nothing much worth fighting for?

But as the nights get shorter again, my energy increases. In fragments, yes. Like the steady drip that builds a stalactite. And actually, I start to see some light, some positives. Some things to fight for.

Sometimes, I just forget to fight. I look in the mirror, and everything just drains out of me as I see the face I don’t recognise stare back at me. I can’t even get to “What do I want?” or “How can I get there?” because I get too tied up in “Who the fuck is that?” Because the answer to the first two questions are where I find something to fight for, not in the last one.

I get on best when I’m fighting. When every nerve, sinew, and muscle in my body is focussed on a goal, on an impossible future. Because then I’m alive. As the nights draw back out again, I’m starting to find my fighting face. I’m starting to put it on, and go out and do things.

That fighting face. That’s what brought me to Changing Faces. That’s what took me to Improv-ing Lives. Something worth fighting for. Because I really, really believe in facial equality. Because I don’t want other people to have to face their own face, and see it as a hurdle or a hindrance or even a stranger. It should be as protected a characteristic for them as gender, as race, as sexuality. And I can’t go out there to people in the same position and say “It gets better” because if I did that, I’d be lying. I’ve not seen it get better. I don’t even know if I will see it get better. But I can push and fight to make it better.

And to do that, to fight it every step of the way, I tack on my charasmatic face. And the more I play that confident, passionate character, a man arguing a case he really believes in, the more I actually come to believe it. My own confidence. And it’s a fight, every stop of the way, against my own self esteem, my own judgement, my own feelings. Because I’m fighting that figure that looks out of the mirror and says “You are beyond repair.” The more I fight that, the more everything else starts to fall into place. The more I can fight against the malaise, against the darkness, against my own frailties which keep rearing their ugly heads. And the easier it is to win.

I have my goals. I have my future. I have my mind. I will not give up.