Finishing the Hat

The coffee is fresh. Hot.

The hour? Unforgivable.

Too late for clarity.

Too early to give in.

Still, I sit.

Still, I type.

Because maybe - just maybe - this time, the words will land clean.

Maybe this time I won’t second - guess the world I’m trying to conjure.

And despite the doubt -

Despite the hurricane of half-formed thoughts,

Despite the silence where certainty should be -

I stay.

Because sometimes, fleetingly, foolishly, fiercely

I believe I belong here.

The cursor blinks - smug, indifferent.

As if to whisper: prove it.

Bastard.

But here we are. Again.

Perched somewhere between fraudulence and flow.

Balanced delicately between procrastination and perfection.

Between meltdown… and maybe.

Welcome back.

Late Night Musings with Rogues and Scoundrels

“So… tell me how this came to be.”

The voice rolled in with practiced ease -measured, inevitable - like a distant train, long heard before it ever breaks the horizon.

Unhurried but deliberate, as if he's not just asking, but inviting me to listen to my own answer.

A beat, a pause, a breath held inside a moment. From a place of love born from within a place of grief. I hear the words leave my mouth before my racing mind has the chance to silence me. Vulnerability is not my forte; she is not a cloak I wear well.

She is oversized, worn and heavy, smothering me yet also simultaneously constricting across my chest which struggles to maintain the even keel my breath demands.

Under the spotlight, the fear of misstep is real. This time there is no script, the actor has prepared, and the scene is set – but the control is safeguarded by someone other than myself. How do you build trust in a relationship in infancy?

Moreover, how do you maintain trust within the relationship you have carried all your life?

The relationship with yourself.

Imposter syndrome is nothing new, this mask is my friend. She knows me intimately, through characters of stage and screen.

“Who are we this time?” she would whisper from the wings.

But this time is different.

The character is me.

The backstory - grief for a life lost, a literary legacy to be forgotten.

Unfinished stories from an unfinished life.

The greyworld must live on.

Acting and writing – same bloodline, different beasts.

As an actor, you slip into someone else. You borrow their skin, their fears, their fury. There’s safety in that, in becoming the storm instead of admitting you are one.

But writing? Writing strips the costume off.

Acting exclaims

Look at me.

Writing confesses: This is me.

And that’s terrifying.

Because if the audience doesn’t clap, at least the actor can say, it wasn’t me, it was the role. But the writer?

If they don’t clap for the writing, they’re not clapping for you.

That’s the difference.

That’s the dare.

So, I accepted. And just like that, I was launched like a possessed ballerina, flung from one side of the stage to the other, oscillating between the dizzying nexus of self-doubt and self-belief. A flurry of flailing limbs and creative despair - on and on and on, commanded by the orchestra on bloodied pointe.

 From a place of love, born from within a place of grief.

There are memories that live quietly for years, folded away like linen, soft with time.

But when a father passes, something shifts.

What was once a passing moment – sat quietly in the audience at the theatre, suddenly holds the weight of scripture.

You replay it, again and again. Not because you forgot, but because now it means more.

Grief has a way of casting light on the smallest things - and suddenly, that memory isn’t just a moment, it’s the moment.

A tether.

A truth.

1884, George Seurat, known as George in the Sondheim musical ‘Sunday in the Park With George’, is sketching studies for his painting ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’.

He announces to the audience, "White, a blank page or canvas.

The challenge: bring order to the whole, through design, composition, tension, balance, light and harmony."

He conjures up the painting's setting, a small suburban park on an island, and retains some control of his surroundings as he draws them.

His defining moment, a soliloquy in song – “Finishing the Hat”, a poignant moment that functions as both confession and justification. It’s not a ballad in the romantic sense, but rather a quiet, aching anthem of devotion to art at the cost of human connection.

A contemplative piece that captures the obsessive nature of creativity, where the act of making becomes both refuge and exile.

I must complete the adaptation.

I must meet the deadline.

I must allow myself to believe.

As dad would often proclaim “The alternative is unthinkable!!”

I tell myself that one day soon, I will close the laptop lid and breathe out a sigh that tells me the work is done.

The here me, the now me, doesn’t know it yet.

So here I am sat.

Following a ghost.

Finishing the hat.