The past few weeks have been a strange, overlapping series of plotlines.
I came down with the flu. The kind that completely rearranges your week and your capacity to do more than microwave things (I’m done with pumpkin soup for the foreseeable future). I was made redundant from a job into which I’d poured years of energy, care, and creativity. At the same time, I stepped into rehearsals for Nice Work If You Can Get It, a musical where I’m playing the role of Jimmy Winter, a daft, wealthy, charming man stumbling his way through love, bootleggers, and mistaken identities.
If you’re picking up on the irony, you’re not alone.
There’s something deeply funny (and oddly meaningful) about losing your job and then spending your evenings literally singing the lyrics “nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try”. It feels more like social commentary than musical comedy.
Rehearsals have been a kind of refuge. Not because they distract me from what’s going on, but because they remind me who I am outside of a job title. They ask me to try, openly and obviously. They invite effort.
And that’s something I’ve been unlearning lately: this idea that trying, really trying, should somehow be hidden or downplayed.
In many work cultures, effort is expected but rarely celebrated. We’re encouraged to achieve, not necessarily to attempt. We perform competence, polish, and the illusion of seamlessness. But in a rehearsal room? Effort is the whole point. You stumble through the steps (a stamp is different than a tap), your voice cracks on the high note (hopefully rarely), you miss the cue (I despise dialogue), and then you try again. No one claps because you’re perfect; they clap because you kept going. Sometimes they don’t clap, or laugh, or even smile. This only strengthens my fortitude to get it right the next time.
There’s something profoundly human in that. And something quietly radical, too.
One of the hardest parts of redundancy is the way it interrupts your sense of self. You’re no longer “the person who runs that program,” or “the person who sends the newsletters,” or “the one in the room with creative ideas.” That scaffolding disappears.
What you’re left with is yourself - unadorned, unstructured, unlabelled.
Psychologists call this the identity gap. It is a period of disruption when our internal sense of self no longer aligns with our external reality. According to research on transitions and wellbeing, these periods, while uncomfortable, can also be some of the most generative. When identity is no longer propped up by roles or routines, we’re forced to ask better questions: What do I actually care about? What matters when no one’s watching?
In short: Who am I… really?
For me, musical theatre has always been a joy. But right now, it’s also become a kind of soft recovery. A rehearsal room is structured and social. It demands presence, but not perfection. You have to listen, move, and adjust. You get to belong, even when you mess up.
These are all core ingredients of wellbeing: connection, purpose, contribution, shared effort. Not buzzwords. Not corporate platitudes. Just people showing up, doing something together that none of us could do alone.
And isn’t that the kind of work we all want?
I’m not quite sure what I’m building next. But whatever it is, it’s messy, creative, and a little bit sweaty.
What I do know is this: I’m not rushing back into something just to feel useful again.
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