What if we improvised?
Learning from comedy to live with chronic illness & build joyful care work
My sister told me that as she is getting ready to fall asleep, the last thing that runs through her mind is drafting her film scripts.
It made me wonder, what is my last thing? For years, I’ve been falling asleep drafting earnest essays and social theory in my head. I told my housemate this, I said ‘I fall asleep writing essays’ and she thought I meant out of boredom and said ‘me too’. But writing keeps me awake and rocks me to sleep.
Gradually over the last few years, and then all at once this winter, something has changed. Instead of just writing essays, I’ve found myself drafting jokes and comedy routines as I drift off to sleep.
It has been such a pleasure. Despite and perhaps because of difficult times, I find I often fall asleep laughing to myself. That may sound unhinged but it keeps me sweet. I wake up with whole stories falling into place.
May I be so bold as to say: comedy is just another way of doing social theory. I went to a creative workshop recently, the facilitator said that some things are too serious to be taken seriously. And old me would have completely riled against that. How can you possibly laugh at a time like this?!
But often comedy is about observing the world and pointing out its strangeness. It is about shaking up the ridiculous rules others hold up as unbreakable truths. It is about finding some joy in amongst it all.
My mildly obsessive bedtime drafting led me to perform a small section of a stand up routine at a couple of open mics. The first time, I was nervous, tired and wired. But I decided to perform in imperfection conditions. I decided to perform before I was ready because I felt there was life in the material. Overthinking bears the risk of sometimes sapping the lifeforce out. So I went for it, took my silliness probably a little too seriously (costumes, props and all) made mistakes, learnt a lot. Then did it again a few weeks later at another open mic. I’m planning to develop the show further (Follow @bifurycated_girls for updates).
You may be thinking, I didn’t sign up for comedy content! This is supposed to be a substack about care work, about chronic illness! Never fear my friend…
Recently, a friend who’d read my piece about grief asked me if I was writing anything new for Care Curriculum, I said I’d been preoccupied with this comedy side quest. They said something along the lines of ‘you have to have a sense of humour to deal with being sick.’
And they’re right. To pursue this line of thinking further, and also because frankly I just wanted to have some fun. I went to an Improvisation workshop. As we played the games, and tried out different exercises, I found many of the skills were familiar from my life with chronic illness. But in general in life, we are all improvising all the time:
“You improvise every day. Life for the most part is not scripted, nor does it always go according to plan. When we recognise improvisational moments, we are better placed to see possibilities. We can make new choices" - Paul Z Jackson
In other words, we improvise in life because it is fundamentally uncertain, we have to learn to adapt. This is something that can be especially true in a life with chronic illness, and in the work of caring. We are forced to follow the tenants of Improv: to be flexible, to focus on what is in front of us and respond accordingly, to find freedom within our limitations, to embrace uncertainty, build on what we have (the famous ‘yes and’) and spot and celebrate incremental success.
In a bid to take my silliness seriously, I have signed up to an Improv course, which I am starting next week. I will share on here what I learn about how Improv can be applied to a life with chronic illness, and to the joy of care work.
Lots of love,
Rachel