The Night My Worst Year Became Someone Else's Story

For about a year and a half I was in it. I'd come out of a relationship, my work was shifting under me in ways I hadn't chosen, and it got dark. Not dramatic-dark. The quieter kind, the kind you keep functioning through because the shows still have to go up.

Rose watched all of it from close range. Then she wrote a storyline about it and put it on stage in front of two hundred and thirty people in a bar in Salt Lake City, and I let her.

It opened with the Grim Reaper, standing in for accountability, and accountability gets struck down before it even gets a say. Then a fall into an underworld full of fire demons who'd each already made peace with whatever they were carrying. The show worked through every level of what I was actually still carrying. By the end it landed on something like acceptance, an embrace of the self underneath all of it.

The curveball, the part nobody watching saw coming, was the Haka. A Maori war dance, dropped into the middle of a fire circus show about my worst year. If I was going to let this thing out in front of an audience, the Maori warrior in me was coming with it. That part wasn't Rose's idea. That part was just true.

Our makeup artist turned me into more of a demon as the night went on, a little more each number, until by the final piece I barely looked like the person who walked in. I liked that. I wasn't hiding what the year had done to me. I was watching someone finally put a shape on it.

I've told a version of this story sitting normally in a chair on a podcast, and it's nothing next to what it was live, two hundred and thirty strangers watching a story about my own accountability that I didn't write a word of.

People came up afterward asking where the music came from, could they get the playlist. I sent them the Spotify link. Nobody asked what the story actually was about. I don't think anybody needed to. Rose already told them, in a language that had nothing to do with words.