1. “So, are you back at work yet?”

Eight months ago, life seemed to have found a trajectory. Six years into a hard-won singing career I was touring with a major show and anticipating the next big job; an opera contract which I hoped was the mark of exciting things to come. Don’t get me wrong, ‘big’ has never been a watchword for my career. My great ambition was having sufficient work to even call it a job and for the most part I was happy with the familiar patchwork of almost enough opera, occasional corporate crap, waitressing to make up the difference and wringing every last messy drop of fun out of my twenties after dark. I’m open to high fives on that one – the only sensible choice.

It was hard work though. As all but the luckiest artists will attest, pursuing a dream (I wish there was a less bollocks way to describe it) in a freelance world involves at best equal amounts of joy and pain. Nice work if you can get it, but living on a carousel of nerves, rejection and self torture has sent many of us, we will freely admit, a hair beyond sane. For me this was compounded by the weird social guilt of pouring all that anguish and effort into something that can often feel like a selfish enterprise. I occasionally found myself wondering, given that the art world wasn’t about to crumble to its knees at the notion of my departure, whether this was really the best I personally could offer the world. But the path of least resistance is a tempting one, and having finally booked a solid 18 months of good work I set a raft of fine intentions for my free time (learn French, train religiously, iron out the technique, start volunteering, writing, saving the world…) then breathed a sigh of relief and repaired to the theatre bar. It’s all very well thinking outside the box, but when you’ve spent so long building the bloody box and it finally looks like it might hold, it’s hard to walk away. Also important to mention that I loved the box dearly (stop me when the metaphor breaks down) and that it was an intoxicating and highly addictive box (maybe now.)

In short, despite the now obvious downside -it’s still counterintuitive to admit it – I just don’t think I’d ever have dared to stop if I hadn’t been forced. However, forced I quite unambiguously was. There’s no sidestepping a cancer diagnosis, and I dropped my work and made a full time job out of recovering from numerous treatments and surgeries whilst not going mental. Thankfully I was considerably better at this than I was at my old job, and eight months later I have the all clear, and am feeling better than I could have expected after all the frankly gruesome (and ingenious) things that have been done to my body. It was a dark time in some ways but the distance that I gained from my hectic, angsty life allowed me both to see what I had been putting myself through, and reassess the future. It’s encouraged me to resist falling into old patterns, and to at least explore what might be out there before I launch myself at another project.

After all, there’s life outside singing. Did you know? I think I used to possess this and other knowledge but it was mothballed the day I moved to London, presumably to make space for all the neuroses. Quite apart from all the music I’ve sadly neglected in favour of, well, music, but still – many of my friends and acquaintances appear to lead interesting, fulfilled, dare I say happy lives whilst simultaneously not giving a toss about opera. The fact that this comes to me in the form of big news itself suggests that perhaps it’s time to brave a bit of perspective. So the singing will continue – but the weeping and gnashing of teeth will stop. And (big finish, incorporating experimental note of optimism) I’ll push as many new doors as I see from now on.