Random acts of creativity

Philip Patston reflects on moments in his past that have inadvertently influenced who he is today.

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Note: This post is adapted from my application for a Fellowship to TED next year)

By the time I was 17, my relationship with my parents had become strained by my teenage rebellion. Smoking, drinking, dying my hair and piercing myself was not the behaviour they had intended me to display as a celebration of their efforts to protect me from society’s low expectations of me as a disabled person. I tried to point out that they had raised a rebel by making me different to what society expected me to be, but it didn’t wash. I look back with the benefit of social work and youth development training and see the classic behaviours of a young man struggling to make sense of a world in which reflections of himself were non-existent, incoherent or unrecognisable.

In my early 20s I developed a little pact with the universe that I’d trust it as long as it trusted me. This pact began what has become a kind of customised, pragmatic spirituality for me: a set of beliefs that are useful, sensible and keep me grounded on earth while still connected to some sense of greater being-ness. Not a godly Being, rather the creative synergy we humans express and experience, with all other life forms on this planet, as the chaos and wonder that we call life.

Halfway through my very first comedy gig I realised I was doing quite well. But I was aware that I was only as good as my last laugh, only as funny as my last gag. A voice in the back of my mind was saying gently, “Keep this up – you could get somewhere.” I realised for the first time that I was doing something that most people would be scared to death even thinking about it, let alone going through with. I felt a bit smug in the knowledge that actually doing it was easier than thinking about it. I forgot there was anything other than doing comedy. “How profound,” I thought. “Stop thinking and just get on with it,” said the voice. So comedy has taught me about flow, about timing and, most importantly, about feeling the fear and doing it anyway, because things are never, well seldom, as bad as you think. As a social and creative entrepreneur I realise I’m only as good as my last idea, so I try as much as possible to shut up and get on with it.

Waiting backstage, an hour before that first gig, I began thinking I’d really made a big mistake. I couldn’t envisage surviving this ordeal. I needed to endure a whole ten minutes onstage, remembering my lines, getting the timing right, building rapport and trust with an audience that needed proof that I wouldn’t die on stage. Then a terrifying thought crept into my consciousness for the first time: How will I elicit the one response I need – laughter – when they have been told all their lives not to laugh at disabled people? What on earth have I been thinking? Why have I committed to this? I’m destined for failure, humiliation, even ridicule. Perhaps I could just lock myself in the toilet and get someone to say I was sick and unable to perform. Surely guaranteed failure without the potential for mortification and mockery is better than what seems now like the complete impossibility of success?

But then I remembered that I’d dared myself to do this and I’d only be disappointed with myself for the rest of my life if I didn’t go through with it. So I just sat there in the green room, rocking in a corner until someone interrupted what they thought was my enigmatic warm-up ritual and told me to get onstage. I emerged, not daring to breathe, into the glare of the spotlight and uttered my first ever line: “I live in Avondale.”

Everyone laughed and I breathed in – we were all deeply relieved and began to think the next ten minutes - even ten years - might be fun.