A Certain Kind of Person

When I was twenty-two years old, I ran away with the circus.

I like to say "ran away" – because, really, how many people get to say that, and because it sounds reckless and adventurous – but honestly, I applied, interviewed, and was hired in the usual way.

During the interview I asked every question I could come up with. Part of me was convinced I would never get the job, so why not get a peek behind the tent flap while I had the chance.

How do you travel? Where do you sleep? How long do you spend in each city? What is it like? Are you friends with the acrobats?

I tried not to get my hopes up, I really did, but I wanted that job with the fire of a thousand suns. For me, it was a complete and utter no-brainer. Who wouldn’t want this? Who wouldn’t take the opportunity to run away with the circus if they could?

Sometimes I have to stop myself and remember that while most people might daydream about it, not everyone is willing to get up and walk away from everything in their lives to make that daydream come true.

In the circus, we used to say "it takes a certain kind of person to go on tour."

The thing I didn’t want to admit at the time, the secret I struggled with the most while I lived on the road, was the belief that I really wasn’t that kind of person after all.

I was born and raised in Canada. Moved to London, England after graduating university. And from there took off with the circus to travel around Europe.

Every six weeks we picked up and moved to a new city, in a new country, with a new language, a new culture, and a new currency. (This was just before the Euro was introduced.)

One of my clearest memories from my early days on tour is of standing at a cash machine when I first arrived in Antwerp and realizing I had absolutely no idea what the Belgian franc was worth in Canadian dollars.

In the end I withdrew 2000 francs, because it was one of the middle options, but I was half convinced for the rest of the day I had just bankrupted myself. (As it turned out, 2000 francs was worth about sixty-eight bucks.)

Later that week, my colleagues and I went out for dinner. Antwerp isn’t the tourist destination that Brussels is, and the restaurant we chose wasn’t on the main drag.

They only had menus in Flemish, and I had to sit there like a child while my co-worker translated all the options for me. I hadn’t really considered the language barrier either.

But on the night of my first premiere – we had one in every city – I left the big top at intermission, flashed my new badge at the security guard and walked through the gate in the low picket fence that separated the public area from the private.

And in that moment, the dream was real. All the celebrities, all the VIPs who were present for the occasion... in that moment I believed they envied me.

During the years I was on tour, I lived in seventeen cities across eight countries. My understanding of time changed. I learned to place memories in terms of cities, not months. Told the hour almost to the minute by which piece of music was blaring from the big top. Lost track of which day of the week it was, because it only mattered whether it was a one-show day or a two-show day.

I stood at the top of Mount Pilatus in Switzerland and of Montserrat in Spain. I got drunk on tequila shots in Vienna and mugged outside a train station in Barcelona. I kissed a man in the shadow of the Dom cathedral in Cologne, and fell in love with a woman while wedged together in the back of a van with a pile of luggage in Amsterdam.

I watched a forklift ballet performed by the site crew in honour of a teacher who was leaving the tour, and danced outdoors through the shortest night of the year at a midsummer party we threw on-site in Hamburg, where it really only got dark for about five hours. We pulled half the sound system out of the big top that night to provide the music, and the cooks spent all day spit-roasting a whole pig.

While everything else changed around me, the site and the big top became the only constants, and the swoop of the tent’s silhouette against the sky was the only thing that felt like home.

For those years I didn’t understand a single word that came out of the radio. The only English language television was CNN and Eurosport. And I learned the hard way that it’s not possible to mime what you need from a drug store without crossing the line into gross indecency.

The constant low-level stress of not speaking the local language became exhausting after a while. Just when I had learned enough Spanish to order food and direct a taxi, we would pick up and move to Germany. Or Switzerland. Or Denmark. (I never did manage to learn any Danish at all.)

And then, whenever I ended up back in the UK, I felt like the most shameless eavesdropper simply because I could actually understand the conversations around me on the bus.

But the biggest challenge I faced was the fact that I’m an introvert. Clinically. Chronically. Any time one of those memes comes around Facebook – Top Ten Signs That You’re an Introvert, or whatever – I tick every single box.

I observe the world more than I interact with it. I need alone time at the end of the day to recharge. So when I was on tour, eating all three meals in the kitchen on site, surrounded by 150 other people for twelve hours a day, all of us living on top of each other in the same hotel, I didn’t go out to party as much as the others.

Chatting around the dinner table was awkward for me, because the only thing we had in common was our job. And I rarely spent the evenings in the hotel bar, which was where the circus did its bonding.

I really did feel like an imposter, like I had sneaked in under the wire somehow. Like, if they knew who I really was – a scifi dork who prefers reading alone in her room to getting drunk with her co-workers in the bar – they would never have hired me.

And I used to daydream about running away from the circus and having an apartment and a life and a job. Owning furniture.

What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was that when they said, "it takes a certain kind of person to go on tour," extroversion wasn’t what they meant.

I get a phone call one Sunday just after midnight, when I’ve been on tour for about three months. My friend Jo, telling me she finally went to the doctor to get antibiotics for her nagging cough. She had come to visit me just a few weeks ago, and at that point even a heavy-duty cough syrup wasn’t helping.

“I have non-Hodgkins lymphoma,” she says.

And all I can think is, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what that means. But the inevitable sinks in while we talk about doctors and tests. "-oma" means cancer. The masses on her lymph nodes are pressing in on her lungs, making it hard to breathe. Making her cough.

“It was supposed to be bronchitis,” I say, just before we hang up.

I can’t sleep after that. I can’t lie still. I can’t cry. I want to do something, to help, to fix it. But I’m three thousand miles away.

I leave my room and wander around the hotel instead, barefoot in my pyjamas. I ride the elevator, step off at every floor, because what else is there to do in the middle of the night when your heart is breaking.

On the second floor, I find the restaurant. It doesn’t have a door, so I just step over the red velvet rope and let myself in.

When I first checked into the hotel, I asked at the front desk whether there was a piano in the building. I’ve been playing since I was three, and hotels often have one somewhere. The receptionist looked at me like I was crazy and told me no.

Which, it turns out, is a lie. Or maybe an honest mistake? Because the centrepiece of flowers, leaves, feathers, and ostrich eggs perched on top of the piano in the middle of the restaurant is so ridiculous it’s possible the staff just doesn’t realize there’s an instrument underneath.

Alone in the restaurant, I pull out the bench and lift the lid, pick out an exploratory scale, ready to cringe. But the piano is – miraculously – in tune. I sit and play to myself for an hour. When I run out of pieces I can play from memory, I stand in the window, watch the night buses, the solitary cars, the rhythm of changing traffic lights, until by four in the morning I finally believe I can sleep.

One of my best friends was diagnosed with cancer at the age of twenty-three, and I didn’t fly home to be with her. (I can tell you – in retrospect – that her chemotherapy was successful and almost fifteen years later she’s still cancer-free.)

But that’s what we mean when we say, "it takes a certain kind of person to go on tour." I think it might actually be selfishness that we’re celebrating. And I’m not sure it’s something I should be proud of.

I wonder, sometimes, if I have always been this way, or whether the very act of running away with the circus changed me. Defined me, somehow, in ways that I’m still trying to understand.

I hate goodbyes, and yet I’m far too good at them. I still can’t stay in one place, in one job, for any length of time without getting restless.

I still dream of owning a house and a garden and furniture, of planting a mulberry tree and growing vegetables. Learning to make jam. I dream of it, but I still haven’t figured out how to live it.

I immigrated back to real life after almost three years on the road, but I can’t seem to settle here. I’ve built myself something of a halfway house instead – I work in the theatre on a variety of short contracts and still change cities at least twice a year.

Because I don't belong to just one place anymore. I belong to dozens. Those memories we all have – those times in your twenties, when you fall in love, when you stagger home with the sunrise because you've been out all night, when you ache in the dark because your heart is broken, when you and your friends become those people on the late train home because you can't stop laughing – mine are scattered like spilled beads across eight countries.

There's a café in Amsterdam where I took my heartache for a woman I could never have. A beach in Belgium where my friends and I stripped down to our underwear and plunged into the surf as the sun came up. A hotel in Cologne where I slept in a man's arms for the first time.

So maybe it's the assumption that I could ever settle, or that I should, that's the mistake. How could I possibly when pieces of me are lodged so far apart?

It’s been fourteen years, almost to the day, since I left the circus, and I still check their job listings weekly. It was the right choice at the time – when I left, why I left.

Two years and seven months on the road is a long time, and I went on to study technical theatre at a drama school in London. The start of my career backstage. But I still can’t stop wanting to go back to find the pieces of myself I left behind.

The recent realization that I wouldn’t go back out on the road, if I got that same chance again, didn’t actually help. May even have triggered something of an identity crisis.

The reasons behind this change are fairly obvious: walking away from your life at thirty-nine is not the same as doing it at twenty-two.

I have a three-year-old nephew now, the first child of my family’s next generation, and I don’t want to miss his growing-up years the way I missed my goddaughter’s.

And one of the theatre contracts I return to every summer is something I struggled for years to get – it’s an achievement that I’m proud of.

But who am I, then, if I’m not "a certain kind of person"? Where do I belong if I’m too much of a traveller to settle down but too old and settled to throw my life aside and travel?

I still haven’t found an answer for that.

Maybe I just need to accept that I’ll live in the halfway house forever. (Although, I suspect that will be far less adorably bohemian at sixty than it was at thirty.)

Or maybe I will actually grow up one day. Maybe I’ll stop being afraid to buy a house, maybe I’ll adopt a child at fifty-five.

Or maybe I’ll finally accept that all doors can’t be kept open all the time. That people are more important than places. That I’m still going to be me no matter what kind of new life I try on. And that that’s okay.

Maybe we’ll just have to meet up in another fifteen years to find out.

Author's Note: I wrote this piece nine years ago. A lot has changed since then and I'm fighting the urge to update everything, because I do like the idea of coming back in a few more years and writing a companion piece at that point.

I will add just two things, though. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of my running away with the circus. And Jo remains cancer-free.