What makes you different?

"What makes you different from the fifty million other people out there who want to do what you want to do?"

I was asked that when I was younger, back when all I wanted was to be an actor. It came after a student talent night, when I was six or seven. I was told to keep going after it — but make sure I had a second job.

So yeah, I needed a second job to be a creative. Still do, to this day. I gained and trained that creativity through community theatre, and the odd professional work on film, balancing it with real life, aka work. But something happened to me between 2005 and 2007 that would lead me to learning how to use my creativity for more than just performing.

I was involved in an abusive relationship, which took me apart piece by piece. It wasn't until our daughter, Scarlett, was born that I understood I had to make some hard choices. Because I wasn't just up against her mother — I was also up against a system.

I've talked about this part of my life quietly — usually when someone comes to me after hearing about it from friends. But I've never said it here, out loud, in public.

So I'll say it now: I'm a survivor of physical and mental domestic abuse.

And my choice to leave — which wasn't easily made — was made from love: for my daughter, for myself, and for my family. Almost twenty years later, I still hold hope that my daughter and I will one day have a relationship.

But it wasn't only my family and friends who helped me back to my feet, it was also my creative thinking and creative energy — the kind I'd usually pour into the arts — that also led to helping me rebuild, and learn to really take control of how I built my life.

It was during this time that I truly learnt how to swap my creativity around — to use it in real life, to create and rebuild, while life continued to serve its blows.

The question "what makes you different?" and another saying my grandpa used (which i will talk about another time) both took on a new meaning. And its what's what led me to The Drama Merchant.

See all my experiences, good and bad, have taught me, and still do, that to be creative, you have to be courageous. Creativity isn't just for the "creative arts sector" — it's a tool to help you choose and shape who you want to be through your actions, not words.

In some ways creativity is like magic, and how you choose to use it to think and speak is how you choose what you create.

So when I ask myself what makes me different, I know it's not talent, or luck. It's that I used my, and still do, my creativity in everyday life to rebuild and learn. And its given me a wife who backs me, a house full of cats we call our family, and three children — Scarlett, and Hunter and Evelyn, who we lost, but who are still part of this family.

What makes me different is I choose to not only use my creativity in the arts industry, I choose to use it in everyday life, and I just keep building and creating like i would on the stage.

So now I'll ask you the same question my dad asked me: what makes you different?

#WhatMakesYouDifferent  #CreativeResilience #domesticabuseawareness #CreativeJourney