There are some places that you experience and immediately understand why people become obsessed with them. Edinburgh during the Fringe is one of those places. It is chaotic, creative, exhausting, inspiring, overwhelming and utterly brilliant. For weeks, the city becomes a giant, living celebration of people deciding to make something and put it in front of other people. Everywhere you look, there are posters. Everywhere you walk, someone is flyering. Every pub, basement, theatre and random room seems to have been transformed into a venue.
And somewhere amongst the thousands and thousands of performers, I had a surreal realisation: Oh my God. I am one of these crazy, weird people.
I have a show.
I get up on stage.
I put on a fucking show for other people.
That is wild.
Going to Edinburgh as a first-timer taught me a lot, not just about performance and creativity, but about energy, courage, authenticity and what happens when you stop waiting for someone else to give you permission.
The first lesson was about energy management.
I remember seeing one of my heroes, Elf Lyons, post about how you have to be a bit boring when you’re at Edinburgh as an artist. You do your show, and then you go home. You don’t go out every night. You don’t spend hours in the bar. You don’t try to see everything, meet everyone and experience every single thing happening around you.
At the time, I remember thinking, surely that’s easier said than done.
Now I get it.
Edinburgh Fringe is absolutely fucking manic. There is so much to do. So much to see. So many people to meet. It’s a beautiful assault on the senses. The temptation is to squeeze every last drop out of the experience because you know there is always something else happening just around the corner.
But your energy is not unlimited.
And for me, that was one of the biggest lessons of the Fringe. You cannot do all of it. More importantly, you don’t need to.
When I take my own show for a full run in 2027, I will absolutely be building in one day off every week. Not because I’m being lazy or missing out, but because rest is part of the work. Looking after your energy means you can keep showing up and giving your best to the thing you came there to do in the first place.
Another big lesson came from watching other people’s work.
I saw shows that absolutely blew me away. Performers who made me laugh, think, feel and sit there thinking, How the fuck did they do that?
And I also saw work that I didn’t connect with at all.
I always feel slightly uncomfortable saying that because art is subjective. It takes a huge amount of courage to stand on a stage, create something from your imagination and bare your soul in front of strangers. That deserves respect, regardless of whether the work is for me.
But there was one particular show that I personally found so dreadful that I was genuinely astonished. And here’s the thing: the performer was on an international tour from the States.
Oddly, I found that incredibly affirming.
Because sometimes we create these imaginary rules about what is good enough before we’re allowed to put ourselves out there. We convince ourselves that we need more experience, more validation, more confidence, more certainty or for everyone to agree that what we’ve made is brilliant.
But there are no universal rules.
You make your own rules.
That performer had created a show, put it out into the world and taken it on an international tour. I didn’t connect with it. From some of the conversations I overheard afterwards, other people hadn’t either. But she was still doing the thing she felt called to do.
And honestly? Good on her.
That, for me, is what creativity requires. You have to be willing to make something without any guarantee that everyone will love it. You have to be prepared for some people not to get it. You have to stop making other people’s opinions the deciding factor in whether you’re allowed to pursue the thing burning inside you.
Because ultimately, if your soul is calling you to do something, you have to give yourself permission to fucking do it.
I also witnessed someone with the most captivating stage energy. Watching them was a lesson in what happens when somebody absolutely owns their presence. They weren’t trying to convince the audience to come with them. They were simply so embodied, so committed and so completely in what they were doing that the audience couldn’t help but go on the journey.
That experience really stayed with me.
It also affirmed something that I’ve been hearing in the feedback about my own show. People have talked about the energy and about being taken on a journey. Experiencing that same phenomenon from the other side, as an audience member, gave me a new appreciation for it.
And it made me think: Go bigger.
Not bigger in the sense of trying harder. Not more exaggerated. Not performing for the sake of performing.
Bigger in terms of trusting that more of me is allowed in the room.
Because when I’m on stage, I’m not consciously trying to create an experience. I’m not standing there thinking, Right, now turn up the energy. It just comes out.
Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe there is something incredibly powerful about not trying to be anything other than who you actually are. About being so present and embodied that you’re not performing a version of yourself; you’re simply giving people more access to the real thing.
And perhaps that’s what audiences connect with.
Not perfection.
Not polish.
But presence.
My final lesson from Edinburgh was perhaps the most important one: It is never too late.
The Fringe is filled with people of every age, background and life experience. People who have been doing this forever and people doing it for the first time. People who probably always knew they were artists and people who have only recently decided to answer that creative call.
There is something incredibly powerful about seeing all those people choosing to create.
Choosing to be seen.
Choosing to take up space.
Choosing to risk failure, rejection, embarrassment or indifference because the alternative is ignoring the thing inside them that wants to come out.
Standing amongst those thousands of posters, I realised that I was now one of them.
One of the weirdos with a show.
One of the people who has decided to get up on a stage and say, Here. I made this. Come and see.
And honestly, that still feels wild to me.
But it also feels right.
Edinburgh taught me that creativity requires courage, but it also requires stamina. That you don’t have to love everything to learn from it. That somebody else’s opinion of your work does not have to determine what you do next. That when you fully own who you are, people can feel it. And that there is no deadline on doing the thing that is burning inside you.
If you’ve got something you want to create, create it.
If you’ve got something you want to say, say it.
If there’s a part of you that keeps whispering that maybe you could do something bigger, stranger, braver or more creative with your life, perhaps it’s time to listen.
Because one day, you might find yourself standing in the middle of a city surrounded by thousands of other crazy, weird people who have done exactly the same thing.
And you might realise:
Fuck it. This is where I belong.
