Freewriting 6:30pm 30/11/18 - Guest Post by Holly Gallagher

This week Daniel Bye got me to run up a mountain.
Well not a mountain
More like a hill
And he didn’t really make me do it
I volunteered
And I didn’t really run
I sort of ran for a few minutes then coughed out half a lung’s worth of phlegm and crawled to the fucking top in bursts of walking every few minutes, complaining all the way
Meanwhile Dan practically skipped to the top then leapt off like a fucking mountain goat to his next destination: Captain Cook’s Monument
But I still fucking did it ok so that’s what really matters
And I did it because Dan was going to
Because he created the opportunity
And I wouldn’t be alone doing it
(Would I fuck walk up Roseberry Topping alone at the end of November without prior encouragement?)
But it was a nice metaphor for the entire week, I think
I entered the room this week feeling more tired than I have in a long time:

• Burnout
• Working 6 day weeks
• Promoting and touring a show about stress where I remind myself regularly that I say yes to too much and don’t stop enough (I maintain that it is still ‘difficult to just Stop’)

And without this opportunity I absolutely would not have broached the idea of making any kind of new work
But through the encouragement of Dan and Naomi and Ruth I worked on four new show ideas. Four new ideas that might become pieces of solo work, or group shows, or even community engagement projects. And I’m excited about all of them for different reasons. I have to share one next week and I’m not entirely sure which, yet.
All of these pieces have to consider the community. They must all be shows/projects that someone on Stockton High Street could come across and go ‘yeah alright then’, and then, sitting in the theatre watching, still go ‘yeah alright then’. They must be for the people from where I’m from, and it must be able to benefit them.
And during this week I have had the chance to hear about a wealth of work from three different artists. And that’s really exciting: to be encouraged to make whilst supporting and spurring on separate pieces of work, and to work in a new way that I have never encountered in the professional world, especially funded.
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This week I nearly cried when I left some milk in my boyfriend’s mam’s fridge that I was going to use for my cereal the next morning. I was that tired.
This morning I ran up a mountain (shhhh) and this evening I have new ideas for work in the midst of burnout, of being preoccupied with other jobs and a project that I have been with for a long time now
And it was all thanks to the encouragement of others, to the creation of opportunity
And I feel refreshed
I feel thankful
And most of all, I feel really excited to see what everyone shares next week in Newcastle so we can keep on encouraging each other further'