About (is me)
hello. i see you are a curious one.
IN 2014 I had exactly 5 bucks left to my name.
so i went to the largest arts festival in the world, plunked myself down to busk “ave maria” in front of a crowd of 30 bewildered-looking Scottish people and never looked back.
Yeah. it’s a true story.
I was born and raised in a town of 7,000 people, which, for Alaska, is positively metropolitan! Complete with enough pedophiles on the run from justice to fill an olympic sized swimming pool, this seaside town offers up quite a few special features including, but not limited to: a rather sizeable Walmart that my high school choir personally christened with the national anthem! The ceremony was complete with a presentation of the American flag, as well as the mayor personally delivering a heartfelt speech before an ordained minister said a prayer to officially bless the Walmart in the name of Jesus and offer a hedge of protection around the store to protect it from the Devil. People had camped out over night in the parking lot to witness the opening of the Walmart.
……it’s a place where dreams really can come true!!
(and then immediately die in front of your eyes like bambi’s mum.)
Yes, it’s pristine.
You can thank the Dena’ina for that . >>>>>>
How you and i met.
Despite the brand new and freshly “devil-free” Walmart standing there so invitingly, I’d sung quite enough “Lord I Lift Your Name on High” for one lifetime, and decided to leave Kenai for the United Kingdom on a one way ticket.
Upon reflection, this was an obnoxious level of assumption on my part. Despite needing the Heathrow desk clerk to fully explain to me the concept of a train, having never ridden one by myself before the exact moment I arrived in bustling, liberal London, somehow it worked. Performing opera on the street would make me my own boss, and take me around the world to perform and connect with thousands of people in ways I never thought possible, all through the magic of music. At one point, I even went viral in the Balkans and was featured on Bosnian and Croatian television. I have a tattoo on my dominant forearm of the Ottoman-style fountain Sebilj, an iconic national landmark the centre of Sarajevo. I received it in Bosnia to commemorate how deeply the Bosnian War, and subsequent resilience of the Bosnian people, informed the trajectory of the rest of my life. Legend says any person who drinks from the waters of Baščaršija will return back to Sarajevo. Below the fountain are the words “again and again” written in the Bosnian language. I have since gone back to tour Bosnia regularly as a comedian.
In 2015 I returned to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival once again, and would thusly stumble into a stand up comedy show for the first time in my life. This was a game changer. The artform of disarming the masses with humour was utterly intoxicating. Here, in front of my very eyes, was a way to meet hundreds of people at once. It was a concept which was previously unbelievable in my town of a few thousand. I could simply “have a chat” with thousands of people I would never otherwise meet, learn about them in real time, and enjoy that process over and over again to my heart’s content. The microphone became my professor. I went on to perform comedy in more than 30 countries, and as of just before the pandemic, in two languages. Street performing would give me the freedom to pack up and travel to any comedy club in Europe at will, and be able to perform for hundreds of international comedy audiences, as well as some of the best clubs in the U.K. without the constraints of an ordinary job. Spending most of my adult life performing comedy for the acerbic sensibilities of the British public would prove to burgeon my personhood in ways hither to unbeknownst to me, and allow me to be introduced to the world. For better or for worse: I am who I am because the Brits are who they are.
Fast forward to 2020, in the beginning of the pandemic in England, I was, like millions of others across the planet, newly stuck at home all hours of the day. My universe for that first year was the living room of none other than Britain’s Got Talent Finalist Daliso Chaponda, who graciously took me in to his flat in Mancester to escape an abusive Englishman in a nearby city. It was a relationship which had ended in an abortion and left me with debilitating depression as a result. Under the direct encouragement of Daliso, I began to fuss with an app called Tiktok to vent my trauma. Being the quintessential professional entertainers that we are, Daliso had a lighting setup purchased for the digital entertaining that would define the next year of our lives. And what’s more: he encouraged me fiddle with it to make my Tiktoks. It was the trauma of my ex’s abuse towards me which inspired me to start creating videos, and it was this trauma that began to resonate with an audiece.
One fateful day I would attempt to channel “diabolical twat” while venting about misogyny on Tiktok, and the character who would go on to define me to millions of people was born. Americans, bless them, heard me and assumed I was English. I had, apparently entirely unconciously, tapped into the American perception of what it is to be British. The cadence of speech I’d developed while living in England for most of my adult life was evidently the secret sauce for a very viral, and highly British-y, success. The caricature stuck, and would become my signature voice. My platform would grow to be known for those very same spirited “twatty” rants about politics, history, vaccine information, sexuality, and much more. I’d somehow managed to merge comedy and activism, and was able to use the power of what I’d been given to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for grassroots causes around the world during the wake of the pandemic. This was fulfilling beyond words. I was able to finally, on an unimaginable scale, share what a life away in Europe had taught me. I was free to raise my voice for things I had come to cherish in a lifetime spent experencing human beings out loud behind a microphone, away from my small town at the end of the world. I now reside in New York.
In March of 2022, while exposing a popular male feminist for taking advantage of his massive platform, equal in number to the population of some major capital cities, in order to have an array of unprotected intimate encounters with a myriad of nearly identical female partners without their knowledge, a message containing my abortion was leaked by one of his supporters and it caused me to have a full-blown psychotic break. I swiftly became the internet’s punching bag and, as a result of this, I attempted suicide. However, by the grace of someone in another country who managed to get my address, I was luckily rushed to the hospital via ambulance. While I was institutionalised for my attempt, Tiktok would proceed to turn my mental health collapse into a viral trend. Creators would proceed to leak private videos of me asking them for help while I was losing my grip on reality, and proceeded turn a real life suicide attempt into popular parody dances and memes. It became a viral joke on Tiktok to take turns doing impressions of how emotional I was in the days immediately preceeding my attempt to take my own life. A number of people amassed entire followings solely based off making fun of how sad I was in the run up to my suicide attempt.
After some months of recuperation and medical treatment, I set out to create a tangible solution for the farse that Tiktok “activism” had become. Thus, “Resensitizing” the podast was born with the help of Stand Up NY housing our recording studio.
We are desensitised.
“Resensitizing” is the name I chose for my podcast because it’s a word I’ve often used to describe my own walk of learning, re-learning, and realising. As I grew deeper in moving away from the types of understanding that I grew up in, my sense of the world around me exploded. There was a reality happening at all times, everywhere, that my heart had been conditioned to be numb to.
One might say it’s like falling in love. The rush of information that came to me, it kept me awake at night with fascination. Beginning to truly “feel” all that I was feeling was like having a new crush I couldn’t stop thinking about. It’s as if the nerve endings of my very soul began to plug into the world for the first time. Learning by experiencing things “out loud” would be my biggest teacher.
That sense of splendour: it’s what I wish I could gift to everyone.
In a country where one half of the population is voting to make abortion illegal, and the other half is publicly jeering at those whom it directly effects, we are numb. Though, I know I don’t have all the answers, I don’t plan to stop asking all the questions. It’s the only way I’ve ever been able to learn. Maybe we are too far gone. Perhaps the rot of this country is now, finally, terminally unfixable.
Maybe there’s hope.
Whatever the case may be, I plan to feel every part of it. And I invite you to “Resensitize” along with me.
