In a life that has too much plot, I survived a plane crash

I was recently in a plane crash. Well. Listen. Sorry for the dramatics but the pilot called it a crash so I have started calling it a crash because he had an authoritative American accent and I’m what the industry refers to as “just a little girl”. I am from the city of Wagga Wagga, teen pregnancy capital of Australia. If you don’t know me, I am a comedian. I am reasonably well known from TV and the internet (the evil TV of the future) and I have a potentially life-shortening genetic situation that makes me live laugh love Lindsay Lohan etc. Back to the plane!

We’re flying home from Edinburgh Fringe and we’re in turbulence. It’s pretty hectic but I’ve convinced myself I’m not afraid of flying (Well - I got a prescription for valium which is similar) so I’m mostly okay with it but now something seems different. We’re coming in to land in Washington DC and the plane is being thrown around the sky.

We bounce, we bounce again and then the plane sort of flips up onto its wing which is digging into the earth alongside the tarmac. The plane takes back off into what is now very clearly a storm. The pilots say nothing for ten minutes. The cabin is full of crying, screaming, praying Americans and I am weighing up messaging my mum to say goodbye. We land in Baltimore half an hour later and as fire trucks and ambulances zoom over to our plane I am struck by an incredible urge to run.

I feel like running (not physically running - I like myself!) when I am worried I have missed something. Feeling like I might die jolted me into all the versions of myself that I will never live. The show I’m performing at the fringe this year is called Legacy. It’s about what you leave behind and the pressure to have children in a world that doesn’t give us enough time to explore all the versions of ourselves let alone a little clone that cries and screams and shits its pants (and that’s why I don’t go to music festivals anymore). I am constantly mourning all the women I never was. I wanted to be a singer songwriter and mope around mysteriously like Cassie from Skins. But I will never be mysterious. I tell my life story publicly all the time. People see me and shout quotes from comedy sketches I am in at me in the street, I have just written a memoir. I will never be Cassie from Skins. I had to sacrifice her to be Michelle from the tele.

I became Michelle from the tele because I wanted to be a musical theatre diva but I am a rubbish dancer that grew into her face around 25 years old. I learned that you can get into a musical by being famous. So I did that instead. And the people in the shows I do will never know that I desperately wanted to be in the ensemble but they were all better than me so I made jokes and that was just easier. I will never be the chorus girl who became an understudy and by sheer luck made her debut the night someone ‘important’ was in.

And I had all of these dreams because I wanted to get out of Wagga Wagga and prove that I wasn’t like my peers who would settle down and get married and stay in the comfortable town with a house and 2.5 kids all called Brayden. But the truth is that version of me could have been so happy. I don’t feel maternal except for towards dogs. I think the most I’ve ever felt like I’ve really ‘seen’ myself is looking at a full standard poodle with the show cut. Still, kids are sweet and funny. There is no shame in choosing comfort. But the itch to run, to become every version of me is suffocating and so I did not stay and so I am constantly on planes and travelling the world but never seeing the cities I perform in just the studios and the theatres. It’s all very glamorous but also I did shit myself that one time (as I’ve said, I don’t go to music festivals any more!).

Which leads us back to the plane crash. On the flight, I had been messaging a woman with my exact same name trying to find out if she was the rightful owner of a mystery envelope of cash with my name on it which had been handed to me months before at a cinema. I had asked for my tickets and the staff couldn’t find them - but could find this envelope. They handed me a challenge: to find this woman. She was a mystery and I was obsessed with her. I’d never met someone with my name before and I felt like maybe she might be a long lost version of myself. Cassie from skins but in a musical and also settled down with three kids called Brayden. My first thought when I felt I might die was that I was afraid I might never get to meet her. And I think there is something poetic in that. The fear of dying before getting to meet yourself. And so I keep running and I won’t settle down and I will be old and lonely when my partner dies in the old age home with no children to visit me. Except the poodles. There will always be poodles.

Michelle Brasier: Legacy will be performed at 7pm in Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Doonstairs) from 31st July – 26th August (Not 14th)

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