“You need a stage.”
I’ve been thinking about that sentence for months.
Not because I disagreed with it.
Quite the opposite.
I think part of me had always known.
I just hadn’t thought about what a stage might actually mean.
For the past few years, my days had been largely spoken for.
And then, suddenly, they weren’t.
It was strange how quickly the space appeared.
And stranger still what seemed to be waiting for it.
Looking back, I think that’s what made the sentence feel so familiar. I had spent years making things in the margins.
A clothing line. A film course that somehow led to Cannes, then Tribeca, then a small movie in Los Angeles. Ideas scribbled down and saved for later. Things I started because I couldn’t quite leave them alone.
They were never really side projects to me.
They were just the things I cared about most.
And yet, somehow, I had kept them on the side.
Maybe because there was always something else that occupied the center. Something sensible. Something stable. Something that made sense when someone asked what I did.
The other things were harder to explain.
Or at least, I’d assumed they were.
They weren’t part of some carefully constructed plan. One thing would catch my attention and I’d follow it, sometimes much further than was reasonable.
And those were usually the things that made me feel most alive.
I think I’d always known what that meant. I just hadn’t given it much room.
The sentence came from a woman I met earlier this year.
She spends her days trying to work out what people are actually good at — not just what they’ve studied or happened to make money from, but the things that seem to sit somewhere underneath all of that.
By the time I met her, I’d already spent hours answering questions and completing tests designed to turn parts of a person into pages of results.
She went through them one by one.
Some were strangely specific.
Mostly, I nodded.
Then I started telling her about the things the pages couldn’t really account for.
The clothing line. Film. A taste of acting.
The things I’d loved making. The places I’d somehow ended up because I’d followed one interest into another.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, she looked at me and said:
“You need a stage.”
I remember looking at her and thinking, yes.
Not Really?
Just: yes.
I think she could tell, because she said it again.
What surprised me wasn’t that she’d seen something I hadn’t.
It was more like she’d walked into a room I’d been standing in for years and pointed at something I hadn’t quite known how to name.
I’ve wondered since then what she meant by it.
Maybe she meant an actual stage. We’d been talking about acting, after all.
But I don’t think that’s why the sentence stayed.
A stage can be a lot of things.
It can be a film set. A page. A room. A screen. A microphone. A conversation.
Maybe it’s one thing. Maybe it’s several. Maybe it’s all of it.
Maybe it isn’t even a place.
Maybe it’s simply what happens when you decide that something is allowed to move from the edge to the center.
Because I’ve never had much trouble making things.
Sharing them is different.
There is a particular moment when something you’ve made stops belonging entirely to you.
Until then, you can change it. Hide it. Abandon it. Decide it isn’t ready. Decide you’re not ready.
You can keep it on a hard drive or in a notebook or inside a conversation with someone you trust.
It can be almost anything while nobody else can see it.
And then you put it somewhere.
Other people get to decide what they think of it.
Or misunderstand it.
Or love it for a reason you hadn’t intended.
Or ignore it completely.
You lose a little control.
Maybe that’s part of what a stage is too.
Not just somewhere to make something visible.
Somewhere you’re willing to let go of what happens once it is.
I’ve been thinking about that more than anything else.
Maybe because so many of the things I’ve cared about most took me somewhere I couldn’t have planned.
One thing led to another. An interest became an experience.
I couldn’t have written most of what came next.
Perhaps the things we keep returning to are worth giving a little more room than we usually allow them.
Perhaps some of them have been waiting in the margins for longer than we realise.
And maybe that’s what a stage actually is.
Not somewhere to perform.
Somewhere to put the things that matter to you.
Somewhere to let them take up a little more space.
Somewhere they can be seen.
I’ve been thinking about what that means.
And what it might mean to finally give something a stage.
I don’t know what mine looks like yet.
I just know I need one.