I have become a lot more wholesome in the past ten years. I was never particularly prickly. I was an arse, though. A bit of one. My sense of humour was inappropriate in ways I will not repeat here, partly out of shame and partly because some of you were there and remember.

I want to be clear that this is not a redemption story. Nobody staged an intervention. I did not wake up in a skip outside Leeds and see the light. What happened was slower and less dramatic, which is probably why it took me until now to notice it had happened at all.

The armour

Looking back, the humour was a defence. If you get the offensive joke in first, nobody can get close enough to see what you actually are. I did not know I was doing this at the time. I thought I was funny. I was unformed, and the jokes were a way of holding a shape until I grew one of my own.

Around thirty, I started to find my groove. I am forty five now, so this has been a fifteen year project, which sounds about right for me. I am not a fast worker. Ask anyone who has waited for a collage.

The people were already there

Here is the part that surprised me. The acceptance I needed did not arrive one day like a parcel. It was already in the room. Mrs Backhouse. The people at Harrogate Community Radio. Friends who had been friends all along. I did not need to find better people. I needed to lower the drawbridge and let the ones I had see in.

The art helped too. Making collages and recording sound gave me a way of reading the world, and once you have a way of reading the world you stop needing to shout over it. Less defence, more spontaneity. That was the whole trick, and it took me a decade to learn it.

What wholesome looks like

So what does it amount to, this new wholesome life? I have dog friends. Dogs I know by name on my walks, whose owners I also know, though mostly as an afterthought to the dog. I nod at old ladies and they nod back, and this exchange means more to me than I can sensibly explain.

I keep regular bedtimes. I maintain good hygiene, which I mention because thirty year old me would want it noted as evidence of decline. I read for pleasure, actual books, in a chair, like a Victorian. And I am tolerant now of stuff I would once have scoffed at, which is perhaps the biggest change of all, because the scoffing was the same armour as the jokes. Different outfit, same defence.

Growing up or giving in?

You could call this conforming. Growing up and settling down and all the other phrases that sound like surrender. I have thought about that, and I do not think it is what happened. I did not sand myself down to fit. I stopped performing a version of myself that was never load bearing in the first place.

I accept who I am because I am accepted for who I am. I know that reads like a fridge magnet. I have decided not to care. The fridge magnets were right about this one.

If you knew me fifteen years ago, I am sorry about the jokes. If you know me now, I will see you on the Stray. I will be the one booping your dog’s nose.