It all began when I started interviewing therapists. There I was, writing a book that I thought might sort my unruly thoughts and oddities, but it led to the Freudian couch. As each research interview with a therapist ended, they would beam, “I presume you’re in therapy, Robin?”

“No,” I would reply.

“….oh”, they would say.

When I finished the book, through a ridiculous number of temper tantrums, collisions with brick walls and hands thrown up in surrender, one book went to the printers and I went to a house in Hampstead.

I would lie on the sofa, shoes still on for fear that my socks may have formed a hole to embarrass me and that my taking off and putting on of shoes would be clumsy and worthy of judgement. I was not very good at it. My mind matched over every possible sentence and subject and bowdlerised most possibilities. I would lie looking at the wallpaper and severing possibilities of a conversation.

“That story is boring”.

“Didn’t you say that last week?”

“Will that story upset the therapist?”

“I bet everyone thinks like that, so don’t start showing as if you think you are special.”

I got to know that wallpaper well. It was my secret Rorschach test to occupy the silence.

But progress was made. If I was an unreliable narrator, it was mainly due to the shortfall in human memory rather than my duplicity.

I came to see the sense of what I was from the perspective of the car accident I was in when I was three. The crash that put my mother in a coma and, for a while afterwards, in a different time. It was the crash that my three year old me though he had caused. I believe that youthful guilt at having caused such damage shaped my anxiety (it really wasn’t my fault, but three year olds have an ability to create utterly false connections). The palpable nausea I feel if I do anything slightly wrong I believe stems from this. The perpetual worry that people in my company are not happy or that I have caused upset. Like many of us, my brain works at superspeed working out how a casual aside could have been interpreted in the worst possible way. I will always find a way of working out how I might be seen to be a monster. Even with friends of decades, the shame homunculus is ever vigilant.

I stumbled on another cliche while on the couch.

It fits neatly in the facile stand up comic docudrama.

When my mother was upset after her accident, as she wept, I would try and put on something of a show to try to cheer her up. When I collided with that cliche I could see it playing as the TV movie of the afternoon on the Hallmark Channel in Wisconsin.

I worry that I stopped my couch trips too soon. It was out of necessity, tours beckoned and Tuesday afternoons were no longer free. A pity, as this also meant I visited Hampstead’s excellent Oxfam Bookshop on a weekly basis.

I think I managed to unearth some things. I now know what they are and a little bit more of why I am who I am. Unfortunately, I think I have only got to the point of throwing them out of the dressing up box, but they are scattered and unordered.

I have felt this strongly during the final leg of my Chaos of Delight tour. Obviously I always worry if the audience are having a good enough time during any show, whether Monkey Cage, the arena gigs with Brian Cox, but most especially my art centre solo shows. In many ways, this solo show has been my most successful. I have had lovely feedback and apoplectic laughter. I enjoy hearing about people who ended up with sodden collars because the person behind them decided to take a swig of beer at the wrong time and then it spurted out due to an unexpected punchline. All of this makes me far from complacent. I worry more each night. This is not so much before the gig, the traditional time to approach a bucket, but throughout the show. Every time a laugh dies down, I think “are they happy? Is this okay for them?” The forefront of my frontal lobes, the most logical bit of me, tries to explain, “all is well. They are happy.”

The primitive jester, made of motley, lava and swamp water is less certain.

It is tiring.

But is it also useful. As my shows grow more and more manic with age, as the intensity and stupid voices and wild gesticulations grow increasingly unfettered, is that all due to the boiler stoking of the anxiety?

If I found a cure, would it make me more unwell?

The gates of anxiety might also be the keys to creativity.

Maybe I shouldn’t tidy the dressing up box just yet.

Robin’s book, I’m a Joke and So Are you is available now in paperback here or a signed hardback edition here. Nine Lessons and Carols for Curious People hosted by Robin Ince with many special guests is in Salford this week and London very soon. Tickets here.

Robin Ince is a multi-award winning comedian, writer and broadcaster.  As well as spending decades as one the UK’s most respected stand-ups, Robin is perhaps best known for co-hosting The Infinite Monkey Cage radio show with Brian Cox.  For his work on projects like Cosmic Shambles he was made an Honorary Doctor of Science by Royal Holloway, University of London.

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