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  It’s when you don’t listen to the voice within that is desperate to follow your calling that you will damage your heart. Your soul becomes depressed, bored, disheartened and lethargic, you question who you are on a daily basis, why you are here; you feel easily exhausted in the grind of life. You wonder what the point of life is and your happiness is limited to fleeting moments of freedom that only come when you momentarily forget the reality you have become accustomed to. Reality that you are just part of the machine, working in a job that you don’t care for, earning money just to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head; you are literally waiting to meet someone, procreate and die.

  It is harder to endure this reality than to listen to your vocation. It takes more effort to kill your soul in a long, slow daily process, gently chipping away at the fabric of what makes you beautiful. People think that following your dreams is hard; I think it’s the opposite. Not following them is harder. Because it is only when you allow yourself to do the thing that makes your heart sing that life falls into place. No matter how many people have told you it’s not for you, or you won’t make a career out of it, or that you are not good enough, your inner voice has to be louder, stronger and more consistent than all the doubters. Because the second you live your authentic life the way you are meant to, the second you allow yourself to follow a suppressed vocation, something magical happens. It stops the feeling of time. It is no longer living to die, but dying to live. This is who I am. This is where I am meant to be. It makes every moment of crap worthwhile, because here, in this very moment, you allow your soul to sing.

  And here in this shitty room in the middle of Salford, where there are no windows and the paint is stripping off the wall, I felt more alive than I had done in years; my soul was singing her little heart out.

  The feeling lasted for approximately the rest of the day until I wake up in my student dorm and have to get to voice classes with Dane. Fuck the voice classes with Dane; I was already looking forward to my next stand-up lesson. 1.30 every Thursday became my new favourite time.

  The fact that I fell in love with my stand-up class was good, as I didn’t have much luck anywhere else. I was in love with a married man called Marley. I didn’t know to begin with that he was married, though it should have been obvious when he would never answer his phone between the hours of 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. I met him in a bar, he played for a local football team and everyone around us was staring at him. I thought it was adorable and said, ‘Aww, this is what it will be like when I’m famous.’ He laughed and clapped at everything I said, I loved getting his attention.

  After a few weeks of what most people would call a couple of dates and a few exchanged text messages, and what I preferred to think of as a whirlwind romance, someone dropped the bombshell that he had a wife and children.

  The next day I kept getting text messages from him, which I ignored. And I could see myself looking at the situation and thinking: I have two options. I can just carry on ignoring him and move on. Or I can answer his messages, continue a dialogue.

  To this day I wish I’d carried on ignoring him, but I didn’t, and I spent the next year choosing to be heartbroken over a man who would call me once or twice a week and have sex with me twice a year.

  It was self-destructive, but it was easier to be in love with Marley; on some level it was a pain I felt I deserved. I had only learnt negative things about love from my father: that women can be disrespected, and that I was not worth fighting for or having in someone’s life. That was damaging, and my relationships with others reflected it.

  One day Marley showed up at my student halls with a football shirt with Lulu on the back. It was his nickname for me. I was over the moon and really felt a T-shirt with my name on it was a sincere sign of a married father’s affection for me.

  Turns out Marley had girls up and down the country; it was actually him that told me about them. One time on the phone, when I was complaining about why he acted so weird with me, he said, ‘Why can’t you be more like Lulu?’

  ‘Eh? Lulu? I am Lulu!’

  ‘No, the other one.’

  There was another Lulu; I was technically Lulu number 2. I cried for months. It was OK for him to cheat on his wife with me, but not for him to cheat on me. I think of that shirt now, and how worthless it is. It means nothing; the fabric offends me.

  Be it a shirt, or a pair of shoes, or a car, or a ring, or a house, nothing bought is ever as valuable as self-love. Someone can buy you all the gifts in the world, but if it is at the expense of your own self-esteem, you are indebted to that item. You are worth more than a T-shirt; you are worth more than a house. Please know that value.

  But at the time, I was young and I thought this active purchase proved Marley’s love for me. I was heartbroken when I found out. And felt like an idiot. I remember being sat outside the Arndale in Manchester, it was 10 p.m. at night and I was eating a kebab, chips and cheese on a bench. I gave my older brother Adam a call and was crying down the phone to him. He gave me this nugget: ‘Aww don’t cry Luisssaaaa. Listen, some people might say there’s plenty more fish in the sea, but I think for this occasion there’s plenty more footballers in the league.’

  I digress.

  I completed the stand-up module; part of the exam was to do a live show in front of a real live audience. No longer just playing to your classmates, but in a proper comedy club, on a proper stage in front of a paying audience.

  The university hooked up with the Jongleurs comedy club and our showcase was booked for Jongleurs Manchester. It was a sold-out event and there were about 250 people watching. My lecturer said I was one of the strongest and so wanted me to go up first.

  I did well for a first time – I didn’t kill it like I had done in class every week, but I did well. Then Zoe went up and opened the second half, and she annihilated it, like the audience went absolutely crazy for her. And despite feeling really pleased for my mate who moments before was being sick in the toilet from nerves, at the same time I felt a pang of jealousy that I couldn’t rouse that reaction.

  Afterwards at the bar, a friend of ours, a guy we both kinda liked flirting with, came up to Zoe whilst I was stood next to her. It was a really noisy bar and he whispered loudly to Zoe, ‘Oh my gosh, you were the best one on tonight Zoe, by far.’ My heart sank. I was crap, I had been good all year and here I was stood next to my best friend and I was crap. This is how I measure myself. I don’t think it’s a need to be the best; I think it was because I didn’t do as well as I knew I could do. Why is it every time I try to get up and perform, I fuck it up by not being as good as when I practise? In real life I can do it effortlessly and have the confidence to deliver, and yet the second there is the pressure of a real audience, I don’t do as well, or because I didn’t get the reaction a friend got, I feel like I have somehow failed.

  After that I played a few open mic nights, but I had lost my confidence a bit and they weren’t as good, and someone posted a blog about it online and called it a ‘smutty set by Luisa Omielan’. I hated it, I hated myself, and I felt mortified that I’d put myself on stage just to be ridiculed. It was hurtful and I was embarrassed for myself; this wasn’t how comedy was meant to make me feel.

  But despite not nailing it outside of the classroom, I graduated with a first-class degree and was selected for a final-year industry showcase, where 20 students were chosen to perform to maybe 100 or so agents and industry professionals.

  I loved the rehearsals and felt confident about how it would all go; I’d found this brilliant monologue of an emotional woman that I thought I could do justice to. It came to the showcase and I did all right, but by no means did I wow the crowd. I came outside afterwards for the drinks reception and wasn’t approached by anyone. I went up to an agent and asked what he thought of my performance, and he said, ‘Yeah, sorry love, I’ve already got brown hair, brown eyes.’ I remember thinking, not mine you haven’t.

  Despite that, my lecturer Mark, the one that I loved and was amazing to
me, brought me into his office and showed me my grades. I’d got a straight first, top scores across the board, one of the highest overall grades in ten years at the university. I was delighted. I ran out and called my mum. She was over the moon for me. And then I called my father. I wanted him to know that I’d done all right, that I wasn’t a failure. My older brothers had graduated a few years before with a 2:2 and a third, and they had since cut contact my father. He hadn’t spoken to them in three years. He said he was waiting for them to see sense.

  When I told him about my first, he said ‘That’s nice’ and then stupidly I said, ‘I know, but remember how you said I wouldn’t do very well and that if I lived with you I would do better? Well the boys got a 2.2 and a third, and look, my lecturer said I got the highest first in ten years!’

  He replied, ‘Yes Luisa, but they did BScs and you did a BA, don’t think I don’t know the difference.’

  I hate how the arts are dismissed, how there is a snobbery about those subjects. It’s a gift to be an artist, it is as important as any science. You can’t discover or learn without art; it is too intrinsic, too insular, too feminine. Art is creation. And it’s fucking hard.

  Anyway, graduating with my first and not getting an agent or the Hollywood blockbuster movie offer that I had hoped for, it didn’t make sense to stay in Manchester. Sure I could work as a bar girl and dance on tables, or sell perfume in Debenhams. But if I was going to do that and be depressed, I may as well do it in the comfort of my mum’s house. So I moved back down south.

  Back in Farnborough, when people asked what I wanted to do next, I didn’t have the balls to say ‘comedian’ so I would just mutter something about acting and seeing what happened. I didn’t want to do a temp job; a local recruitment company was advertising a graduate scheme in London. I thought, well at least I could live the fun City lifestyle, and, you know, meet boys and go out for drinks. Whatever. The schemes were so down with the kids they held auditions as opposed to interviews, and you could earn up to £18k in your first year. So I applied for all of them.

  One particular interview/audition was with a very kind old man. It was a graduate scheme with a start-up tech company of some sort, and my job would be in computers or hard drives or something. We had a big long chat and he asked me about all my skills; we seemed to get on really well. He said, ‘Luisa, you are doing a great interview and I think I would happily hire you, but I get the feeling you don’t really want the job.’ I didn’t want him to get in touch with the agency and blame them for wasting his time, so I said ‘No I do, I really do’ and then found my face winking for me. He half laughed and wished me well.

  The recruitment company said it was all about transferable skills, and that my training would make me a great candidate to be a recruitment consultant: it was people-focused, with good earnings and an easily established clear career path. But I didn’t want to sell things; my gap year of massage machines had put me off for life, and the thought of working in recruitment made me want to dig my own eyes out with a spoon. But I did like the idea of having money, so, dead inside, I applied.

  I went through the interview process and got quite far by displaying my enthusiasm for recruitment and targets. What do you know, I am a good actress. I got to the third round of interviews and was selected to be seen by a senior recruiter in a central London corporate office. Having had what I thought was a successful half-hour talking to a lady in a suit, she then asked her male colleague to step in.

  He was a proper Del Boy in an Armani suit, think fast, talk fast, Essex accent, brown shoes, and coke at the weekend kind of guy. He must be the company’s best-kept secret, I thought. There was a chair opposite me behind the desk, but instead he chose to sit on the table in front of me.

  ‘So, says here you got a first in acting?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well if you are an actress, why are you here?’

  ‘Because it didn’t work.’

  ‘And what, you just gave up?’

  ‘Er no, it’s just really difficult and unrealistic to get in to.’ I was quoting the rhetoric of aunts and uncles everywhere.

  ‘So you don’t want to do it now?’

  ‘Er no.’ My heart winced. ‘I really want to work in recruitment.’

  ‘Interesting. If you came to me and said I’m 40 and it hasn’t worked, I would believe you, but if you can’t even be bothered to work and fight for your own dreams, what makes you think I want you working and fighting for my company?’

  Sometimes, when someone says something really truthful, it can be embarrassing and annoying. Especially when it comes from a suited-up 20-year-old who’s earned more money in the last three days than you have all year. But at the same time, it can feel like a relief. The game was up, and although I had no face left to save in this situation, it felt good. I hated him because he’d showed me up, but I loved him because he was right. He should be a recruitment consultant, he was absolutely excellent at it. I should not.

  So I quit all the graduate training programmes and parked the dream of working in London. My mate Alison from college had set up her own recruitment firm and she could help me out with temping. It was enough for now. I got three jobs a day, spending my mornings as a postwoman, my afternoons in the stock cupboard of Wilkinsons and my evenings working in a bar.

  It was at this time that I started thinking about going to America. I did some investigations and rang this school called the Comedy Institute, where they teach a masters in comedy, sketch, joke writing, improv, stand-up, the works. Just reading about it made my heart sing. I enquired about coming out for a year and getting a visa, and they said, ‘Hey you should totally speak to a really good friend of ours, I believe he’s in London at the moment, a German guy called Klaus Hans, oh you’ll love him! Want us to pass on your email?’

  And here, my friends, is the first plot point in my story.

  8.

  DADDY . . . ISSUES

  Klaus was a comedy promoter from Germany who had spent a year in the States doing the course at the Comedy Institute before deciding to set up his own touring company. He booked shows in Berlin, Gdansk, Helsinki, Romania, Singapore, you name it; he was a good guy to know.

  He met me in a coffee shop above a bookstore. I don’t know why, but I had goose bumps around him. We had a coffee and I bought him a slice of rocky road and we chatted for hours about comedy. Now I wouldn’t necessarily associate German with being the sexiest accent in the world (sorry Germany), but for some reason, whenever Klaus opened his mouth, something about his harsh, gravelly tones had me. He literally had me at guten Tag.

  Klaus said I didn’t need to go to America to do a course; in fact I could do a comedy course right here in London. He said London has one of the best stand-up comedy scenes in the world and if I did a class here, it wouldn’t necessarily be to learn more about stand-up, as I had already done that at uni. He said the only way to truly learn stand-up is by doing it, but that a class would help me find my feet, it would give me the confidence I needed to start in London, and I could meet a network of people on the London circuit. He told me about a man called Logan Murray who taught an excellent stand-up course. Klaus gave me Murray’s number and I signed up. He then handed me a copy of Time Out and circled all the gigs that I could call and try five minutes at. We talked about everything, I told him all about Salford, he told me all about the US. We spoke about our hopes and dreams, about failure. He told me what it was like trying to sell a show and having acts on that people wanted to see as well as taking risks on acts audiences had never heard of. I talked about being crap and judged, and how it kept me feeling trapped and prevented me from trying.

  He said, ‘Darling Luisa, maybe it is not fear of failure that you have, perhaps it is more to do with fear of success.’

  Sometimes believing for a lifetime that you can achieve something becomes a daunting prospect when you actually try and execute it and it’s not happening. I didn’t get an agent, I didn’t get signed, I wasn’t funny
on stage, but put me in a room where I can just play and I am at my happiest; surely that’s got to be a sign of something. So I took Klaus’s advice and looked for a room where I could just play, free from judgement and just play. So I signed up to the stand-up course. It cost £495, a month’s postwoman wages, but like I have always said, you got to speculate to accumulate.

  I stayed in touch with Klaus when he travelled back to Germany; he would call me, I found him so easy to talk to and he was so passionate about me starting my comedy journey in London. Before I knew it, we would be Skyping for hours. But it’s safe to say that on that first day, the first day I met him over a rocky road that I went home and said, ‘Mum, I’ve met the most amazing guy, I think I may have found the one.’ And for me, he remained the one for the next four years.

  THE ONE

  Listen, haters gonna hate, when you have found the one, embrace it. I think it’s really unfair when people say ‘He’s not the one for you.’