![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/78d487fde4f219470a691eebce5c792aa3bdde5c.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nI\u2019ve never been much of an actor. When a camera is on me, I freeze up and channel an incredible amount of energy into what my hands are doing. There was an audition for a high school musical that still, 20 years later, sometimes arrives in my mind\u2019s eye and makes me break out in a nervous sweat. (A Russian accent was involved. A Russian accent in a public high school in regional Queensland.)<\/p>\n
Without the help of prescription beta blockers, public speaking used to make my hands \u2013 and whatever prepared notes I held in them \u2013 shake so hard they could be seen from the back of an auditorium. I swear I only got applause at the end of some writers\u2019 festival speeches because my voice quivered so much, people felt pity for me, and relief that I got through it at all.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Credit: Robin Cowcher<\/p>\n
So while a late-in-life pivot to the stage is not on the cards for me, I have been undertaking small daily performances recently that have slowly compounded to improve my life.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m acting like a well-rounded person.<\/p>\n
For years, I told myself I wasn\u2019t \u201ca gym person\u201d. That was for muscle daddies and fitspo influencers in matching Lycra sets. They were stacking plates and chasing PBs while I twisted and contorted in Pilates classes and puffed my way up hills on slow, lumbering walks. We were cut from different cloth. But early last year, after yet another muscle injury screamed for me to be stronger, I started my slow apprenticeship into strength training.<\/p>\n
When I get ready for the gym, it\u2019s like I\u2019m putting on a costume. I\u2019m no longer Brodie, the sceptical, cynical writer who works from home and finds the concept of a \u201crun club\u201d the stuff of nightmares. In character as a background player at a gym, I squat and bench and mix pre-workout with creatine and hinge at the hips.<\/p>\n
Loading<\/p>\n
And the great joy of this performance is that I\u2019ve learned no one pulls focus. The fear of embarrassment was gone the second I realised no one cares about me there. (Hopefully that changes if, one day, I become stuck under a heavy barbell like in workout safety induction videos.) No one is looking at me or judging me or caring about anything but themselves. By performing an anonymous role, I realise I\u2019m not the main character. And it\u2019s freeing.<\/p>\n
At home, with the new financial year well under way, I\u2019ve been moonlighting as a new character, one who is responsible with money. Rather that jumping at impulse purchases to fill a dopamine void, this role requires me to plan, to learn formulas for the spreadsheets I\u2019ve made to make visible my spending habits, to Google terms like \u201cAPR\u201d and to finally realise that investing little bits here and there isn\u2019t purely the domain of crypto bros. It might be the defining role of my lifetime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve never been much of an actor. When a camera is on me, I freeze up and channel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[64,63,538,137],"class_list":["post-58649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fitness","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}