If we had to typecast the kid I was in school, I would be the funny one. I tried, although I’m not sure if I was that funny, especially in high school. Back then, my humour revolved around planking and the Harlem shake... so not that great. And yet, throughout the years, I was referred to as “funny.” This perceived persona would repeatedly trap me in a concrete character mould.

When I was nine, I had my first taste of anxiety, listening to Uncle Mike or Aunty Hillary go on about the ozone layer. ‘It’s shrinking,’ they would say, ‘getting holes, and the sun’s rays are seeping through.’ I was old enough to understand that the penetration of the sun’s rays was not good. However, I was not old enough to realise that these rays would not burn humans alive as though we were witches at the stake.

I spent that summer waiting for our demise. For the sun to light the world on fire and kill us all. My first taste of mortality was served piping hot, and I was very unprepared for it. I lay awake at night thinking about death, the sun and the ozone. I was sure that if I fell asleep, I would not wake. I lost a lot of sleep that summer, a cycle that ate away at my eyelids. The Edge’s Top 20 would play in the background, the soundtrack to my anxiety. Even today, I don’t know why this caused a lot of panic and fear.

I entered my teenage years, and anxiety was pushed into a small corner of my brain. Instead of feeling too much now, I was feeling too little. When the doctors asked when my depression started, I said ‘thirteen’, and they looked at me funny. Not funny ha-ha in the way that everyone else saw me. More funny-confused. Funny-sad. ‘Thirteen?’ They say, stunned. ‘But you’re twenty-two! You’re only just talking about it now?’ Why would I talk about something like that sooner? That isn’t something the funny friend talks about.

When you’ve been told what character you are in the stage play called Life, it’s difficult to escape. People turn it over within themselves, and we are taught to believe that a specific character trope is who they are. When someone is told they’re smart, that becomes ‘who they are.’ There is a fear of what will happen if they don’t keep up with the image everyone sees them as. “You were so smart,” people might say and “now you’ve gone and thrown your talents away.”

This also happens when society names someone ‘stupid’ or ‘pretty’. They take it, believe it, and feel that they must live up to it, all because they were told it from day one. It’s difficult to shake that title when it’s been branded onto you since you were small, and then it’s hard to break character. As much as we preach about wanting three-dimensional characters in film and television, we get so surprised when we see it in real life. The angry and aggressive boy is gentle? The pretty one is doing law at a top university? The funny one has been admitted to a mental ward because she attempted suicide? I am not exempt from this type of practice. My niece is only three months old, yet in my head, I’ve decided that her character in this world is the ‘grumpy one’. We are all out here assigning seven billion new dwarf roles for a reboot of Snow White.

The funny one was a title to me as much as my name; now, I’m shaking it off. I am no longer that character; we don’t have to be the things we were called in the past. We are so much more; we are not that, we are something else, we are everything. We are whatever we want to be, and we are free not to be that anymore. We are far more than anything anybody could name us.

To my fellow funny friends, I dedicate this to you. Cry, be smart, dumb, fight, depressed, play, nice, scary, and scared. Be whatever the hell you want to be. Today, the only thing the sun will light on fire is the titles we’ve had stuck to us our whole life.

We are shape-shifters. We are free just to be.

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