Look at me, exercising and budgeting. Who cares if it’s all an act?

I’ve 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’s 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.)

Without the help of prescription beta blockers, public speaking used to make my hands – and whatever prepared notes I held in them – 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’ festival speeches because my voice quivered so much, people felt pity for me, and relief that I got through it at all.

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.

I’m acting like a well-rounded person.

For years, I told myself I wasn’t “a gym person”. 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.

When I get ready for the gym, it’s like I’m putting on a costume. I’m no longer Brodie, the sceptical, cynical writer who works from home and finds the concept of a “run club” 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.

And the great joy of this performance is that I’ve 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’m not the main character. And it’s freeing.

At home, with the new financial year well under way, I’ve 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’ve made to make visible my spending habits, to Google terms like “APR” and to finally realise that investing little bits here and there isn’t purely the domain of crypto bros. It might be the defining role of my lifetime.

Now for a truly narcissistic confession. When I clock off from work for the day and finish my dinner in front of an episode of Real Housewives, sometimes I ask myself: “What if someone were watching you right now?” Not in a threatening, we-need-to-file-a-police-statement kind of way. But rather, if my life were a one-woman show, if my apartment were an incredibly detailed set on a stage, if there was an audience watching me – what would they see me doing? And what would that tell them about who I am?

When I remember to floss and do my retinol and reset my kitchen and climb into bed with a book and cup of liquorice tea – rather than watching every video the TikTok algorithm serves me until I’m cross-eyed and strung out – I’m developing a character who is caring for herself.

Even when I’m alone, even though no one is watching, it’s like that invisible expectation is the urging I need to compel me to do something to better my life or night or just that moment. And while the imagined audience rarely gets much of a show, at least what they’re witnessing is slow, progressive character development.

I’ll leave it to my therapist to decode why I can’t simply do nice things for myself because I deserve them and need to imagine they’re somehow benefiting someone else next week, when I return to the stage (her office) to reprise my role of “woman working on more than just her physical health”. I hear it’s a hell of a performance.