Don’t go yet. Stay five more minutes....

Don’t go yet. Stay five more minutes. I’m going to tell you a story, but I’m going to do it in under five minutes. Does someone have a watch? All right. Good….

….I went mad and then I was forty-five, which was older than I ever thought I’d be, and then I was fifty, which was older than I ever thought I’d be when I was forty-five, and then on the night of my fifty-seventh birthday I went blind and I stood naked in the middle of my bedroom and all of a sudden I was at the center of the universe, facing out. No more trying to get in anyone else’s head. Oh, what does she think of me? What does that man bagging my groceries think of -- nope. It’s just me! Alone in the universe! Standing in the center of my own life. I can’t even look in a mirror. It’s just me and my thoughts and sometimes I have no thoughts at all. Sometimes I just lie in bed in the morning and think about nothing. Imagine that. Before you take a break, imagine that. Sitting in the center of your own life with no thoughts at all about what other people are thinking. They can think whatever they like. You can all think whatever you like about me. See? And it hasn’t even been five minutes.

Baker, Annie. John. Theatre Communications Group, New York, NY, 2016. pp 109-111.