Sitting on a cold staircase alone, in silence, I had got through half a packet of pink wafer biscuits in ten minutes.

Then an arm wrapped around me. It was my wife. Well, the wonderful lady playing my wife on the stage about ten metres away.

‘Time to go, George,’ she said with a smile.

This week nine years ago, I was playing George Bailey, the lead in the Christmas classic ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, on stage. As an actor it’s one of those dreamy parts you can really get your teeth into.

Based on A Christmas Carol, the play tells the story of a man who feels his life has been a failure and considers suicide on Christmas Eve. He meets an angel and sees his life at different stages which makes him reconsider what he really wants to do.

Challenging enough one might think but three days before rehearsals began, I collapsed at work. Parademics carted me away and the doctor signed me off.

I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and felt all of the things I loved doing for pleasure suddenly slipping rapidly away. That black dog people talk about arrived, and a curtain shrouded life.

I’ve just stumbled on the plethora of emails I’d sent our wonderful director during that time, and oh, the support that was received both on email but also as I struggled into the rehearsal room was amazing.

Things feel so much better when you’ve people around you who genuinely care.

Then showtime came.

Performing any show can be nerve-wracking and intense but when you are playing a suicidal man while struggling the same thoughts yourself, well, I look back and wonder how I ever managed it.

I would drag myself through Act 1, go and hide with a pack of biscuits, recover enough to be pulled lovingly onto stage, perform the second half (and the challenging eleventh hour part as he has a complete breakdown), and then walk off in something of a daze.

Was art mirroring life with this show?

I remember a big, burly man coming to me after the first show, tears in his eyes, telling me this was the best performance he’d seen. This was no show, my friend. I was living it.

Throughout that play my body was shaking, my heart was fluttering, my mind was foggy, but performing was what I loved, and my ‘wife’ would hold my hand or stand close enough to ground me in the moment that nobody in the audience would have any idea that at any given point, I could have run off in floods of tears and not returned.

It was written and performed as the old time radio plays and I remember standing in front of the microphone, worried I’d get through, but determined. Why? Why not take the easy life and rest, let someone else do it?

Because sometimes, the show must go on.

Not because we’re pretending everything’s fine, but because showing up, even when it hurts, is an act of courage in itself.

That microphone wasn’t just a piece of metal and sound, not simply part of the play. It was a moment of truth. A reminder that I could get up on a stage and perform, stand up, still use my voice, even if the rest of the world was collapsing away from there.

And in a way, it’s a reminder that we all have something to say, especially when life tests us.

Standing in front of a microphone on stage and essentially playing your life out through a performance is a massive undertaking but here’s a question or two for you to ponder, or answer below as you wish…

1) If you were given a microphone for five minutes today, what would you say?

2) Would you tell your truth?

3) Would you share your story?

4) Would you speak hope into someone else’s darkness?

Thing is, you never know who needs to hear that the show can go on, even when you feel the curtain’s ready to fall.

As Clarence, the guardian angel to George says, ‘Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives…’

How will you touch somebody else’s today with your truth?