Co-creator and lead actor in Netflix comedy-drama Feel Good, Mae Martin, sits down with Eve to examine how cathartic it is if you do choose to share your personal life with the public.
The Canadian performer started in comedy aged thirteen, and they share how freeing it was to be focused on a path from so young:
Mae: “I started seeing live comedy really young, it was all the local Toronto comedians… I was at comedy clubs four or five nights a week from the time I was like thirteen, I don’t know why my parents let me do that (laughs)…I was like a groupie! I made t-shirts with their faces on it and would turn up with gifts…I would wait at the stage door and get people to give me their autographs and they still had day jobs themselves, they were like ‘this is crazy’!”
“After puberty I had 6 or 7 years of trying so hard to be cool and then thank God I have grown out of that, now I am a lot closer to my kid-self. I think everyone is trying to get back to that true essence of themselves, before you get messed with by hormones and puberty”
Eve: “I think it is important to remember the kid part of yourself, I’ve only started thinking about that in recent years”.
After spending time in a rehabilitation centre for substance abuse, the comedian hasn’t shied away from their past:
Mae: “I’m grateful for it, I’m amazed that I’m here. It will always be a part of my life, I still think about it almost daily to be honest so it is a daily process… I think everyone has found the pandemic really hard but yesterday I went to the gym for the first time and I felt like I was at an amusement park!”
Eve shares her pride in Mae for sharing their truth about being non binary:
Mae: “It felt good to say but bad to read Twitter comments… I Google myself, I read everything… I’ve learned from my mistake, Instagram seems like a sort of friendlier place”
Eve: “I agree with that, it is way friendlier than Twitter…I try not to (read comments) because my anxiety, I can’t read it. Don’t do that! But as much as there is that negativity, 100% you saying that and living your truth is helping the people it needs to help and it gets to those people.”
Eve: “Did you have any fear about putting it out?”
Mae: “I thought about it a lot and I was really nervous. It is something new for me and as I said in the post, it is an on-going process. You always worry when you make a strong statement that your thoughts could change and that that could be a problem.”
Mae: “I’m lucky, and so are you, to be friends with Elliot Page and so watching that process, reading those interviews and especially how happy he seems I was like, that seems pretty good. As soon as he said definitively ‘this is who I am’, he was experiencing less bumping up against people misgendering him so that seemed pretty appealing and I really admired that bravery and I have taken my own small step.”
All pieces to credit: Constantly Evolving is available now on BBC Sounds