Who The Hell Put This Glass Ceiling Here?

On smashing personal glass ceilings (without the use of a Wonkavator)

Grandpa Joe: You mean we’re going…
Willy Wonka: Up and out!
Grandpa Joe: But this roof is made of glass! It’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. We’ll be cut to ribbons!
Willy Wonka: Probably.

I was invited to give my first guest lecture last week: to final year students at the University of Leeds, talking about skills to help them navigate a career in the creative industries. I absolutely loved it, and not just because the exterior of the School of Fine Arts had a New York High School of Performing Arts vibe. I loved talking to the students, I loved being in their orbit, I loved being on campus… in a ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to spend more time here and do more lecturing!’ kind of way, not a Never Been Kissed/17 Again bodyswap/time travel kind of way, I hasten to add.

One of the ideas I spoke to the students about was that of moving through our comfort zones and smashing our personal glass ceilings. And although I didn’t go into the following with them, being back in a university environment reminded me once more of my own glass ceilings, my deep-rooted childhood (and who am I kidding, adulthood) dream of following in the tap-dancing footsteps of The Kids From Fame, and the two incidents which quashed that dream.

Or rather: the two incidents I would for a long time blame for quashing that dream. Because it wasn’t until many years later that I realised I had, in my response to these events, well and truly quashed them myself.

The first Dream Quashing Incident™ started when I was about to leave middle school, very excited about the prospect of going to our local high school – because each year they put on a school musical. The year before I started there (aged 13) they had put on a production of Joseph And His Technicolour Dreamcoat (as is contractually obliged for all British schools to perform) and, well, this budding triple threat couldn’t WAIT to get up on that school hall stage herself.

Until I started there. Because that was the year the first big wave of teachers’ strikes hit – and one of the consequences of that was no after-school drama, so no school shows. In fact, there were no musicals staged for the rest of my time at high school.

And what did I do about that? Well, I was just a kid with a very big but very secret dream, so naturally I kept my mouth shut and did nothing. I took it on the chin/as a sign, and I retreated, cursing Margaret Thatcher/Keith Joseph/Kenneth Baker (thanks to a few brilliant lefty teachers who reminded us who was to blame for the strikes). I only finally, barely, got it together to go for my dream in any small way in my final year, when aged 18 I sang I Know Him So Well at the end of year school concert with Elizabeth Webster (who was magnificent, though memory fails me as to which of us was Elaine Paige and which was Barbara Dickson).

The second time events conspired to quash my dream – and I again went “Oh OK, then!” – was in my first year as a student at Sheffield University. Bruised by the above experience at school (I was embarking on a modern languages, not performing arts, degree for starters), I nonetheless told myself: “It’s OK! University is where I can do all the fun theatre stuff. It’s where all my heroes met and did it! Look at the Beyond The Fringe lot! The Monty Python chaps! Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie!” Yes, Sheffield University was where I was going to turn this ship around and point it due north-west (to the New York High School of Performing Arts), so in my first term I auditioned for a university production of Cabaret.

I remember a few things. I remember making the shortlist for Sally Bowles. I remember standing around a piano with half a dozen Impressive Girls singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me. And I remember the American postgrad director telling us all that it turned out they couldn’t get the rights to Cabaret after all, so they were going to do a straight play instead.

Once again I took this on the chin/as a sign, went ‘OK, I’ll move on!’ – and walked away from it. Only to then go and watch the staging of the aforementioned straight play some months later, and feel utterly robbed because it turns out they had decided to intersperse the scenes on stage with performances of jazz standards sung by a series of – you guessed it – Impressive Girls standing by a piano.

It took me a long time to both realise and accept how I had, in fact, sabotaged myself both times. How I had used these turns of events as an excuse to keep myself small because, well, small was safe and familiar, and who was I to have these silly dreams in the first place? Seeing them as evidence that it was Not To Be, I had focused on things that had been totally out of my control without looking too deeply at my response to them – which was in my control. It finally dawned on me that in doing so, I had constructed my own personal glass ceiling both times. And I wasn’t even a professional glazier.

Don’t get me wrong – real actual glass ceilings exist in society (and by ‘real actual’ I do of course mean ‘real figurative’). They’re everywhere, in all sectors, trying to keep historically underrepresented people in their lane, trying to keep certain people away from success and power, stopping them from achieving their potential.

But I bet you have a personal glass ceiling inside yourself – or indeed: on top of yourself – too. Whether it’s how happy we believe we’re allowed to be, what career we’re entitled to pursue, how much money we’re allowed to earn, how much success we deserve… we often put an unconscious limit on these things, and we conspire to keep ourselves within those limits.

It took me years of interrogating those sorts of beliefs and fears inside myself – including looking at where they came from – to even begin to smash my own personal glass ceiling. And when I started to do it, I would often retreat once again to ‘safety’ after achieving any kind of success.

But here’s the thing: smashing ceilings and achieving success isn’t linear. It isn’t neat and tidy. Most of us will be chipping away at our glass ceilings gradually, not smashing through them in one go like a Great Glass Wonkavator. And every so often we’ll retreat from the progress we’re making, because, well, who isn’t afraid of falling glass?

But once you start to smash your personal glass ceiling, your muscles start to build (which is to be expected, you’re doing a lot of smashing) and there’s increasingly less glass to break through. Although don’t be surprised to find that it was, in fact, just an atrium you were chipping away at, and above that there’s a whole other glass ceiling…

Is it a life’s work? Definitely. Will you be cut to ribbons? Probably.

But as Willy Wonka says: Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.

He lived happily ever after.