What a Work-in-Progress Comedy Show Taught Me About Where to Go Next

Skating, Songwriting, and Failing on Purpose.

Over the past few months, whenever I’m in Montréal, I’ve gotten into the habit of going to the rink a couple of times a week. No plan, no purpose, no choreography to refine—just skating for the sake of it. I thought it would feel freeing. Instead, I found myself hesitating at the boards, staring at the ice as if it might tell me what to do.

Without a coach to guide me or a structure to anchor me, I felt lost. And worse—I caught myself worrying about what other people might be thinking. What is she even doing here? What is she working on? She’s not as good as she was at the Olympics anymore. The thoughts circled me like vultures, silent but relentless, picking at my confidence until I froze.

Even when I finally moved, I couldn’t turn off the voice in my head picking apart every step. People told me to share my skating on social media, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that if it wasn’t exceptional, then it wasn’t worth showing.

It was the same with songwriting. I started writing songs last year, but I could never finish any of them—let alone show them to anyone, let alone perform them. I would listen to other artists’ work and immediately compare. It’s never going to be as good as this, so what’s the point?

The irony is that the perfectionism that now paralyzes me is the same force that made me a champion. It’s what got me to the rink every morning, what pushed me to refine every detail, what made me incapable of settling for good enough. After competitions, the podium and the celebrations often felt like background noise. What I wanted most was to break down my scores, analyze every point, and figure out how to be better for the next event. That painstaking process—ce travail d’orfèvre (this meticulous craftsmanship)—was what I loved most about my job.

Figure skating is also a sport where your work is judged by a panel of people from different countries, generations, and tastes. To win, you have to convince all of them. There’s little room for something too niche or polarizing—your perspective on your own work has to absorb and reflect everyone else’s. I was never someone who obsessed over pleasing the judges more than anything else, but I can’t deny that I cared. And that I had to care.

To protect myself from criticism, I trained myself to anticipate it. I learned to see my skating through the eyes of my harshest critic. I shaped myself into the least attackable version of me possible.

I’m not criticizing that mindset. In competition, it wasn’t just normal—it was necessary. It was a strength, and a process that I enjoyed. But now, as I step away from that world, I’m realizing just how much this way of thinking—this thing that once made me great—is now getting in my way.

The Art of Bombing.

Last December, I was in London visiting friends. My friend Sam, a young comedian on the London circuit, was performing a Work in Progress set at a tiny comedy club in Angel. I had never seen a work in progress comedy show before—only polished specials on YouTube or Netflix. I understood the concept, but I hadn’t realized just how unfinished a show like this could be.

For an hour, I watched Sam test jokes that didn’t land, stumble over his words, fumble with the mic, and cut jokes short when he forgot the setup—or when he just changed his mind mid-delivery. It was messy. Imperfect. At times, uncomfortable. And yet, I was completely entranced. Not just because I got to see the behind-the-scenes process of someone figuring out their art, but because I was mesmerized by Sam’s absolute lack of fear.

Even when the room fell into silence, he just shrugged it off, laughed, and kept going. “Well, I guess I won’t be doing that one again!” he said, crossing out a failed joke in his notebook. Later, when we grabbed a drink, I was struck by how happy he was. “Yeah, I was so bad!” he said, grinning. “The show is gonna be good though.”

Sam wasn’t just unafraid of failure—he enjoyed it. He understood that taking risks was the only way to grow as an artist, and that nothing teaches you more than a bombed set. “I’ve lived and continue to live out a lot of people’s worst nightmares in the service of making something that I feel is right and ambitious enough to be worth watching eventually,” he told me recently.

Failing on Purpose.

It made me think about my own experience with improv comedy a couple of years ago. I had signed up for classes with a few friends and stepped into a world that felt completely foreign to me: creating in the moment. Improv is all about reacting, trusting the flow of whatever is already happening, and the less you think, the better you are.

At first, I loved it. The silliness, the spontaneity, the playfulness. It was fun, low-stakes. But then we started performing for an audience, and something in me locked up.

The fact that we couldn’t rehearse before performing made my brain short-circuit. How will I ever be ready? How will I know I’m good? How do I prepare myself to be worthy of being on a stage? What if I bomb? What if I make a mistake?

The more I worried about losing control, the more unnatural I became on stage. The more I tried to control the outcome, the more rigid and disconnected I felt. And after a few performances that left me wanting to crawl into a hole and disappear, I quit. At the time, I lacked the self-awareness to understand why I did. And because I was still competing, it wouldn’t have made sense to unlearn a skill I still needed every single day.

But now, here I am, trying to figure it out. How do you unlearn something that has been useful to you your entire life? How do you reshape a mindset that once served you so well but is now holding you back?

Of course, it’s not about getting rid of perfectionism entirely. Figure skating taught me une exigence—a level of discipline and precision—that is an invaluable strength. But maybe it’s about loosening my grip just enough to make space for something else.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the idea of failing on purpose. What if I trained myself to value failure more than I value perfection? What if I started seeing it as a sign of growth rather than something to be ashamed of? What if, like Sam, I could feel proud of failing?

With that mindset, I decided one day that I would finish a song. Not a good song—just a song. I wouldn’t judge it, I wouldn’t overanalyze it, I would just finish it. A few hours later, I had one. It was the first time I had ever completed a full song, and ironically, it turned out to be the one I liked best.

A few days later, still riding that momentum, I decided to perform it at an open mic night. I hadn’t rehearsed it much, I was still unsure about some parts, but I told myself: I’m going to fail on purpose. Was it a Grammy-worthy performance? No. But it was better than if I had waited endlessly for the day it would be perfect.

I’m trying to carry this energy with me now. The point isn’t to be perfect anymore—it’s just to move and see where it leads. And instead of letting fear dictate my choices, I’m learning to trust my own taste.

What if the judge I tried to please most was me?

Perfectionism got me far, but maybe I don’t need it to go where I’m heading next. Maybe real growth isn’t about getting everything right—it’s about being brave enough to get things wrong.

The painting I chose to illustrate this text is The Entombment by Michelangelo. I saw it at the National Gallery in London during the same trip when I watched Sam’s show. I remember standing in front of it, completely moved—not just by the figures, which seemed to be caught mid-motion, but by the feeling that something was left unsaid, unfinished.

I didn’t realize at first that it was unfinished. But when I later researched imperfections in art, I came across this:

Michaelangelo’s contemporary, the historian Giorgio Vasari once observed that Michelangelo's works ‘were of such a nature that he found it impossible to express such grandiose and awesome conceptions with his hands, and he often abandoned his works, or rather ruined many of them... for fear that he might seem less than perfect.’

I wonder how many unfinished pieces exist in the world—artworks, performances, ideas—that were never shared because their creators feared they would be judged too harshly. How many moments of raw beauty, of quiet imperfection, have been locked away when they might have moved someone like me? What if the things we leave incomplete, the things we hesitate to show, are the very things that could resonate most with others?

I think about that now when I step onto the ice, when I sit with an unfinished song, when I hesitate to put something out into the world. Maybe the value of creation isn’t in its perfection, but in its existence. In the fact that someone, somewhere, might stumble upon it—and be moved.

Lately, I’ve been finding my way back to the ice—but on my own terms. Not chasing scores, not proving anything, just exploring what movement feels like when it belongs entirely to me. Maybe that’s in skating, maybe it’s somewhere unexpected. But this time, I’m not measuring success by how perfect it looks—I’m measuring it by how much it makes me feel alive.