An hour before she was due on stage for the first show of her month-long Edinburgh fringe run, Nina Gilligan was lying in a dark room, hoping that her medication would take effect. She was experiencing an intense migraine, one of the symptoms of her chronic pain condition fibromyalgia, which affects an estimated one in 20 people, mostly women.
All month, on top of the universal fringe stresses – financial risk, career peril, social pressures – she has been dealing with an additional, invisible challenge.
“You can’t time it. You’re not in control of it,” she says. “So I’m in bed, and I know I’m going to have to drag myself out, take more medication on top of the medication I’ve already had, and pull myself through it.”
Gilligan’s migraines not only cause pain, but also temporary memory loss, leaving her grasping for words. Not ideal for a standup. They usually appear in a three-day cycle. “You get the aura symptoms, where I get the memory loss. Then the headache. Then the hangover. And it just repeats.”
At that night’s performance, you wouldn’t know it. Gilligan was sparkling, hilarious, in control, as she performed Goldfish, a complex show exploring her fibromyalgia, memory loss, and the things she won’t forget: the times her pain has been dismissed and one particular violation at the hands of a man in comedy. She’s learned to “mask” the pain, she says.
Getting a diagnosis for her myriad symptoms – pain, difficulty swallowing, digestive issues, fatigue – wasn’t easy. She encountered a lack of knowledge and a lot of incredulity from health professionals. At one show, when she mentioned fibromyalgia, “A junior doctor shouted out: ‘It’s not real!’”
In her show Square Peg, Bella Humphries discusses symptoms that were wrongly diagnosed for years. Humphries has premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), an endocrine condition that affects up to 8% of people who menstruate. During the luteal phase of her cycle, the one to two weeks in the run-up to a period, Humphries experiences symptoms that disrupt her life, from deep depression and anxiety to muscular pain and overwhelming fatigue. “I get a real sense of paranoia, like everyone is staring at me, and often when I wake up, I feel like I’ve committed a crime,” she says.
Spending the full month in Edinburgh guaranteed this would form part of her festival experience. “In the past 18 months, my PMDD has got worse,” she says. “PMDD doesn’t marry very well with stress and 18 months coincides with when I decided to do the fringe!”
Stress, as well as loud noise and bright lights, can trigger Gilligan’s symptoms, so there’s apprehension. Humphries has similar concerns: “I’m away from all of my support systems, things that I do to feel good and safeguard myself.”
Last year, Garrett Millerick was feeling a fresh dread as August approached. He’s been attending the fringe since he was 19, first in student plays, then directing theatre, then performing standup comedy. “When I stopped drinking, the fringe became this point in the calendar that I was terrified of, because it had been, for all of those years, associated with partying,” he says. “I had no idea how I was going to deal with that.”
He documented the shift in his 2023 show, Never Had It So Good, and is now 18 months sober. We meet for coffee early on a Saturday morning. “If this had been 2015, I’d have been scraping myself out of bed and giving you half answers,” he says. “Then I would leave this place having a breakdown about what I said, did I make a prat out of myself?”
In 2022, worrying about building post-pandemic career momentum, Millerick “really leaned on booze”. He’d start with a post-show beer and end up drinking about 12 pints a day. “You’re at your most vulnerable when you come off stage because you’re full of adrenaline. Your brain goes: ‘Chase the high, chase the high.’ So after the show, you’ve got to go home. Shower, change, reset, have a cup of tea.”
It was easy to “romanticise” drinking as part of comedy. But it turns out, there had always been other sober people at the fringe. One friend, who first took him to get help, told him: “There will never be a party or a bar where there’s not another person around who will be able to help.” As he joined the networks of support in the city: “I now know sober people who I’m able to reach out to and speak to any time.”
To protect herself, Humphries is taking antidepressants, exercising regularly, and avoiding socialising at certain times, “because my social battery gets drained very easily”. Gilligan is prioritising rest too, avoiding additional gigs to focus on her show: “Your energy becomes a precious resource and you’ve got to work out how you’re going to spend it.”
Two weeks later, we speak again. Gilligan has got to know the owners of a quiet cafe where she can recharge. Mercifully, her worst day of pain came on a designated day off, but her symptoms crept into some shows. “I’ve had a couple of moments where I’ve had to stop and can’t find words,” she says.
Humphries is now in the phase of her cycle where she is flooded with uplifting hormones, but her worst day came about a week in. “I just felt like there’s no point, I can’t see any good in anything,” she says. “But none of it was about the festival.” Now that Humphries understands PMDD and how it affects her: “I don’t panic. I’m aware now that I don’t actually feel like that, it’s just a symptom.”
This did make performing the show harder, “but I still enjoy doing comedy when I’m feeling like that, because it’s the one time I’m not thinking about anything else.”
Gilligan agrees – reminding herself to enjoy each show and be in the moment with each audience helped. “When you have a chronic illness, you prioritise the things that you love, and I love this job.”
Millerick stuck to his strategies. “Last year, I remembered that performing standup comedy is my favourite thing, that’s the party. All of the other stuff was ruining the party for me. It took not being absolutely smashed to remember why I love it. I’ve enjoyed these two fringes a lot more than in the previous years.” Observing that many people’s mid-fringe breakdowns are exacerbated by alcohol has only strengthened his conviction.
All three mention human connection. Gilligan’s son lives in Edinburgh and has cooked for her. Friends and family supported Humphries too: “I hope they know how much it means. For a long time, I dealt with it by myself.” Joking about PMDD has helped her “feel some power over it”, she says. “I still wish I didn’t have it, but it made it less scary.” Hearing from audience members who have PMDD, “weighs out any bad stuff. When I felt alone, hearing people talk about it was such a lifesaver.”
Millerick has had comedians express curiosity about sobriety, and encourages them to reach out to anyone who has spoken publicly about alcoholism.
Talking about both sexual assault and fibromyalgia has felt “empowering” for Gilligan and many women have approached her after shows. “They feel validated,” she says. “Women suppress their rage and their stories, because essentially, they don’t feel like they’re going to be believed. Don’t let secrets make you ill.”
Humphries says: “Just getting to this point, for some people, is a huge achievement. There are a lot of things that people are struggling with that are so far removed from the festival.” Looking back to the fear she felt in July, she now feels proud. “There were times when I felt like I wouldn’t be able to do this. It took some planning and sacrifices, but I managed to make it work for me.”