I have always struggled to find a thing to commit to. The feeling of having a cause or organisation or community to really rally behind and serve is something I’ve always envied in my peers. So, the prospect of devising and leading a ‘worthwhile’, that is both impactful and effective, was scary. The past few months have been terrifying. I have spent many an afternoon, witching hour, and sunrise chain smoking outside my flat with the contents of my stomach desperately wanting to be released. Especially, having chosen a self-defined project with my supervisor, not only was I `leading’ a such a project, but I was where the buck started and ended. This fact really crystalised for me when the day before my first workshop, through a combination of physical responses to nerves and genuine illness, I was lying in bed desperately willing my body to heal. Because otherwise a bunch of people would show up to a comic shop in Cumbernauld the following afternoon waiting for an insecure university student to show and up and talk and be left disappointed with an afternoon wasted.

Funnily enough, the Leadership in Action project wasn’t all bad, it was just extraordinarily stressful. I didn’t realise this fact until I was packing away my things about halfway through my little workshop tour having people walk up to me thanking me for providing something that they wouldn’t have got otherwise. Only after I had realised that it was in fact two hours and not twenty minutes later and that I had actually loved those two elusive hours. Only when I realised that I was going to miss my bus home because I was too engrossed in talking with these people on things that I was passionate about did I realise that this was something I want to do for a very long time. On a personal level, this project allowed me to delve into something, truly organise myself and my life as a means to host and do something that was really cool. The unpredictability of how things would go if people would show up and if they did whether or not they would gain anything or even care about what I was trying to discuss weighed heavy for a long time. And whilst I didn’t get crowds lined up to discuss critical thinking and popular media and how this can affect us in our daily lives through the medium of a creative workshop, I still count this project as a success. The number of times that I heard someone say ``I’ve never thought about that before’’ or sit in silence after I’ve asked a very simple follow-up question was invaluable. The point of my project was to encourage and make people think about things that I have thought about since teenagerhood and to genuinely get that type of response from at least one person meant the world to me. The number of genuinely interesting and young creatives and creators that I engaged with through this project was extremely inspiring. I was hoping to reach some young people and hopefully encourage a savvier version of a media consumer, instead I had people attending who stake their livelihoods on creating popular media as well as teenagers who spent most, if not all, available time, and money to making these comics, scripts, shows, books. To get that type of reaction to these types of people was enriching and gave me some semblance of a material impact that my musings and intrusive thoughts over the past few years at university could have.

The thing about leading and organising most of a project is that any problems are yours. And this means that flexibility is probably a good thing to be before you snap. Random opportunities arose and went away over the months of planning this, and these were often terrifying in the most exciting way possible. Prime example being I received an email from BBC Scotland out of the blue to advertise my workshops on air on one of my chain-smoking bouts with the first of many cups of coffee for the day in hand. My plan for the day was to go over feedback and revise and practice my workshop for the 100^th time that week, but this was quickly uprooted. The number of people and organisations I contacted over the past few months led to an ever-increasing inbox full of emails from various actors ranging from extremely useful, to middling, to absolutely useless. I have gained a lot in having most if not all the onus on me to sort these things out, something which still provides me with an extreme amount of anxiety and worry. If nothing else I have learned a lot about being adaptable by being the only one available to advertise, liaise and coordinate these workshops and this project, doing things I never thought I would be stressing about.

On a much more basic level, the workshops in and of themselves were extremely chaotic and varied in terms of focus. At this point I could recite my script, which has been revised countless times at this point, and run what I thought the `best’ version of my workshop at the drop of hat, just give me some paper and a pencil. But looking back and trying to find some universal overarching narrative themes from the workshops I ran seem impossible, as each one was so unique in terms of what it was like. There were several ones where my prompts were internalised as expected, and the responses that I got from participants were predictable, where everything was done on time, and where my job seemed very easy. There were also times where this was really not the case. One of my favourite workshops I ran was the farthest thing from whatever I had planned or imagined the workshop would end up being. The main aim and focus of these workshops was to encourage, especially young people aged 14-25, to question how popular media influences their habits of thinking about war, conflict and peace; and how this affects how on a real life day-to-day perception of real life conflict. This is what I had planned for. To start off from a familiar starting point of a typical ``war story’’, promote some discussion around this, ask some difficult questions about why the group has chosen what they have and to show how this affects our habits of thinking about conflict, how this is possibly detrimental and strategies to deal with this. What I did not plan for was a 50+ year old man as the only person to show up for one particular workshop with an idea he had for a new take on a `war story’ comic. All the talking points and things that I wanted to tease out over the course of the next 1.5 to 2 hours of workshop time was told to me by this man within the first 10 minutes of us introducing each other. Having said that, the original structure and plan of the workshop broke down completely, but what was left was a discussion about this comic that he had thought of the night before in bed a couple hours before the witching hour. It was a discussion between two people who shared a passion for stories and how we tell them, with some 20 to 30 years between them, and how we as a society mostly tell them, how this is flawed and what a truly novel approach to `war stories’ would look like, or if it was even possible. Thus far, whenever I have had to adapt my plan and my workshop material it was to specifically highlight or bring home one or two talking points that might stick when the rest of them would’ve taken several more hours of workshops to bring up. Up until this point in my Leadership in Action journey, the purpose of the workshop design and the recursive revision process had been to optimise as many habits of thinking about war, conflict, and peace in the stories we tell and experience as possible. But this experience in a small comic shop in Aberdeen put into focus the real reason behind this project. To encourage discussion around something that isn’t taught in schools or at university but should be an act that everyone does and reflects on as a habit of daily life.

As if very much by accident, in the process of organising and running these workshops across several venues across Scotland, I’ve gained a lot in terms of exposure to what I want to do after I leave my undergraduate degree. My supervisor, project manager at a partnered organisation, and I all thought it best to run such workshops at comic shops as venues to try and attract as many people as possible, given that they each have their own respective communities on a local level. Some of these venues proved invaluable as they were very much in touch at the local level with the community I was trying to attract to these workshops and really facilitated my project. This exposure meant that I got given access to a very closeknit community which I probably otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Part of the reason I applied for the Laidlaw programme in the first place since I don’t get the opportunity to study and promote discussion around comics and popular culture otherwise. As I continue my journey into the scholarship in this field, I have met so many people that know someone that is friends with someone who live lives and do work that, up until now, I only ever thought a fantasy to have. The most obvious example of this was someone who literally worked in the comics publishing industry for some 30 odd years and has just finished their PhD in War Comics and was good mates with the professor running the masters programme I was looking at. Also, as said before, the venues I visited over summer were invaluable for this project, and as I seek to run or be a part of similar projects to my Leadership in Action project in future, I now have a network of some very competent, passionate, and accommodating people as I seek to translate my passion and interest into something actually useful to other people.

Some of the moments I have experienced over the past few months and the number of things I have learned that will inevitably prove useful from completing this Leadership in Action project are truly invaluable. Although not a smooth ride, and not without its fair share of stress and caffeine consumption, I do wish this fate upon anyone else in remotely the same boat as me. I hope that, in future, if any prospective Laidlaw scholar looking to run their own self-defined project that sets them up for their longer-term goals in reaching people and educating them on their passion has as good support as I did with my supervisor, Dr Alice König, and my project manager, Kirsty Law from Helm Arts. On that note, any support that I could offer that is even remotely akin to the support I got I would happily give as the experiences I’ve had as a result of this project I wish everyone can get in their daily life.

In short, the Leadership in Action has forced me to do things that I hate and detest, but as a means to create and do something that was worthwhile, that I value and am passionate about and eventually has been truly enriching and fulfilling. I have met some very cool people that, as I try to dip my toe into academia/teaching in future, I will carry with me as validation and as a reason to get on with it as I stare absentmindedly at the first licks of orange light reach past the horizon, cigarette in hand.