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The Shit Show Is Over: Andi Osho at 53
Andi Osho is in a good place. At 53, the Blue Lights actor, comedian, coach, novelist…(the list is endless), looks incredible, all radiant skin and hair with a sprinkling of silver. When we meet, at the Ivy Club, in London’s West End she’s wearing funky black trousers and an oatmeal cashmere cardigan over a white shirt and black tie - a pretty, pearlescent brooch pinned to the cardigan. The outfit strikes me as thoughtfully put together, an expression of her masculine and feminine sides, but then, it’s obvious within minutes that Osho is a very thoughtful, enlightened woman, who, at midlife, is at the peak of her powers in every way. Does she feel like this?
“Listen, I’m not in the promised land yet!” she laughs. “Experience, ageing … it’s a process, isn’t it? A period of transition. I’m just fully on board with the idea there’s something brilliant on the other side, to do with wisdom, being the nurturer of ideas and movements and businesses. I feel strongly that this (her midlife) is not a breakdown, but a breakthrough, and I want to embrace that, because the alternative feels like hankering after something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Osho is very good at transitions. In fact, her life feels like one undaunted transition and reinvention after another. Brought up by a single mum in the East End, she started out in TV post-production, then left the security of what she calls those ‘proper desk jobs’ in her late twenties to become first a comedian, then an actor, with roles in things like Line of Duty, Breeders and I May Destroy You; she is currently playing the resilient Sandra Cliff in the brilliant Blue Lights, the police drama set in Belfast. Making those transitions work especially in terms of the inconsistency of acting work, Osho did many jobs that would “put hairs on your chest”, as she says. “I was part of the nighttime economy, really: bar work, clubs, I was even a tequila girl at one point…” So what, from those experiences, does she draw on now?
“All of it. Because all of it has informed something. Like many immigrants, my mum had come from Nigeria to this country starting from nothing, and so the goal was always a secure job (Osho’s mother, Charlotte, was an NHS nurse). A lot of immigrants’ kids had that software installed. When I decided to become an actor at 29, the 9-5 in TV post-production just wasn’t viable anymore. That’s when I had to have all those survivalist jobs.”
She tells me it was “not without fear” to give up that security, but what she found was that the freedom it gave her was what she needed to thrive creatively.
“I remember being at home one day, and I didn’t have any work. And I was like - I’m going to go to the park. I’d never done that before, you know, be home and able to do what the fuck I wanted. I feel like that fed into where I am today because it was a change in my very being, the beginning of my evolution out of this mindset that had been wired into me since childhood that I had to be tied to a company. I realised it’s ok to take a risk, a punt with this acting thing. It was a compulsion, a feeling of ‘my spirit won’t be settled if I don’t do this thing’, even though I know it’s going to be challenging.”
It’s this feeling, this instinct for what feels right, that Osho calls her ‘inner navigation system’. “I’m led by it,” she says, “but I’ve had to learn how to listen to it. Earlier this year, for example, I decided I wanted to make more bold steps into coaching.” (Osho already had a creative coaching and mentoring business called Creative Sauce.) “That meant me getting proper coaching training. It meant a big time and financial commitment, and that same fear of ‘should I be doing this?’ came on me, but I just thought: what does my inner navigation system tell me? And here I am now, halfway through my coaching training.”
I ask her if she feels this ability to tap into her navigation system, the fact she has one at all, is what she’d call ‘wisdom’.
“Yes, I feel like wisdom is not about building experience necessarily, it’s more about tuning into what that experience has taught you. So sometimes people go, ‘Oh, I just trust my gut,’ and actually they’re not listening to their gut; they’re listening to their fear. And we’ve all done that, but for me, it’s learning, ah no, that feels scary and hard, but it feels right.”
We discuss wisdom at some length, like the two wise midlife ladies we are. I tell Andi about a definition of wisdom I heard and liked recently, ‘judging rightly’, and she tells me hers:
“Pattern recognition plus compassion,” she says. “It’s this idea, as you get older, that wisdom comes because you can say, ‘Oh, I’ve seen this situation before and I always react in this way,’ but the difference is now, you can be compassionate towards yourself.”
I’m curious about Osho’s comedy career, which she only began because acting work was inconsistent, yet which was knock-out successful, with shows at the Palladium and the O2. How did it feed into her life and work now? What did she learn from it?
She doesn’t hesitate: “How to access the Berocca version of myself,” she says. “Basically, the funniest, sharpest, most confident version. All comedians have to play that version of themselves, because it allows them to be hyper-present - so important in stand-up. You have to be absolutely in the moment, thinking, this is working right now, what else could I tag that with? Or, that person isn’t very engaged. Let me see if I can wrap them in. You have to have your comedy head on the whole time. You can’t afford for the ordinary you to step in.”
So, it’s kind of like a superpower, I say, this ability to put your ‘ordinary’ self aside and shine on stage? She agrees and gives me a perfect example. In 2012, amid a period of severe depression, when Osho was unable to get out of bed, she was forced to do a show at the O2 because her agent wouldn’t cancel it. “But you know, I wasn’t thinking ‘oh I’m so depressed, I can’t believe I’m here.’ I was just in it, connecting with these folk. Hyper-present. Then I went off stage and back to wherever I’d been in my head.”
Osho tells me the rules of joke-writing that she got from her years as a stand-up (she retired from comedy in 2012) also came in handy for novel-writing. “For example, the fact that hard sounds are funnier than soft – so cock is funnier than penis,” she deadpans.
Her first novel, Asking for a Friend, was published when Osho was 48 and is essentially about the dating exploits of three female friends. One could argue, I say, that dating is traditionally a subject for a younger writer - what was she able to bring to the page at 48 that she wouldn’t have done at 28?
“The thing with Asking for a Friend was that I’d had multiple revelations about relationships by that point that explained to me why my own relationship history has been such a shit show: the obsessing over certain people, relationships going off the rails…”
One of these revelations was that you could have different attachment styles for different relationships. “So, in my intimate relationships, I had an anxious attachment style, but with my friends, I was avoidant,” she says. “Even just knowing that is so important because when I meet somebody now (Osho is currently single), I know that I’m predisposed towards anxious attachment, so I can monitor myself and tell myself, don’t worry, let them do the thing…”
The other thing Osho learned from writing about dating, she tells me, was that you didn’t have to put so much importance on these dates, but also that “you could configure everything about relationships, not just the dates bit, in a way that works for you. That blew my mind,” she says. “Because I had so ingested this fairy tale notion of what relationships should be, that it left no room for my own happiness, or any other version of what one could look like.”
There is a guardedness about Osho, a wariness in her eyes when I ask her a question, that I wonder is what she’s talking about when she says she is avoidant in friendships. “So, you don’t like to be too needed?” I say.
“Exactly that.”
Osho’s father left when she was seven, which, she explains, no doubt contributed to her self-reliance.
“I think I felt like I had to be my own father in some ways,” she says. “That’s probably where the guardedness came from. Also, I was very competitive, which gives off a male energy. Boyfriends would say, ‘You’ve got too much male energy, you need some female friends,’ and this would annoy me because it was kind of true.”
Osho didn’t have many female friends when she was younger, though, and attributes this to a combination of factors that meant she found it hard to trust women. She’d had a problematic relationship with her mum and a bad experience at her all-girls school. “Most of my mates were men. I just found them more straightforward. It might be something to do with my late ADHD diagnosis, but I found women so much harder to read.”
An ‘awful lot of therapy’ in her 30s and 40s, she tells me, has ‘softened’ her, and now she has fewer friends but more female friends. Osho has clearly ‘done the work’, constantly improving herself. “One thing I’ve realised about boundaries,” she says, “is that it doesn’t always feel good to uphold them, and there are right and wrong ways of doing so.” She tells me how recently she upset one of her female friends. “I said something that didn’t need to be articulated,” she says. “But I did the clean-up afterwards. I texted to say I’m sorry if I upset you.” Her friend appreciated that. The ‘clean-up’ is very important, I think.
Osho has so many strings to her bow, it’s actually rather dazzling: she’s a businesswoman, a podcast host, an actor, a writer…. What does she think of as her real job?
“To be fully expressed and help others do the same. That’s what’s in my heart, that’s my overall purpose. What really fires me up, you see, is the idea of people being whole. I get so lit up when someone goes, I’m thinking of writing a book or becoming a photographer. But it’s not just about being creative - I’d be as excited about someone wanting to set up a business - it’s about helping people to access all parts of themselves and not feeling like they have to leave any part out of the light. That’s what I do in my creative coaching.”
I ask her if she feels a kind of urgency at this age to get on and fulfil that purpose.
“Yes, look, we can’t fuck around,” she says with characteristic bluntness. “In your 20s, you think you’ll live forever. Death seems like this abstract thing. When I turned 50, I had this very real awareness of, ‘Oh. I’m really going to die.’ It really felt close. But it wasn’t a dark, depressing feeling at all. It was incredibly empowering.”
And as if she hasn’t got enough to do, Osho also serves midlife women by charting her perimenopause on her YouTube channel. She tells me it’s not the physical stuff (“you know, the dry vaginas,” she says, er…drily) that she’s interested in. It’s the ‘heart and soul’ work of midlife, the self-worth.
“When I see a beautiful older woman on Instagram, it’s not her physical beauty I recognise but her energy, and I want to be like that too. Not out of a desire to be validated, but because I love myself enough that I’m like, let me just put an outfit together and do my face, because yeah, I’m fucking hot - do you know what I mean, though?” she laughs. “And that attitude takes cultivating, because as women, we’re not thinking in a vacuum, you’re doing it in the face of societal pressure and beliefs that women’s value comes from being youthful.”
And how does she feel about her 53-year-old body? “Well, it’s a different body to my forty-year-old one, so it’s really about learning what this body is capable of and enjoying and appreciating this body. For me, there has to be a process of saying goodbye to those old bodies, the one where her knees didn’t hurt, she wasn’t tired all the time…. I had to grieve that person before being able to embrace this one.”
This ability to ‘let go’ is another of Osho’s many superpowers. “I think that’s probably one of the things that makes women sad,” she says. “They don’t consciously let go of the hair colour, or tightness in certain places, or fertility, or eyesight. If we are still hankering after those things when they’re gone, then we’re constantly living in this state of ‘not wanting what is’, and that is such a painful space to be in. Letting go creates capacity for new brilliant stuff to come in.”
Andi joins us at Power Years Live on Friday 6 November at Arding & Hobbs, Clapham Junction. She will be in conversation with Poorna Bell, Emma Campbell and Lorraine Candy. Expect honesty, laughter and a room full of women who know that experience is their greatest advantage. There are just a few tickets left.
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