Program: Sashi Perera on reinvention

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Sashi: I remember my dad had called his friends to let them know the news, and when he was ringing people, they were just kind of like, this is a joke, right? This is one of the worst jokes you've ever made.

Yumi: Comedian Sashi Perera was 28 years old when she devastated her friends, her family and her whole community. Success in Sashi's Sri Lankan Australian family followed this formula. Get a good job, marry a good husband and make good babies. She was on track to tick those boxes, and then she junked it all.

Sashi: My brother and my ex-fiancée were hugging each other. My mum is just off a little bit into the distance next to them. She's crying.

Yumi: The reason for the tears. Sashi had brought 250 people from Australia and around the world to Colombo, Sri Lanka for a wedding that wasn't going ahead. Sashi grew up in a tight knit migrant community in Perth that valued familial obligation, high achievement and financial stability. Everyone around her worked hard and she learnt that relentless achievement is quite helpful if you want to ignore negative emotions. But emotions, pesky as they are, can only be squashed down for so long. And when they exploded out of her pressure cooker, Sashi started questioning the path laid out for her. I'm Yumi Stynes, ladies, we need to talk about rewriting success with Sashi Perera. Let me set the scene. Sashi and everyone she loves are at a New Year's Eve party at the fanciest hotel in Sri Lanka's capital. The party is Great Gatsby themed. Women are wearing glamorous flapper dresses and long strings of pearls, and the music is pumping. The year before, Sashi and her fiancé had chosen this place to get married on the 3rd of January in two days time, Great Gatsby New Year's Eve is supposed to be a fun pre-wedding event, but now it's the only event.

Sashi: It was just this chain of absolute disaster.

Yumi: Two months before the Gatsby party Sashi had told her then fiancé she couldn't go through with the wedding. Then they had to make the stomach churning calls to their families with the bad news. But flights were booked and the venue paid for, so everyone showed up anyway. Many of them expecting Sashi to get over her cold feet and go through with the wedding. So on the breakup holiday from hell, Sashi's friends and family are drowning their sorrows instead.

Sashi: My brother and my ex-fiance were hugging each other and crying about how they would never be the brothers they thought they were going to be. My mum is just off a little bit into the distance next to them. She's crying.

Yumi: When Sashi backed out of the wedding, she also ended her relationship of seven and a half years.

Sashi: We were very, very close with each other's families. His brothers were my brothers. My brother was his brother. A lot of people to let down at the same time.

Yumi: Even though she knew she couldn't go through with her wedding, Sashi was consumed with guilt.

Sashi: It just sticks in my mind as a really formative experience of creating a lot of chaos for a lot of people that you love, like, not just in terms of kind of severing the romantic connections, but also with Sri Lankan communities, particularly like we were really tired, you know, like we were very, very close with each other's families. I remember my dad had called his friends to let them know the news. They were just kind of like, this is a joke, right? This is one of the worst jokes you've ever made. He's like, no, this is this is for real. It's not going ahead.

Yumi: Prior to the pre-wedding meltdown, Sashi had been living with her fiancé in Tanzania when her feelings of discomfort started brewing. Before she called off the wedding, Sashi had a secret plan.

Sashi: What if I go through with this and we just get, like, a quiet divorce in, like, six months time. So anytime you're thinking about a quiet divorce, going into a wedding like that's a sign.

Yumi: All right, so let's go back to 2015. You've just blown up your long term relationship, and you've disappointed your entire peer group and cohort of family and friends.

Sashi: Everybody.

Yumi: Everybody's baffled by you. And there was tears, destruction. And you're there in the middle of the chaos. So in the aftermath of that, I'm guessing that you moved back with your parents to put the doona over your head.

Sashi: Uh, super incorrect. Could not be more wrong. I thought, why don't I move to Egypt? My whole family was like, wait, what? No, no, don't do that. And I was like, none of you know me and don't understand me and don't support me in any way. I'm moving to Egypt.

Yumi: Cairo was chaotic and noisy, and Sashi found herself going to lots of expat parties to try and find her place.

Sashi: I was just feeling so unmoored in everything. I did get to lose myself in the city, which was great, but that also meant that I felt quite lost a lot.

Yumi: Were you drinking at the time?

Sashi: Yeah a lot. I just didn't want to go home. Like when I went back to my apartment and went back to the reality of now being alone. I think there's so many single people who just love their lives and love being single, and that wasn't where I was at. I was just very aware that I could have been a wife sleeping next to my husband in Tanzania, and instead I'm coming back to this apartment, having blown up my life and being the villain of this story. And I just didn't want to sit in any of the uncomfortableness of that and work through that. I just wanted to avoid it. And that just meant I was out a lot.

Yumi: Tell us about starting to date again after so long with one partner.

Sashi: No. So weird. Right? I mean, have you ever had to enter the dating pool after.

Yumi: Well, I should be there now. Um, because it's been, like, 4 or 5 years.

Sashi: Wow.

Yumi: I'm still just hanging on the sidelines.

Sashi: Yeah. See, so I got the advice that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone. And I thought, okay, well, I just got to get in there.

Yumi: This was the era of Tinder's heyday. But Sashi had never been single while dating apps were a thing.

Sashi: I didn't really know any of the nuances of, like, how it's supposed to work. So I think the first person I matched with, I was like, hey, do you want to meet up? And he was like, are you crazy? It was kind of like coming to all of it again. Like relearning so much that I'd already known when I was 17, 18. It was weird.

Yumi: In the years after calling off her wedding, Sashi moved to three different countries, worked long hours, and drank herself into oblivion, all to outrun feelings of shame and failure. She was nostalgic for the comfort of her relationship with her ex-fiancé and was flinging herself into situationships.

Sashi: I think I used to be quite a love addict, you know? Like, I just loved being in love, where I knew what it was like to find and love a best friend and sleep with a best friend and wake up with a best friend. And I just wanted to sift through all the junk to get to that again. And I think I was seeking that quite in all the wrong places. And and so I slept with a lot of junk and dated a lot of junk.

Yumi: So she fell for an American guy with a strong southern drawl. They tag teamed as international girlfriend and boyfriend for eight months. And then. So she got a phone call from his other girlfriend.

Sashi: I got cheated on and it was awful, and I just felt really broken and lost and like, I would never trust anyone again.

Yumi: With her tail between her legs. Sashi moved back to Australia. Her romantic life was failing and her professional life wasn't giving her the joy she'd been promised. And then, very unexpectedly, the path that Sashi had been seeking revealed itself to her while she was in the audience at a gig at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Sashi: I'd gone to watch Nazeem Hussain do this sell out show, and I think seeing a man who looked like my brother and just hold all of town Hall with just a microphone was very captivating for me. I just, I loved being a part of that.

Yumi: Sashi mustered up some courage and signed up for an entry level stand up comedy competition. At this point, she's never done any comedy before. Nothing.

Sashi: I remember when I was on the tram on the way to the competition, it was kind of like, hey, you could just pretend that you did this. None of your friends are coming to it. No one knows that whether or not you actually went through with it, you can just turn around and go home in an hour and say, you know, it didn't work out. I felt really, really nervous just before I stepped on stage, but the second I got my first laugh, I was completely hooked.

Yumi: Sashi had a knack for keeping a crowd entertained. She even made the competition's state finals. But stand up comedy was never the plan, right? The lawyer thing had been buried in deep since she was a kid.

Sashi: Your parents are so formative in those years, right? And they'd always told me that I was very good at arguing. They were like, go be a lawyer. And I was like, okay. So I either wanted to do that or I wanted to be an archaeologist. And dad told me that everything worth finding had already been found. Don't worry about it. So, yeah.

Yumi: So Sashi had been carefully steered away from dead end pursuits and towards a more secure career. All this effort was going to pay off one day.

Sashi: The weird thing is, I thought the game was high school, but then you get into uni and then you learn you have to work like three times as hard, and then you get out of uni and then it gets harder and you're like, ah, when does fun start? They're fun.

Yumi: So in her early 30s, Sashi tentatively dipped her toe into the fun pool. She moved to the more lifestyle friendly public sector and continued her 9 to 5 while doing stand up on the side. She met a guy called Charlie with cute dimples and no evidence of an international girlfriend. As Sashi's comedy career started taking off, balancing her law career got harder and harder and she was working herself into the ground again. Then she got the worst kind of wake up call.

Sashi: Watching my dad push himself, retire, get diagnosed with stage four cancer and then pass away four months later, you know, he just kind of kept putting off his break. He was like, I'll rest later. You know, the fun is later. I must work now. The work is now.

Yumi: You have to deserve the fun.

Sashi: You must earn the fun. Over 70 years of your life. And so when he passed away, I very much made the decision to take a step back.

Yumi: So your dad died. And that was a kick up the bum for you because, shit, he didn't. He didn't have his fun in during life.

Sashi: He just worked so hard. Both of my parents worked so, so hard to give us everything that we had. And I feel like it's something in the migrant mentality, when things have been so hard for so long that even when it got to a stage, the mortgage was paid off. My brother and I are grown ups. We have our own lives now. Dad still has this switch in his head saying, you know it's not enough. By the time he got diagnosed, it was one month after he retired. So I honestly still think he only retired because he was literally dying.

Yumi: Wow.

Sashi: And it was just so formative in my brain because I think it was like, oh, it doesn't matter how much money I have or how much money I make, it will never feel like I'm safe and secure. It just won't feel that way. So I've got to retrain my brain. Wow.

Yumi: This is so aligned with my life story. Not that this is about me, but my dad died in very similar circumstances.

Sashi: Wow.

Yumi: He had so many dreams of things he'd do, but he never did any of them because he was too busy working his later. Yeah. And then cancer grabbed him and took him.

Sashi: I'm so sorry. Was it really quick as well?

Yumi: Even a two year diagnosis, which he followed. He followed the doctor's orders and died exactly two years later.

Sashi: So obedient. Even in death. That's really nice.

Yumi: Terrible. But one thing I want to ask you about that. Was your dad able to see your success as a comedian before he died?

Sashi: No. So that's probably one of the saddest things for me personally, because he'd seen me do gigs, you know, but he saw me do gigs to, like, three people in open mic rooms, which is very different. And it's only actually after he died, I thought, all right, I don't care about being cool and I don't care about being perfect.

Yumi: After her dad's death, Sachi quit her well-paid and supremely sensible lawyer job. She also stopped caring about being perfect or being cool. She started sharing snippets from her comedy sets online.

Sashi: My account grew from 1000 followers to 100,000 followers in three months time, and everything that I've gotten since then has all come on the back of his death, where I just thought, you know what? I'm just gonna do it.

Yumi: Well, can we put a word or a phrase to that? Is it that you just stopped caring so much, or you gave fewer fucks, or you just took the gamble? Like, how do you quantify it?

Sashi: I think it's so weird being a human right, because you have to hold two thoughts in your head. One is that you have to live for now with the thought that but you are going to die someday, you know? But you don't know how and you don't know when. And I think a lot of us like to not think about the latter. I definitely wasn't thinking about the latter. And what his death did for me was, oh, I'm gonna die. And if I die, maybe I should just do the thing, you know? Enjoy now, because he didn't know that he was waiting to retire, and then he was going to live his life. And it's like, do it. Do it now. I think that's what I learned. The Nike logo. Just do it. This is the ABC.

Yumi: Oh, sorry.

Sashi: Sorry. We can't say Nike. No, I'm just like, well, let me paraphrase. Just do it now.

Yumi: Thanks to a few viral videos. Sasha's career went bananas. She was getting asked to do TV specials and invited to comedy festivals. Her personal life was humming along at the same pace as her professional life. She and Cute dimples Guy were in love and she'd been doing the hard yards at therapy. What she learnt there became essential when Sashi and her partner Charlie, entered the next stage of their relationship.

Sashi: When he proposed, I wasn't expecting it and he got so weird I thought he was breaking up with me. He was sitting under this lamp and he was like, can we have a chat? And when he was proposing, I had those same feelings of anxiety I felt with the first proposal of this is forever. And I knew now that's anxiety and it's your brain trying to protect you and it's fine. So instead of being afraid of the future, I started just kind of knowing that just step by step.

Yumi: Sashi said yes, she was sure she wanted a marriage to Charlie, but not so much a wedding.

Sashi: The lead up to that other wedding in Sri Lanka where it's like, pick the right flowers and pick the right theme for your wedding and pick the right dress. It was just all too much and it made my anxiety just worse and worse and worse.

Yumi: This time, Sashi and Charlie did the opposite of a 250 person destination wedding.

Sashi: When we just eloped. It just kind of changed everything for me, and I was so determined that it would only be about us getting married. So Charlie would be like, do you think we should get some flowers? And I'd be like, no flowers. Wedding only. I just want to get married. I don't care about all the other stuff.

Yumi: So you and Charlie were in love. When did you start trying for a kid?

Sashi: We got married December 2020. Started trying January 2021. Got pregnant straight away. We were like, wow, we have nailed this. Ten out of ten and then had our first miscarriage in February 2021 when we went in for the six week scan and there was no heartbeat.

Yumi: Sashi went through another two miscarriages in that same year.

Sashi: It was a lot of heartbreak on the back of a new marriage, that's for sure.

Yumi: Gosh, that's a.

Sashi: Lot. It was a lot. It was a lot. It's called a recurrent miscarriage. And I think the worst thing was once, you know, once you have three in a row, they're like, oh, this is serious. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Until then they're like, don't worry, this won't happen again. And it happens three times and they're like, oh, okay, let's start some testing now. And they did a whole bunch of tests. And there was nothing that came up to be the reason for it. So they actually told me to just kind of try again as soon as I was ready. Because at that point, you feel like time's running out. That's the worst thing, is that there's this ticking clock that you can't unhear.

Yumi: The process was exhausting and draining. Sasha didn't realise how depleted she was until she went to give blood one day. The blood bank wouldn't let her donate because of her recent miscarriage.

Sashi: And I was quite upset. I was like, I've gone out of my way to come here to save some people, and you won't let me donate blood. And they were like, you know, your body needs to recover. And I remember that thought. I just thought, why is the first place that I'm hearing that my body needs to recover at the Australian Red cross, you know, where it's just kind of where I get permission to just take a break. That was hard. That was really hard.

Yumi: That makes me want to cry. Were you thinking our luck will change? This will be okay. What was your energy around the baby making?

Sashi: We were actually referred to IVF. Still, at this stage, it doesn't occur to you that it might not work, right? Like I was like. But the whole purpose of a woman is to have a child. This is the programming that I've heard since I was a kid.

Yumi: So she had two iui's artificial inseminations. They didn't work. Then she tried IVF.

Sashi: We did four transfers. And then after the fourth transfer, we got pregnant. Very exciting. And then we had a miscarriage again, completely unexplained again. And I think that one floored me, because I don't think I'd had hope for a successful pregnancy since my first one. And I think that one really flattened me. It was after that I was like, Charlie, I'm done. I just can't ride this roller coaster anymore. You know, my 37th birthday, I'll never forget it, because we went to the hospital at 6 a.m. for a blood test, a hormone injection and a scan. And then I went to work, and then I went to a gig. And by the time I got home, I was so tired, you know, I was just so spent. And if there was an end date for it, you can push through it to know that, okay. But it ends in success. And so that's fine.

Yumi: Push through sashes whole belief system had been informed by her hard working migrant parents. If you worked hard. If you tried and you persevered, you would be successful. But in the messy and sometimes cruel gamble of fertility Sasha and her husband had to face maybe not even being included in the game.

Sashi: I was like, it might not come and that is a reality we need to start dealing with. And you're not supposed to talk that way in our society. You know, it's kind of given that everyone who wants children has children, and that's really not the truth. I said, this has to be something that we start thinking about, and I'm happy to explore other options. But I don't think IVF is the route for us because we kind of had divided into three factors, and we said, we'll keep going as long as it makes sense for us physically, emotionally, financially and for me, the financial side we had saved for it. The physical side, I could probably just hang on. But the emotional side, I just felt like my mental health was going to collapse And I just wouldn't risk that again, because for us, getting pregnant meant a miscarriage and that meant I was experiencing huge anxiety over not just, oh, but what if we don't get pregnant? It was also what if we get pregnant and my body goes through this again? So I was lucky that we sat down and I said it. And he also said it because it's not just you going through this, it's your partner, it's your family, it's your friends watching all this happening. And he very much was in agreement after the fourth one. He was like, yep, that's it. We will figure something else out.

Yumi: There's a real bravery in stopping fertility treatments that I don't think we talk about enough.

Sashi: I think I listened to your podcast on, um, you did so many on fertility treatments and people who'd pursued IVF, and I think That they make the they've monetised hope. That's the reality of it. And it works for a lot of people and it's brought a lot of people joy. But I don't think there's enough focus on, okay, when is it okay to stop? And for us we did for and I was like, I can't do this to my body anymore.

Yumi: So Sasha, you've always been a high achiever, typical migrant kid. How did being unable to conceive or continue a pregnancy impact your sense of self?

Sashi: It made me feel like a complete failure and I got to a stage. I performed at the splendour festival in. I think it would have been 2022, and I remember I was at this Lizzo set and she had this bit where she said, put your hands up and say, I love my body. And I remember being like, I hate my body. And I had never been in a space where I hated my body. You know, I had, you know, I had the same teenage feelings when I was like, oh, I wish I was thinner. I wish my I could look hotter in a bikini, all of that. But I had never hated my body. And I realised that after the hormone injections and the miscarriages and feeling just like, come on, just do this one thing that you're supposed to be able to do. And also as you're going through it, everyone around you is either pregnant or they already have kids. And it's really, really hard to feel a sense of value and to retain a strong sense of self, especially as a woman. When your uterus is not doing the one thing that you're told that it should be able to do.

Yumi: Sachi was shocked at her own self-loathing, and it was being compounded by her sense of failure. So she started writing down everything her body was able to do.

Sashi: All of the hikes it's gotten me through, all of the the physical activities that I've been able to do because of this body and it can't do this one thing. That is okay. I need to be able to forgive that and start making peace with that and learning about that. And I think that really, really helped.

Yumi: At the same time, Sachi had been badly injured playing touch rugby. Yeah, our girl was in the wars, so she took herself off to the only exercise classes that her injured knee would allow.

Sashi: Which was the classes for over 60 year olds. And I smashed those classes, I'll tell you. But it was also so impressive seeing these people over 60 who were just so fit and still living life to its fullest with their bodies, and I just found it really inspiring.

Yumi: Sachi also reached out to a bunch of women who were 10 to 15 years older than her, who were childless.

Sashi: Some of them were just incredibly generous with their time and their thoughts and their feelings and how that's all worked out for them.

Yumi: And after years of heaviness and disappointment. Sashi and Charlie wanted to let their hair down and celebrate.

Sashi: So we had a big party to celebrate our four years of marriage, and by the end of that, we had some friends chanting and saying, four more years. You know, like maybe weddings should be celebrated every four years, like an electoral term.

Yumi: For someone who really hates big fuck off weddings. The pictures from this party sure looked like pictures from a big fuck off wedding, but it wasn't called a wedding, so Sachie's wedding trauma was tricked. She had a great time. And after the Non-wedding wedding as the circuit breaker slash SeaChange, Sashi and Charlie moved to Sri Lanka for a couple of months.

Sashi: And got to just completely disconnect from our lives here as we'd been living them. The re-entry after that has actually been really difficult because I would say most of our friends in our social group all have children. And now, as a result of having been so open about our journey. We get this really lovely message from friends when they've just found out that they're pregnant, which is really nice, but you just feel this despair whenever you receive it. And also in friends groups where most of the people are mothers, when almost 95% of the conversation turns to childcare and you don't have anything to say about that, you end up kind of very silent at the table.

Yumi: It sounds like an ongoing adjustment.

Sashi: Very much so. It's only been a few months. And yeah, I think also the reality is that I remember when I was first single, after being engaged, you kind of had to make a whole set of new friends. It didn't mean that you let your old friendships go, it's just that you had to meet people who were also where you are in your life now. And I think that's also the reality that we have to deal with. Like we have to find friends to go hiking with on Saturday mornings, and that's a totally achievable thing. We just have to step outside our comfort zone.

Yumi: Sachi, do you feel like you've gotten more comfortable with failure?

Sashi: I have gotten more comfortable with failure, but that doesn't stop me being afraid to fail every time I'm starting a new show. You know, like a week before my anxiety gets so high that I'm like, cancel it. Who cares? The other ones were really good. You don't need to do this again. Cancel it all, cancel it all. And then I know now that if you just push through that anxiety. Because the deal I now make with myself is okay, just do it once. And if you hate it, you can cancel the rest. And every time I go out on stage, I have the best time. But it took me doing it and going through with it to learn that the anxiety of it, the fear of failure, is just the first step. And then go. And then maybe you'll fail. Who cares?

Yumi: Who cares? There was a clear direction Sachie's life was supposed to take. Job. Husband. Kids. She said no to the big fancy Sri Lankan wedding. She cut the safety cord and chose comedy over law. And then she failed at the wretched lottery of fertility. Time and again in Sachie's story, she's had to rewrite what success actually means. And to me, it seems like her life is brimming with success. Heaps of friends and laughter and over 60 aerobics. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies, We Need to Talk is mixed by Ann Marie de Bettencor. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Cranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.