1. W***ing

I WAS circumcised for medical reasons and I got it into my mind that I couldn’t cum, and that I wasn’t like other boys. I thought – does that mean I can’t have weans? When I had my first w*** – and I say this well aware it’s a funny topic – I felt like I was normal. In a good way. It instantly changed everything: the clothes I wore, how I felt towards lassies.

You don’t map your life out but it becomes clear in your mind that there is potential in some things. It boosts your confidence. It was a good feeling. All the other pleasures in life – films, music, the telly, drugs – come and go, but w***ing has been there the whole way.

2. Drinking

DRINKING is a ritual and you lose your inhibitions. You come out your shell and meet up with people. Once you get used to it, it’s just who you are. I was one of the last people my age to start drinking. Once I started, that was that. The adventure of not knowing what was going to happen – I loved all that.

It becomes an important way to make a distinction between your working day and when you stop working.

If you are a person who lives in the past or worries about the future, it helps you focus on the here and now.

There’s the downside, if the here and now is also shite – but if you’re just cutting about having a laugh, you don’t care about anything. It didn’t really change my life, but it was my life.

3. Stopping drinking

I HAD a few low points, as they say. When I was ready to top myself was the lowest I ever felt. I fortunately had what you could call a spiritual awakening – even though I’m not a spiritual person – or a primal, instinctive feeling, and realised I was going to die.

It was enough to promise myself that I wasn’t going to drink again. I felt it the whole time. I felt optimistic. It was out my system. I felt invincible after it – it was a rock-solid decision.

I had all this extra time to think things and make things, even just wash clothes and wash the dishes. It was when my girlfriend Lynn and I went travelling too. The problem was that I became less sociable and that annoyed Lynn a bit.

Hardly anything was still good when I was sober. I always had to hide how bored I was. If people I know take a break from alcohol and tell me how bored they are, I tell them to try it for 15 years. You don’t get used to it. Maybe if you took booze away, society would collapse and nobody would step out the front door – who knows?

It changed my life for the better, but made me go out less, but I’m not like that – I like sitting on my computer and playing games.

4. Drugs

I THOUGHT differently after taking acid. I was taking it about once a week. For about six months me and my pal were taking it every Saturday. I became used to it. It changed the way I thought about certain things.

Eccies changed my life more. I was never a dancer, the idea of it horrified me. I remember I was drunk in Millport and folk were dancing. It was nerve-wracking – I didn’t like the feeling and I thought it was pointless.

But when I started taking pills and going to Hangar 13 (pictured above) ... it was brilliant. I felt dead confident. It felt cracking being a part of all that. It was almost like a higher dimension to drinking. It was a new aspect to my life.

I always feel I should say drugs are dangerous, but I remember a 13-year-old lassie got drunk in Millport and fell in the water and cracked her skull. She died in hospital.

I remember there was a tiny wee column in the paper about it having something to do with drink. No-one said something has to be done about weans getting their hands on booze, and we didn’t want anything to happen because we wanted to drink.

Anyone dies taking pills and it’s on the front page for weeks. It is a serious thing, but you can see the hypocrisy. How can everyone talk about getting steaming and no-one gives a f***? Everyone knows booze is what f**** everyone up the most.

5. Citalopram and meditation

THERE are people who take anti-depressants and have a really bad reaction, but everyone’s brains are wired differently. Right up until that point, from my teenage years and right through my 20s, I was flirting with suicidal thoughts, dark thoughts.

I was just a negative person. When I stopped drinking, I was fine for a bit, but it crept back in. When my son Daniel was born, I had a really bad way of dealing with the pressure.

I was depressed to the point where it affected my physical strength. I went into a cupboard and started greeting my eyes out. I was going to top myself.

I had a pal whose husband took antidepressants. I went to the doctor and he just gave me the prescription. That’s one thing that I don’t agree with and I was lucky it worked for me. The very next day I just had this get up and go. I felt like I’d woken up and had this big thing to look forward to that day. I didn’t feel negative about anything. I was just a bit more up for things. I’d go with Daniel to a soft-play, which is one of the worst f***ing places in the world, and enjoy it.

That’s when I was making vines. I was out and about and having a laugh. I used to meditate every morning. I trained my brain to push thoughts out of my mind and how to stay relaxed. It’s like having a wee quiet room. I’ve used it for things like going on stage and just general stressful stuff. I hardly do it these days, mind you. You control yourself and get into this relaxed and clutter-free part of your mind. It’s a cracking feeling. If you even just do it once, you know you can do it.

6. Fatherhood

I WOULD be lying if I said that having Daniel was so fantastic all the time. There are moments of happiness and hilarity and being amazed by my son. But I am quite a lazy, selfish person.

I wonder if things like saying everything is amazing leads to post-natal depression. I know that’s a hormonal thing as well, but I wonder if it’s almost like the Hogmanay effect. Everyone else around you is saying it’s brilliant but it can make you feel sadder.

I think I owe it to certain people and to myself to say that I don’t get up to much with my son. There are certain things I do like doing with Daniel but Lynn does most of the organising.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of women find themselves doing the emotional labour because men are selfish, lazy bastards, and I’m one of them.

I like telling him about things and boring him to tears, lying next to him and playing away, listening to him eating. Wee things like that. Now, it’s good seeing him come out with something and being clever.

All I want to do with my son – and Lynn doesn’t agree with this – are things I’m into – films, programmes, games. I’m sure a lot of women who read this will think it sounds familiar, but I don’t know if it makes me a bad dad.

I tell him I love him and all that, but he has zero respect for me. Lynn gets all the good treatment. But I feel like there’s a lot of me in him and I can right some wrongs.

I’m especially conscious of it because of the things I felt in my mind, so I try to bombard him with positivity and examples if he gets something wrong so he’s a lot more happy and confident than I was.

7. Telly

Limmy as Jacqueline McCafferty, one of his characters

I LOVED directing and being in the middle of it all. It was magic. You’ve written it all, thought about it all and people are coming and going and asking you stuff, you’re acting – it’s a brilliant feeling. For someone who is a control freak like me, it’s excellent.

There is no way that I could leave “She’s turned the weans against us” to another director. My original plan for Limmy’s Homemade Show was to go out and about and make it. But I wasted a lot of time compared to when I wrote the script, edited the script and all that.

Getting recognised is a perk of it all. I love people coming up for a photo and all that. I don’t like it when people take a sneaky picture or watch me eating. I was on a train once and there was a guy watching me eating crisps. I felt I had to start a conversation to demystify myself – I’m just a boring f*****g guy who talks too much.

Lynn wanted to go to see Calvin Harris for her birthday and I just said I can’t go. I couldn’t face people who were drunk and eccied coming up to me. When people are drunk, they don’t have any boundaries. I’d be out in the open, trying to sort of dance, feeling pure self conscious. We had a bit of an argument about it, but it would have been a nightmare for me. But I don’t like going to those sort of things anyway.

8. College

I WAS getting up every morning, Monday to Friday, and doing a course. I was meeting people and having a laugh, going to the union, socialising with a new group of pals – it was brilliant.

It took me out of the monotony of having nothing to do and being skint and angry. I had something to aim for and keep out of trouble for. I was doing film editing, printing or lithography or Photoshop – it was like school again, but better.

They gave me the bare basics, and I’d go up the Barras and buy the discs and teach myself the rest.

I’d go away and do my own thing. I didn’t really learn the rest until about a year after I did the fourth year of my course at uni, when I did a placement. I learned the most once I was in work.

9. Streaming

I REALISED that this could actually be my career. It comes and goes, but you have all these people on Twitch [a streaming platform] where it is their livelihood.

If that keeps up the way it has kept up, then that has definitely changed my life. I am hoping for more telly stuff at some point, but I’m thinking more about Twitch than I am about anything else.

I could dedicate all my time to streaming games, going out and about or doing my improv stories. And it could be an actual job. And then folk interact with it.

There are goodies and baddies on the streams, people who gave me bad advice – like sending me to Manchester in Eurotruck Simulator 2 for a part that wasn’t there – there are things I remember and names I’ve noted.

I love getting all angry about all that. Last night, after a show in Aberdeen, I was streaming for about two hours. People were leaving comments and all that and I love it.

10. Flash

I WAS in work doing database stuff and thinking “f**k this”. I started doing wee animations and all that. I wasn’t sure what I was good at until then. It was the first time I was good at anything in that sort of environment.

I went from doing wee daft animations to being an invaluable member of a team of 30 people. I’d only started at the company a few months previously as a wee ned from Carnwadric – that’s how I felt.

I wrote a chapter about Flash in a book and went to conferences and shared my stuff. It was brilliant. I wanted somewhere to put it all, so I made Limmy.com. I made videos and got good at video editing and that led to everything else.