Hello. I’m Al Jennings.
I’m a writer from West Yorkshire, a former musical theatre student, an occasional runner and somebody who has spent much of his adult life wondering whether everybody else received an instruction manual that somehow passed me by.
I’m approaching 35, which seems like a perfectly reasonable age to begin questioning almost every decision I’ve made since leaving school. Although, in fairness, some of those decisions were questionable at the time. I just had better hair and considerably fewer responsibilities.
At eighteen, I packed my bags and headed for London to study musical theatre, armed with big ambitions, an enormous appetite for life and the unshakeable belief that a career in showbusiness was just around the corner.
Broadway had yet to receive the memo.
Instead, life took me in several unexpected directions. There were years spent living and working overseas, a return to Yorkshire and, eventually, a career in recruitment.
Somehow, I ended up responsible for helping other people make sensible career decisions while having very little idea what to do with my own. I appreciate the irony.
I’ve always been fascinated by people. What we want, what we say we want, the extraordinary lengths we’ll go to for somebody who isn’t worth the bus fare, and the elaborate stories we construct to convince ourselves that everything is going exactly according to plan.
Particularly when it quite clearly isn’t.
A different sort of ambition.
At 25, I was a very different man.
I lived for weekends. I travelled whenever possible, spent months living out of suitcases and generally approached adulthood with the vague expectation that somebody more qualified would eventually arrive and take responsibility.
They never did.
There were nights out, holidays, adventures and more than a few mornings when I’d wake up, inspect the previous evening’s decisions and wonder whether an apology, a bacon sandwich or an international relocation would be the most appropriate response.
Occasionally, all three.
I don’t dislike the person I was then. Quite the opposite. He was adventurous, impulsive, occasionally outrageous and determined to experience as much of life as possible. Although I’m not entirely sure I’d trust him with my house keys.
But somewhere along the way, life started changing what I wanted from it.
Losing my mum changed me profoundly. It changed how I understood time, what I valued and how I thought about the future. Some of the things that had once seemed enormously important suddenly weren’t. Other things, which I’d spent years putting off, became much harder to ignore.
Growing older did the rest.
These days, I’m less interested in collecting nights out and more interested in building a life I’d genuinely like to wake up to.
That doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly become a model of emotional stability and responsible decision-making.
I’m still working out my relationship with my body, my ambitions, other people and the peculiar sensation of approaching middle age while occasionally feeling about seventeen.
I’ve also developed an interest in fitness, which has involved voluntarily entering gyms, lifting extraordinarily heavy objects and registering for a ten-kilometre run. This last development would have come as something of a shock to anybody who knew me at 25.
Including me.
For much of my adult life, the only circumstances under which I considered running acceptable involved catching the last train or escaping a potentially compromising situation.
Apparently, we’re calling this personal growth.
And then there’s the writing.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, particularly when it gives me an opportunity to examine the absurdity of ordinary life.
There’s something endlessly fascinating about the contradictions of being human.
We want honesty but avoid difficult conversations. We want meaningful relationships but occasionally pursue people whose emotional availability makes the British rail network look dependable. We want change but become very attached to the habits keeping us exactly where we are.
And we all seem convinced that everybody else has somehow worked it out. I don’t think they have.
I created The Unfinished Man because I wanted somewhere to explore that peculiar gap between knowing better and actually doing better.
It’s a personal publication about queer life, masculinity, bodies, desire, belonging, loneliness and the ongoing business of becoming yourself.
But my interests extend well beyond the emotional consequences of being a gay man with access to the internet.
I’m interested in theatre, literature, music, politics, work, travel and popular culture. I can become disproportionately invested in the artistic direction of the Eurovision Song Contest, the decisions made by fictional characters on television or the extraordinary ability of Andrew Lloyd Webber to inspire both admiration and exasperation.
Sometimes I write something deeply personal. Sometimes I write about culture. Sometimes I find myself asking why an entire country seems determined to enter a European music competition while behaving as though participation constitutes a personal insult.
There’s room for all of it.
I’ve previously written columns for TheGayUK, with work also appearing in Tackle Magazine. Today, The Unfinished Man is home to much of my independent writing, while I develop essays, columns and features for other publications.
I like writing that has something to say without treating itself as the most important thing ever written. Something intelligent, occasionally ridiculous, perhaps a little uncomfortable, and recognisably human.
If somebody finishes one of my pieces having laughed, thought differently about something or felt a little less alone, I’d consider that a respectable outcome.
If an editor also wants to pay me for it, even better.
Still becoming.
I’m not writing from the other side of some extraordinary personal transformation.
There hasn’t been a montage.
Nobody has played an uplifting track while I’ve emerged from a gym wearing trousers two sizes smaller, clutching a green smoothie and radiating the sort of inner peace normally reserved for people who have never encountered the M62.
I’m still very much in the middle of it.
There are things I understand better than I did ten years ago, things I’m still spectacularly bad at and plenty I’m only just beginning to question.
But I’m more interested in the life ahead of me than the one I thought I was supposed to have.
And if I haven’t worked everything out by 40, I suppose I’ll just have to keep writing about it.
At least that way, the whole bloody experience might eventually pay for itself.
Al Jennings
West Yorkshire, England · Still becoming.