Kumail Nanjiani

Very scared to go back because I had not, I will be honest, I had not missed doing stand-up because I was feeling creatively fulfilled doing all this other stuff.

What I missed was being good at something that I wasn't good at anymore.

I hated the feeling of like, I remember at a certain... There were a couple of years when I was in New York where I was like...

I've never been as confident about anything in my life as I was about stand-up in that period where I was like, I can go up in front of any crowd and do well right now with no material.

When I think back on that, I was like, that felt like a different person.

I could not imagine thinking like that.

So it was very, very scary.

And it was scary for a bunch of different reasons.

It was scary.

The most scary was, what if I can't do it anymore?

What if I don't have it?

It takes so long to get good at it.

What if that part of me is dead?

Which is fine.

I like this person that I am now.

Yeah, but you don't want to learn that on stage.

Right.

And that's the only way to learn it.

You can only learn it on stage.

And so, yeah, I was really, really scared to go back to stand up.