As actors, we spend a lot of time monitoring our experiences, and considering the human condition in order to reproduce it truthfully on stage. This can often take over our lives; we’ve often caught ourselves evaluating our responses right in the middle of a blazing row, identifying our displaced anger but failing to control it, or rationalising exactly what it is we want from any given situation in a way that’s probably incomprehensible to any normally functioning adult. In fact, we can seldom have any emotional experience without a little voice in the back of our heads whispering to us “remember this, this may come in useful one day”.

The best performances draw from a wealth of life experience and careful observation, but can this constant stepping outside of one’s self end up shielding you from a guttural response?

The thing is, my Mum was right when she counselled me as an angst-filled teen in the throes of unrequited love: time heals all wounds. It’s a testament to my positive upbringing that up until recently the most significant emotional turmoil I had suffered through had been quite fancying a girl at the age of 15 who wouldn’t give me the time of day. I mooched, I moaned, I wrote awful poetry and mournful three chord ballads, but time has rendered this pathetic episode a distant memory. Even if I wanted to delve into that self- indulgent mess of feelings as some sort of emotion memory exersise for a role, I doubt I could truthfully use any of it.

The grown-up me would perhaps be charmed by my younger self’s all encompassing belief that he was going through something no one in the world had ever experienced before or since, but inevitably chuckle at his naievity and wonder what all the fuss was about.

But some life experiences change us irrevocably.

I recently took a two-week sabatical from writing this column, as I was spending time with my new family after the birth of my first daughter, Isabella. My partner and I have spent nine months knowing we were heading towards this significant milestone in life, our hospital bags packed, employers put on standby, family and friends waiting for the news with bated breath, but in reality, nothing can really prepare you for the birth itself.

I speak, of course, as a man whose physical part in the gestation of this child ended nine months ago, but with the retrospective dram of wisdom afforded to a newly besotted father. Under pressure people can surprise, amaze and enchant you. I felt the three of our lives change that night, and I saw my partner act courageously, selflessly and bravely in the interests of our child, in the face of real danger.

Isabella was born by emergency C-Section after a 12 hour labour, during which we went through the whole spectrum of worry and panic. A lot of the mid stages of this agonising time are now completely forgotten to us, a clever biological nuance which tricks the hapless couple into thinking, “Let’s put ourselves through this again and have another!” in a few years time. All I can really remember is standing for long stretches of time with the gas and air tube in one hand and a glass of water in the other, responding to the commands of “GAS” and “WATER” in turn, until after many different consultations with midwives and examinations, a doctor confirmed the need for a caesarean section to safely deliver our baby.

This was an eventuality I truthfully hadn’t even considered, so to have it thrust upon me at 4am after 48 hours without sleep, when my partner’s contractions left her doubled over in pain and incoherent through the pain relief, was one of the most petrifying experiences of my life.

I now know that such procedures are commonplace and the risks are very low, but in my fragile state, as they wheeled my girls out and I was left alone to put on scrubs and wait for the doctors outside the theatre, all kinds of awful and terrifying things went through my mind. I waited for the longest half an hour of my life while they administered the anaesthetic, sometimes pacing, sometimes sitting, fighting back the tears, and trying to reassure myself that someone would be out to bring me in at any minute.

I felt for the first time almost completely alone in the world, unable to call anyone for support, wrestling with all sorts of conflicting emotions, but powerless to affect the outcome of what was happening in that room. Then all of a sudden our midwife appeared, beaming from ear to ear. I remember briefly thinking how cold and insensitive it was for her to be smiling at a time like this, forgetting that this was probably her third or fourth caesarean that night alone. How dare she smile at me after leaving me in this agony? She squeezed my shoulder, her smile turning to a frown of concern: “Hey, what’s up?” she asked. “You can come in now, it’s all going really well!”

The next 20 minutes are a blur. I remember being reunited with my partner, her teeth chattering from the epidural as she tried to tell me how worried about me she had been, and trying to articulate how I had felt, before giving up, and the two of us tearfully agreeing we would never ever do this again. Then before we could prepare ourselves for it, we heard that first gurgling cry from the other side of the surgical curtain. It’s impossible to avoid sounding like a pompous parent when I say, you can only understand what this feels like when you have experienced it. It is completely UNREAL.

My daughter was handed to me, swaddled and cleaned, looking as serene and perfect as her mother, despite the ordeal they had both just been through, and I felt…well that’s just it really, and that’s the point I am trying to grope my way back to. I felt… human. I couldn’t describe it to anyone else, I couldn’t monitor it and write it down, I couldn’t confine it to a handy reference library of experience, I just felt it.

Earlier this year, I played a character in a period drama who at one stage in the play was panicking at the bed of his partner, as she delivered his first child. I remember the cast saying to me at the time, that this must have such a new significance to me as a father-to-be, that it must feel weird and exciting. If I’m honest, I have to say that it didn’t. Our imaginations are vital tools as actors, but as a 23-year-old who had thankfully never had an ordeal like that before, I didn’t even scratch the surface of what this scene was all about, and I’m not sure I really had the tools to do so.

Not only was this a pivotal point in the narrative, where the character was experiencing a crisis of love, a crisis of faith and a crisis of identity, he had to cope with the very real possibility of his wife and son both dying in childbirth. It’s hard to imagine oneself into such a fevered state. Now I gave this scene a pretty good stab, don’t get me wrong, but were I to approach something similar again, I know I would now have a very different take on it, and not because I could do some intensive acting exercise into recreating how I felt, but because I truly felt it at the time.

I can remember walking from the hospital that first morning struggling to keep my bleary eyes open in the crisp, golden sunlight, and it was almost like although everything looked the same as it had on my way into the building the day before, somehow the very atoms and molecules of the trees and the bushes and the ground beneath my feet had shifted.

Ever since that moment, the world as I knew it had changed for me, completely and irreversibly.