All through my life I’ve wanted to make an impact, be admired, get attention for what I do and be the best that I can be.
Since I was little, I had huge expectations for what I would become and what I would do with my life. And for a while I was on my way of achieving what I wanted. I got good GCSE grades and I had opportunities to go to college and do what I had dreamed of doing.
My main dream was to be an actress. I know many people dream of doing this as a career but I felt like I was capable of actually doing it. I loved drama, I sorted out my confidence issues and performed many emotional, dramatic and often tragic scenes which I was proud of and my teachers congratulated my fellow actors and myself. My strength in acting was doing the more serious stuff rather than comedies and romance. My favourite piece I did was based around 9/11 where we had to be tactful, respectful and believable. We did extensive research that left us in tears in order to not just play the part but “be the part”. Even with lack of props, lighting, setting and costume, our group of 3 brought our class audience to tears as well as one of our teachers. The applause we got, amazing comments and hugs from our friends gave me the best feeling in the world. I wanted to perform it forever. It was one of the proudest moments of my life. But then my GCSE drama exam came up. I was put in a group with other students who did not care about their drama grades, couldn’t be bothered with the lessons and were the least serious of our class. Out of our group of 6, 3 of us wanted to do well. The play we were given was a comedy we had to adapt and make our own. My heart sank. The dramatic pieces were given to the other groups. After weeks of trying to control the unruly members of the group and complete the work they were not doing we had to take our exam. On the day while rehearsing we realised our piece wasn’t long enough so had to word our arses off to add more scenes and include more drama skills and techniques. Through the stresses and effort we managed to get our piece just long enough so we get ready to perform for the examiner, our class and our teachers. Despite the nerves, it began well, no mess ups, no freezing on stage, no wrong lines; it was going perfect. Then we got to one scene we added at the last-minute, one of the less eager students didn’t come in as cued. We prompted him with improvised lines but he ignored them. One of our 5 minute scenes had to be forgotten about. The scene that made up our minimum time. We carried on, stayed in character and just hoped for the best. We finished the piece with only that one problem. As soon as the lights went down and our performance had ended tears sprang to my eyes because I knew that my chances of doing well in the subject I loved was gone. My teachers tried to reassure me when I explained what had happened about the scene but I knew that it had ruined the performance for the rest of us. While I still passed my exam, only just I might add, my grade wasn’t going to be enough for me to pursue acting as a career.
That was when I lost all hope, faith and confidence in myself. My dream was shattered. There was no way to do the exam again, I just had to except it how it was.
Now today I see actors/actresses doing interviews for their big screen début and I envy them so much. I get sad because I want to be them. I want to be that somebody who people see and think they are amazing at what they do, they are attractive and are going to go far in this world. But I will never be that person. And maybe, even if my performance in my exam was as good as I hoped it would be with a different play and different group, I still wouldn’t be where I wanted to be. But I would have had a better chance of it I’m sure.
I think that’s where it all started to go wrong. I gave up on myself. And I need to start finding a reason to believe in myself again.
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