All through my younger years, I’ve always had one passion which is being the centre of attention. Ever since I was in nursery I’ve always loved performing, for example in my first nativity play I refused to play a mouse and the nursery had to have two angles because I was adamant that I would play an angel, looking back on that I feel sorry for the other kids who probably just wanted to get on with the play.
My love of attention continued into primary when in primary I sang in the Christmas Xmas Factor. I entered that every year, singing, dancing and not caring what anyone else thought. In my primary, we had very few drama lessons but whenever we did, they were always my favourite. Around primary 4, I went to my first audition, it was for a show called ‘A long long crime ago’ which was a show about fairy tale characters being put on trial. I didn’t actually speak in the episode but being part of the jury was enough for me. I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the studio and didn’t really care about the fact that the episode would be broadcast on TVs everywhere. After that I went to my first proper audition for an actual show called ‘The worst witch”. Looking back on that audition now, I realise how terribly it went, I could barely get my words out and really didn’t understand how to bring personality to a character but it was definitely a valuable experience and taught me a lot about how the acting industry works.
In my first year of Secondary school, things changed. I was painfully shy and hated drama because I felt like everyone was judging me for my voice. At the time I felt like the teacher just didn’t understand me but looking back on it, I realise how nervous she must have been, having never really taught someone with a speech difficulty and I think she really did try her best. The next year brought a bit of a surprise, there was a new drama teacher at school who brought a bit of a different attitude to the class. He was very encouraging and after a few weeks of having him, I started to really enjoy drama and care less about my speech. I actually ended up choosing drama in S3 and I’m now doing 4 drama lessons a week. I’ve found my drama to be really helpful with making friends and becoming less anxious about my my speech.
I’m now working towards having a career in drama and being an actress which I think shows that having encouragement in the things you love and being able to overcome your insecurities is not impossible. Times are changing for disabled people and I think drama is definitely becoming more accessible.
In this post I didn’t go into too much depth about my relationship with my voice because I plan to do a separate blog post dedicated to that.
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