by 
Wow, what a month. I am sure you are all reeling backwards from the past couple of months. I have been so busy that I really have no idea what day it is most of the time. No, really. I don’t even bother anymore. I just figured it’s December, and eventually it will be January. And eventually, after finals, I can breathe, right? WRONG. IT WILL BE CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEARS AND THEN SCHOOL. And I will never breathe again. Ever.
This year has been a challenge, from my personal life to my health battles to my family life to my schoolwork. Phew, I look back on it and it looks like the blur of a train, bulleting past my face and leaving nothing behind but a whooshing sound and a bad hair day. I need a fancy Italian hairdresser named Fabio who follows me around and tells me I am every waking second how fabulous I am. I should have asked for that for Christmas. Darn it!
Finals and auditions were a blur, and the second I caught my breath, they were over and I was cast in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Arcadia’ for next semester, registering for next semester, preparing for my Study Abroad interview, shopping for Christmas, and writing scholarship essays. But then came the beautiful moment… I had been looking forward to… for months.
*CUE DRAMATIC OPENING MUSIC*
After months of waking up at 5:15 in the morning… and driving for an hour to my classes… I could finally…
(wait for it…)
SLEEP IN!
*CUE HALLELUJAH CHORUS*
‘Tis true. I have gone on “sleeping-in overload” and have been waking up around 11:37 every morning, and I have no regrets. Y.O.L.O. as the kids say these days. It is really starting to annoy my mother. And I think my father just gave up. One thing I will say, my dreams are amazing. They could win Oscars, and most of the time, they are casted incredibly well. My dreams are legit, you need a darn impressive resume to be in one. Have my people call your people.
Now that we have digressed for a good sixty-seven million paragraphs, we can get on to important things. In regards to how my hobbies and extracurricular activities affected my choice of degree, I will just tell you this: they are my choice of degree.
I have been doing theatre my entire life, through my church and through community theatre programs and through my junior high and high school. I did Teenage Drama Workshop (TADW) for three consecutive summers during high school and junior high school, and during the school I participated in a production every semester. I have never not done theatre.
However, you may remember if you have bee keeping up with my blogs thus far, that I was a Cinema & Television Arts major. I can only imagine you are holding your hands up now, in incredulous scoff, thinking to yourself, “Hey, lady. What gives? You said your extracurricular choices were in direct and equal relation to your degree? What is going on here, you scoundrel?” Now, calm down Reader. I am getting to that.
I was a CTVA major because I had done theatre my whole life. I was sick of it. Or so I thought. What I was really sick of was the same old thing. I had done theatre with the same people for years, and I mentally linked that to the craft itself. Silly Amanda, being stupid. I craved novelty, and I was scandalously in love with film. But after a year, I had to look back on my life. I loved film, yes. It was the most important thing to me, second only to my faith and my family. But, I was an actress. Analyzing film was not enough for me. I wanted to go to the Royal Academy, and I wanted to do this thing right, but a film major wasn’t going to do it for me. So I became a theatre major, and now, I am studying abroad in England my Junior year and studying theatre, and I am on the right path to RADA. And I have never felt more myself.
So, I encourage you to do the same. I want you to look at yourself and identify what you are passionate about, what makes your skin feel like it’s drowning in fire, something that you can feel in your bones. We all have something, we just have to be brave enough to find it. I want you to do that. I want you to ignore everyone else telling you who you are, and just think about what you want, and you go for it. You are talented and you are special and you are a beautiful, singular, glorious creature, and no one in the world has the right to tell you otherwise.
So find yourself, and you chase after what you want. I do not want to hear that you can’t. “I can’t” is uttered far too many times these days, and I have no use for them, and frankly, neither do you. Remember what Oscar Wilde said:
Be yourself. Everybody else is already taken.
Happy New Years, guys.
XOXO
Grace
