Identity

Writing is happening at the moment, slowly. I’m finding it difficult to capture the chaos of thoughts and ideas onto paper. This is bothering me. Without meaning to be arrogant, a few of my course mates (that’s an awkward phrase…) said to me the other day about our screenwriting class that they don’t like speaking after me because I have good ideas. This was very nice, but at the same time I now feel pressure - I’ll have to continue to have good ideas, and that scares me. That’s the trouble with a reputation, good or bad, you have to live up to it. I remember in junior school when I was seven, one of my friends asked me to help her with spelling because, she said, I was the best at spelling in the class. From then on, spelling tests became a fixation; I had to get them all right every week, or my status as the best speller would be lost. Similarly, people have on occasion told me they see me as very calm and relaxed, and that they can’t imagine me shouting. All good to hear, but sometimes I do shout, and I’m certainly not always calm. I just try to be, which of course doesn’t help me remain calm, oh dear.

So I’m going to have to strive to keep the ideas and the writing going. That’s how it should be though, needing something to drive you on. I feel like here, starting out somewhere different, that my identity became fragmented, and I’m still figuring out how to put it back together again. I’ve managed bits of it myself, other people have put bits together as well. A year ago, I was a completely different person. I came for the open day here, not sure what I would find, very unsure of myself, and the process began there. Since then, I have written more than I have in years put together, met so many people I would never have met otherwise and done things I couldn’t possibly have done anywhere else. Today I found myself replying to an advert from Miracle Theatre looking for models. There’s so much I could do, I want to keep on finding things I’ve never done before (modelling aside, I used to model for an artist in Liverpool, never for a theatre though) There must be so many things I can do that I don’t even know I can. I want to find them.