Drama Queen – 302

It seems ironic that I left drama behind when I have so much interest in working in the dramatic arts now. Sure, I want to be on the writing and production end of things, but given the right circumstances I could act, and it would certainly not hurt to know actors. I mean, I still like a good play now and then.

I mentioned that I had not been satisfied with drama in ninth grade, but I still took a class as an elective my sophomore year. A lot of my friends were in the same class as well, and we had some fun with it. Ms. Coburn did some really good exercises, and told some good stories, and I guess it was reasonable to give it one more shot after I had been doing it for so long.

I think the real problem was that I would not play to my strengths. I was good at comedy, and I could get good results with comedy, but every time I had a chance I would do something serious, and it would just be too serious. I helped other people write their sketches and we made them funny and they were great, and then I would play a troubled youth or do something really sappy and really something that I was not ready to relate to. I guess one issue was that I always wanted there to be romance.

Anyway, I feel like I was not really being true to myself. Sure, acting is about being someone else, but I think you need to be comfortable with yourself first, and I never really got there. Acting may be the path for some people, but it wasn’t working that way for me.

That is not to say that speech team and sports management got me in touch with my true self either. Really, that just took time, and an extended period of clinical depression, followed by a lot of in-depth writing and then blogging.

For social reasons, I am glad that I left drama behind. I still had a lot of friends in the department, and I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that department was the most corrupt and had the worst snobs of any group in school. No, they were not all snobs, and they were not all corrupt, but there was enough. The stories I heard later were horrible, containing depravity I could not even have imagined then. With all that I did not know, even then I saw people being used sexually, and damaging mind games, and lots of underage drinking.

I’m not saying that these things never happened outside of drama—I’m sure they did, but based on their prevalence among the people I cared for, if I had been a part of that group, I would have been facing them all the time. I don’t think I would have given in to temptation and participated myself, but I just think I would have been sad all the time, and I was sad often enough without that. I’m just grateful the almost everyone emerged okay, but they had some pretty rough paths getting there.