Hi, I’m Alex. I’m a writer, I’m thirty-nine and will shortly be living out of a suitcase again, something I thought I’d left well behind in my twenties. Back then, I was a regular sofa surfer (thanks to everyone who put me up! Apologies if I cried too much or you caught me masturbating when I thought you were out).
Of course, thanks to London rental prices, my situation is unexceptional and I’m lucky enough to have been offered many a sofa to surf, but with several of my friends purchasing their first homes, some even their second, I’m starting to wonder how I’ve fucked up so badly, that I’ve ended up in this situation (again).
So, rather than moan, each week I’ll walk you through a mistake that perhaps you can avoid. I’ll have to go back to the very beginning to unpick the missteps that have often led to friends and family holding me up as an example of what can happen if you don’t work hard enough at school. It may, at times, contain foul language.
Mistake Number Three: Attending Drama School.
After fumbling about in Camden for a bit and taking too many drugs, in 2009 I auditioned and got a place at the only school I’d applied for that year (it’s like £30 an audition, probably more these days and as you will have learnt by now, I had little money).
It was my second stab at theatre school. A few years before, I’d been accepted into a school in Whitechapel, a wonderful place that understood that not all would-be actors were middle-class and easily able to fund the fees and survive in London. To accommodate those who needed to work full time, their classes were held during the evenings and weekends, and most who attended were like me - poor and needing a lot of work on their voice. I loved it. I felt safe there, but after one term, we were all summoned to the theatre and told the school had sadly gone into liquidation.
So, I dicked about for a bit, spending the money I’d saved on partying and trying to look like Kate Moss, but after a few years of being off my tits in the same Topshop tea dress as everyone else and getting my stomach pumped, I got bored. Besides, I was never a great drug taker and could barely handle the come downs, often bumbling around my boyfriend's flat, crying and listening to Katie Melua. Somehow, I had an agent who booked me a few commercials, but lacking any natural instinct, I needed training.
On Valentine's Day 2009, I was offered a place at another drama school, something that upset my then partner so much, he pulled the head off a rose he’d bought me with his teeth and then spat the petals out the window of his Vauxhall Tigra as we hurtled across the Hammersmith Flyover, and he screamed at me for all the cheating I would apparently be doing as a drama student (I should’ve been so lucky).
After he’d calmed down, I realised I had six months to raise £13,500 plus living expenses, so I quit my job at Cartier (which of my many jobs, was actually quite nice) and began working in sales, where a woman sporting a razor sharp bob and a Vivienne Westwood jacket taught me how to sell ad space. I raised a fair bit of the money myself, but foolishly took out a career development loan to top me up and help me live.
None of this is unusual for those attending drama school, and, thankfully, nowadays, most schools are recognised by UCAS, but choosing to attend often leads to some sort of hardship if you’re not lucky enough to be funded by your parents and lounging about on a nice, comfortable trust fund.
Whilst the debt didn’t help matters, it wasn’t just the cost that helped this cracking life choice get into my list of mistakes. It was how I adapted to being suddenly surrounded by the middle classes.
Before drama school, I’d never really been aware of the class system, naively lumping myself somewhere in the middle and floating along happily. However, attempting to break into an industry largely dominated by the middle class quickly taught me otherwise.
I should start by saying not a single person was mean to me, not to my face anyway. They were all perfectly lovely, but I found the other working-class students too late, and so the formative part of my course was spent self-consciously tripping over my practice shoes as I tried to keep up with the privately educated and do a spine roll. In turn, this left me - a people pleaser - leaning into my well-versed knack of self-deprecation.
It was my first taste of my now faithful friend, Imposter Syndrome. I had little knowledge of the theatre, realised I was pretty common and had it carefully explained to me that the difference between working class and middle/upper middle is that my parents were probably all too happy to spend any money they had on a large television instead of my education. To be fair, they were correct, our TV was huge.
Suddenly, it didn’t matter if they were talented or not; in my mind, they deserved to be there because they had a good education and seemed to instinctively know how to network. Their apparent confidence and right to be in the room knocked me, and instead of getting back up, I just smoked too much, told myself I was shit and let everyone else think that too.
Whilst it’s not unheard of to see working-class talent rise, and students from similar backgrounds in my year have gone on to do well, I won’t have been the only one who felt this way at some point. Fourteen years on, and the arts are still dominated by people from a middle or upper-class background, with the working classes taking up less than 10% of the industry. It is a relentlessly tough career regardless of your socioeconomic background. Talent, determination, sacrifice and a thick skin are required, no matter where you went to school or how financially stable you are, but I worry that no matter how many times casting directors say they’re looking for raw, working-class talent, many people are put off even attempting. Drama school fees aside, the costs of being an actor (never-ending headshots, Spotlight, etc) pile up and can feel overwhelming when you’re trying to juggle a day job, pay the rent and smile through the endless rejection.
In hindsight, I was never going to set the acting world alight. I was always too in my head. I struggle with accents, and I can’t sing, often being told to “just smile and lip sync along.” In short, I was appalling to watch and would’ve been even if I’d trotted straight out of an independent girls' school. No amount of education or money was going to get me in shape, but maybe if I’d let myself belong there, I would’ve gained a confidence that I could’ve applied in other areas of my life, perhaps building a different career which would see me financially comfortable and not let the thousands of pounds I spent on massaging myself into the floor as part of a movement class go completely to waste.
Next week, Mistake Number Four: Embarking on a ten-year career of crash dieting.