A letter from Yandrick Agius on restructuring your life to find happiness. Do you have a story you’d like to share for a blog post? Write to us at the98percentpod@gmail.com or use the Contact Us page!
Dear Alexa and Katie,
Hello. My name is Yandrick and I discovered your podcast by chance a few weeks ago following a friend’s tweet. Your podcast has steadily become a personal favourite and I have been binging on episodes. One of my greatest pleasures is listening to actors giving interviews and talking about the profession, so The 98% has really fit the bill for me. Through listening to the episodes, I feel very funnily invested in you two lovely, strong and wonderful women (and Sir Tom, obviously). I’d like to congratulate the both of you on creating such a wonderful podcast which serves as a safe space for actors.
Your podcast has helped in many ways and I’d like to explain why. I’m a 21 year old student from Malta and 98% of our population is made of muggles/non-actors. A very roughly estimated 2% (which again seems somewhat grand for our small community) makes up the local actors. Like most places, acting is not really seen as a full-time profession, nor completely respected as one and to add insult to injury, there isn’t even the possibility for professional vocational training for acting. I’ve been in love with acting since the age of 11, when the drama teacher at my school walked into our classes and asked us if we’d like to give up our midday breaks for drama lessons. I was one of the few who was daft enough to go for it and I immediately fell head over heels in love. I kept up acting during my years at secondary school and mid-way, I discovered I could actually sing pretty decently and I fell in love again, this time with the world of musical theatre. For some time, it was my dream to study musical theatre at drama school in the UK however I side-tracked my plans because life got in the way, teenage years happened and my focus shifted. At the age of 18, I decided against going to drama school and I enrolled for a Bachelor of Laws at university because I wanted to pursue that career path. It was at this point that I decided to put theatre in the back seat and focus on academic extra-curricular activities and committees.
Mid-way through my second year of university, I had a breakdown, I had just gotten out of a relationship and I realised I was really missing performing. I jumped from one production to another to distract myself from how miserable I was. I really messed around with my academics and risked so many exams and assessments, I still don’t know how I did it. I quickly realised university was steadily killing my enthusiasm and that I couldn’t see myself living without some kind of theatre in my life. I kept myself busy with shows and I eventually decided to get back into classes for acting, singing and dancing. I was too late and most definitely not prepared enough to audition for the next year, so I decided that I would audition for drama school during my fourth and final year of university, alongside my finals and my dissertation. A year before my auditions, I set my priorities straight. I stopped taking part in shows and dragged myself to every single class I could find on the island. I also decided to put my social life on the back burner in order to be able to balance my academics alongside my training. I even added music theory and piano lessons to the mix, because one of the schools I wanted to audition for was a conservatoire. I was also working almost full-time days teaching English to foreign teenagers in the summer to save up for auditions and rushing to classes in the evening. This time in my life was really difficult. I was really giving myself a hard time and the majority of my friends couldn’t understand what I was doing or why. I turned down many nights out to stay in and get work done and I can recall many nights alone, with some tearful stress-induced breakdowns of loneliness along the way. Nothing could have prepared me for it, I really struggled with my mental health and I didn’t know to deal with it. It came to a point where one of my drama teachers calmly called me out on it during a session and encouraged me to seek the assistance of the in-house counsellor. That was a really tough pill for me to swallow at the time, to admit that everything was not okay and that I needed help. I managed to gain a lot of perspective and self awareness from this and in hindsight it was great life experience to add to my catalogue of experiences to drawn on for my acting!
As my fourth year of university started, so did my intensive audition prep and the sacrifices certainly didn’t stop. Luckily, I had learnt to deal with myself a bit better but it was still no easy feat. No one around me ever really understood what I was doing, because 98% of the population just don’t get it in the first place. Whilst I was better equipped and self-aware of my emotions, it still involved many lonely nights working away, whilst my friends were out enjoying themselves or worse, getting a head start on their studies or dissertation - whilst I would be trying to do as much as I possibly could and being exhausted at 11pm but dragging myself down to the piano to practice my audition pieces.
Auditioning was an experience, with the usual madness of sorting pieces being further complicated by having to sort logistics, trying to combine schools in the same trips, trying to balance university work whilst not getting caught out on missing too many lectures. My last recall audition was two and a half weeks before my dissertation deadline and boy was that a toughie! Also please note, my thesis was about copyright for musical theatre productions - I don’t think I could have come up with a more dramatic title if I tried. Following a turbulent few months and a full-blown juggling act, I auditioned for 4 drama schools and today I am very happy and humbled to say that I have been offered three unconditional places and one reserve list place. I’ll be moving to London this September and studying musical theatre at my dream school.
Whilst this is all very positive and I had a lot of reason to celebrate, my brain still didn’t give me a break - since I still had my final exams to face. I prepared to the best of my abilities however I really really really struggled with my mental health and my self-worth. The way that the law course works in Malta is that it is four years to get a Bachelor of Laws and then one year for a Masters in Advocacy or Notarial Studies. My decision meant that I would be stopping at my bachelor’s and not doing the master’s just yet; A. because I had a good opportunity ahead and B. because I had no interest in a legal career any time soon because it made me fucking miserable. I had made my bed and it was time to lie in it and I was very happy to do so, however, I was challenged by a massive wave of Imposter Syndrome. This is basically when you feel like you are a fake, inferior to those around you and constantly in fear of being caught out. This was somewhat inevitable as I was surrounded by another 150 law students who intended on pursuing their legal studies and careers. I never kept any secrets from my friends that I absolutely hated the law course and I was always very vocal about how unhappy it made me and I generally tend to use humour as a defence mechanism by joking that I was a total dimwit when it came to law - that being said I always knew I’d be damned if I didn’t finish what I started. Setting myself this difficult challenge was really testing. I knew it was making me miserable and I was dead set on doing my best, but whilst preparing for my final exams, I couldn’t help but feel like an absolute failure. I felt like a failure because I wasn’t reaching the goals I had set for myself at the beginning of my course. I was a completely different person to who I was at the start of my course and I was nothing like the fourth year students I looked up to during my first year. I remember messaging one of my best friends two days before our worst final exam and sobbing my little heart out because I was really feeling like a complete fraud and a joke who would have been a failure as a lawyer and just jumped ship.
My final exams came and went, as all things in life do. I made it out, somewhat sane and I recently got my final results and I will be graduating this December. Mid-way through my exams I discovered your podcast and it was really the kind of dialogue I needed to hear. To be hearing about an actor’s struggles, to know and believe that we are strong people who deal with so much. I needed it so much, because no one else around me was openly having those conversations. On the positive side, I really learnt a lot about mental health and your podcast has really empowered me and given me so much knowledge and awareness.
You’re probably wondering why I’ve gone on with this mini-life story. First of all, it’s thanks to your podcast that I’ve been able to become more self-aware of the actor’s life. Secondly, it’s because I had never been exposed to the actor-academic dialogue and nothing could have prepared me for what I was going to experience. I’m writing to you on the off-chance that you might be able to eloquently speak about this struggle on your podcast, out of hope that this small and unimportant story helps someone who is experiencing this complicated personal conflict. Stepping away from stability and academics is never easy, however I really hope to be able to find happiness in my new path. I recently felt that I would always carry a bit of regret with me and some feeling of failure, however I have actually been able to slowly accept and to understand that I’ve done a pretty badass thing for myself, and it’s partly thanks to you lovely ladies.
Thank you so much for helping me find my self-worth, I hope to learn to harness that self-love a lot more and to pass on what I’ve learnt to others who share the same struggles. I hope my lengthy ramble makes some kind of sense and that it puts a smile on your faces, because you’re doing a really good thing for all of us. Bless you both.
Love,
Yandrick
Yandrick originally sent this letter in July 2019 and has since graduated from university and is 9 weeks into his drama school training. He wants to help others who may be balancing university and musical theatre by sharing his story! Follow him on twitter @YandrickAgius.