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Bexistentialism HT15 Week 2

Somehow my self-conscious indulgences have spilled over from term to term without me being asked to leave and never return. For me personally, there is at least some amusement to being asked to get drunk on my own inadequacy on a weekly basis. But this week, it’s a bit different. I don’t want to talk about why I am incapable of going seven days without doing something fucking stupid.

Because though it’s funny, it sometimes gets a bit too much. This week I have an audition. Perhaps that sounds very mundane to you. It’s rather different for me. I find auditions rather similar to Oxford interviews; I walk in with a familiar sense of inadequacy. Within seconds I make my first assumption: they don’t like me.

My legs start shaking, my mouth is dry, and I feel the heat rise in my cheeks. Their faces give away nothing as the torture ensues. In my head a chant rises, lacing together kind words of failure. As the audition ends I run away as fast as casual walking can look, leaving the thrones of authority to laugh at my shrinking back.

This ‘torment’, means that auditions cease really to be a thing for me. I’m one of those bastards who doesn’t turn up. Sometimes I claim I’m ill, or I’ve forgotten a tute, and sometimes I don’t even email. Sometimes a friend forces me to go along. But beginning my fifth term at Oxford, I could count the number of auditions I have been to on one hand.

I got out of my worst audition, mentally blocking their email so I wouldn’t have to receive the official rejection. I squirmed at the thought that these two people, from whom I now flee in clubs and in Tesco, would forever define me as the worst actor their eyes had ever seen.

That is unless they were looking for someone who was exceptionally good at acting like they can’t act. At this point you lift your head from the page and say ‘man up’. Good timing.

Because this week something strange happened. I raise my hand to tick off the next, and I go along. And it feels awful. I feel the fear and once more I shrink.

But, just like my Oxford interview –somehow – it’s not rejection that gets handed to me. And I sit in the King’s Arms for my first meeting with the cast. And I think, maybe not everything has to go wrong all the time.

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