So, audition season is finally over, and things have continued to be absolutely crazy in my life!
Auditions drew to a close a few weeks ago, and I didn’t get as many offers as I was expecting. Auditions were stressful, but exciting. It was amazing to get to go to so many fantastic schools I wouldn’t have otherwise seen and get that audition experience. However with each rejection it got harder and harder to recover and get my mojo back. By the end of the experience, I was so worn down and disappointed, and I really feel like I lost a great deal of confidence and motivation. I’m only just starting to feel better now, several weeks on, and it will take time before I feel completely back to my confident, motivated self! I know from experience that ultimately rejections and disappointments lead us to the greatest opportunities in life, but it is difficult when you have put so much into something that hasn’t worked out.
With time, I eventually came around to realising that not getting into the schools I wanted to won’t actually prevent me from training and having a career in dance. No one can decide that I’m not destined to perform except me, and although going to a good full-time school is the ideal preparation for that, it is not the only route. I am already at a good school, and I do have two offers to study dance at two top universities if that is what I choose to do. Options are on the table, and with the disappointments of auditions almost behind me, that is a good position to be in.
I hoped that after all of the preparation for auditions, then travelling around and actually auditioning, then the nerve-wracking wait for emails and letters, I might be able to relax a bit when it was all done. However that hasn’t been the case! Our landlady made the decision to sell the flat we’ve been living in (which was supposed to be our long-term home), meaning that we had to leave only a few days after my auditions ended! What’s more, my boyfriend had to fly to Austria on a days’ notice, meaning that he was away for moving day and I had to do the last part of the move alone. Luckily his mum came to the rescue and we crammed all of our worldly possessions into a Fiat 500! We didn’t have the time to get another deposit together and find a new place with auditions going on, so we moved back home to his parents’ for a couple of weeks. The change of pace was quite nice, but it was hard not being in London, and I wasn’t able to make it in to any classes. I also got ill twice while we were there!
Yesterday we made our way back to London again with a couple of big suitcases, and we’re staying with friends in East London. It’s so good of them to put us up, and so far it feels amazing to be back in the city! I get to return to classes tomorrow, which I am so excited about, and we are going to start looking for our own place right away. It is really weird to not have my own space with my own things around me, but it gives us the breathing room to save and to find the right place to move into next. We’ll probably get a flat share near my ballet school for the summer, and then re-think come September based on whether or not I decide to go to university.
Now I will be thinking about the challenges of forging some kind of routine in an unfamiliar place. It’s going to be strange trying to maintain my cross-training and nutrition, etc., when I’m not in my normal routine or in my own home! But I’m so happy to be back in London and back at ballet!
Another recent major life change is that I left my day job as a teaching assistant at the end of term (the day before we had to move!). Now that we’re moving, we can find somewhere with cheaper rent so that I don’t have to work alongside my training. It was sad to say goodbye, and things won’t be easy, but it will ultimately make a huge difference to my training. Having to work alongside ballet for the past few years has been extremely challenging and has really prevented my progress. I am so excited to be able to focus fully on my dance training!
So that’s my crazy life at the minute… this blog post is coming to you from a Shoreditch coffee shop, and I can’t remember how to get back to our host flat from here! I’m trying to see this whole time as a crazy adventure rather than a stressful situation! That’s why things have been quiet on the blog front for a while, but I have some good posts coming up, including photos from my audition adventures, book reviews, notes from my visit to a dance nutritionist, and the next instalments of my adult beginner’s guide to ballet. I’m also signing up to flamenco classes now I’m back in London, which I can’t wait to try, and I’ll share my experiences of that here!
So stay tuned for more great content coming up and thanks for joining me on my adventures!
Jessica x
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