Do you want it enough?

There are a lot of things I want in life. I’d like to run the marathon, to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, to be a grade 8 pianist, and to speak fluent French. But these things all take practice, hard work and dedication. All perfectly possible, but I clearly don’t want it enough. For the last few years I have flitted through life saying ‘I want to work in television’ ‘I want to be a writer’ and I thought I wanted it, but now I realise it was down on the list right next to French lessons.

I sent off my CV, dipped my toe in the water with a couple of TV companies and completed a work placement, but generally life carried on as normal. In the last few months, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, this is the first time I have wanted to succeed with every bone in my body. I live and breathe the things that will help me along the way. I now work full time in a theatre, I come home every evening to write script reports and read scripts. Any rare evening I have free I go to see a play, and this evening I tried out a new writers group. Every day I get a step closer to where I want to be and I have realised this isn’t a half-arsed commitment. There will always be someone more talented than you, so you have to be the one who wants it the most.