Personal Profile Essay
I didn't enjoy poetry. I despised everything about it. Yes, I despised it, especially when I was forced to absorb it in school each year. Everything about it irked me. That's exactly what I thought regarding poetry up until recently. When I was essentially forced to participate in mandatory "Poetry in Voice" competition, I thought it was the end of the world. When details of the competition were announced, I was relieved to know that we had to perform a poem, not create our own. What seemed like a compromise at the time only brought up a harder challenge; performing poetry. The first couple of times I had to perform it was awful. The eyes of my class and my nerves got to me and my performance was flat. I went home in distress and explained the situation to my parents. They gave me the advice of combining my passion for acting with this situation. This made a ton of sense to me. I would just treat this as a scene and the class would be an audience of sorts. The next couple of times I performed I implemented the techniques I learned in acting class to deliver my performance with great improvement. This led to me winning the class competition and the school competition. I even competed at regionals and got selected for qualifiers at nationals. I learned the valuable lesson of not shutting down any opportunities. Now, I always look at obstacles from different perspectives and give everything a shot because it may lead to good things I never expected.