A Letter To My 17-Year-Old, Tomato Sauce Sandwich-Eating Self, By Tom Ballard

If youth is wasted on the young (someone enlightened said that once, right?), what would you have told your 17 year old self? Together with UTS:INSEARCH – which in a nutshell is a service that helps you find another way into UTS – we approached some friends of Junkee and asked them to pen a letter to their younger self as they prepare to head out into the big wide world.

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Dear Tom,

Please put down that “sandwich” of toasted bread and tomato sauce* and listen to me.

Firstly, I’m sorry that this message from the future isn’t too glitzy. I imagine it’s a bit disappointing that your future self is communicating to you via a letter; generally you want your messages from the future to be delivered via a hologram or a robot or something. Future you (aka me) is doing okay, but we’ve all got our budgets, particularly in this economy.

By the end of this year you will finish Year 12 with a high score (that’s not quite as high as your brother’s was), you will turn 18, you will not go on Schoolies because it clashes with musical theatre camp and you will audition for the top acting courses in the country and not get into any of them.

You will not even get a call-back from NIDA even though you thought the man running the auditions liked the look of you (don’t flatter yourself, honey).

But your heart’s still set on tertiary education. Mum and Dad are highly intelligent people (both of them teachers) who instilled the value of learning in you and your bro (Gavin, as you know, is halfway through his IT Engineering/Law degree and absolutely loving the college lifestyle).

You will be offered a place in the law course at Monash University and a scholarship to boot. Because you’re obsessed with the idea of being A CREATIVE ARTISTE you’re not immediately enthused about it and decide to defer. You spend 2008 travelling to the UK for a public speaking competition with your parents, moving from country Victoria to a tiny room in Fitzroy with no windows, doing pretty bad stand-up and not learning how to cook.

When you eventually do start uni in 2009, it’s…messy. You can’t keep up with the drinking in O-Week, you don’t make many friends, you get bored with all the reading and fall behind, you hate the 40-minute commute out to Clayton, you don’t understand how anyone has time for all the extra-curricular stuff everyone keeps banging on about, you get lost heaps, you’re always tired and you don’t have anywhere near the amount of sex you were sex-pecting.

Oh, and you drop out after six weeks, which you consider “a failure”, and you hate failing because that’s what other people do, right?

Now I know all this doesn’t sound ideal, but trust me, things totally work out for you, thanks to you slowly getting your shit together and being very, very lucky. By 2015 you’ve been on TV and radio and you get paid to tell dick jokes and there are thousands of people following you on a micro-blogging site called Twitter (shut up, it’s cool, okay?).

But you’ll notice that the messiness doesn’t stop. That’s how life rolls, I’m afraid. I know you like to think you’re special, Tom, and I know you have this perfect plan in your head about how things are going to go, but I reckon you should chuck that shit overboard and just enjoy what’s in front of you. If you throw yourself into those six weeks of uni a little more, who knows what could happen? The worst (and best) case scenario is you’ll be challenged and learn something about yourself.

That particular course wasn’t right for us at that particular time of our life, but there’s an entire universe out there to learn about and heaps of universities out there to help you do that. As I get older and appreciate the breadth of my ignorance (it’s hella broad), I’m desperate to learn as much as I can, from screenwriting to physics to politics to yes, even cooking.

As happy and lucky as I feel now, eight years away from where you are, all the joys that uni can bring – intellectually, socially and SEXUALLY – seem so apparent to me and are reflected in so many people I meet and work with.

Enrolling somewhere in the near future (and actually finishing a course) is firmly on my agenda. Sure, starting again might be a little “messy”, but that’s okay.

So have fun, kid. Oh and don’t worry about season two of Orange Is The New Black – I know the first few eps are a little uneven, but it gets great by episode four.

Love (is that weird?),

Tom

*(Actual thing I used to eat. A lot.)

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Tom Ballard is kicking off 2015 with a new stand-up show ‘Taxis & Rainbows & Hatred’ touring Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. Find out more here.

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UTS:INSEARCH gives you a second shot at getting into uni if you didn’t get the ATAR you need. They offer courses in Business, Communication, Design & Architecture, Engineering, IT and Science and in some cases can FAST TRACK you into the 2nd year of a UTS degree. Watch the UTS:INSEARCH movie trailer to find out what it’s all about!