This is me.

It’s weird, you know, that feeling you get when you finally discover who you are. “You’re true, authentic self” or something like that. 

It’s starts off as a niggling feeling, eating away at you, until it grows, bigger and bigger until you can’t contain it anymore, and it begins seeping out of your every pore. At first, you try to deny it, try to hide it and hope that it will just go away. But it doesn’t. It can’t.

The Young Playwright’s programme was designed to support young people to develop their creativity and find their voice. Never in a million years did I think I would be leaving it with so much more than that.

From the beginning, I knew it was something special. Whether it was because I felt challenged, or because my creativity was nurtured, I don’t know, but it had a feeling, a sense of something magical. As the months rolled on, it slowly but surely it became my thinking space, somewhere to explore my thoughts.

Our day to day lives are filled with so much chaos, so many things to do, that it can become overwhelming – we never have the chance to just stop…and think. And when we do, we find ourselves trapped in a never-ending whirlpool of thoughts and emotions that make it difficult to decipherer what any of them actually mean. But through this programme, I have been able to decipher them, been able to start articulating them and making myself more understood.

Month by month, I have found myself more aware, more switched on to myself. I’m able to put words on paper and make sense of my creative thoughts, which previously seemed to be written in another language.

I’m leaving this programme with a stronger sense of being, a stronger sense of who I am and what makes me, me.

I am Lauren. I’m 21 years old. I’m passionate about advocacy, inclusion and youth. I’m curiously creative. I have ASD and rely on God to get me through. This is me.

I have found my voice, and now, thanks to this programme, I am beginning to learn how to use it.

Lauren Asher

Lauren is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2019-2020