I Bombed My Audition: What Grade 10 Taught Me About Talent, Confidence, and Investing in Myself
By QueenB.Divine
Reading time: approximately 8–10 minutes, including a moment to pause and reflect.
Notice this. Grade 10 was very different from Grade 9. Obviously, because it was Grade 10. Look at me giving you the educational facts right out of the gate.
But something else had changed. I had started settling into myself. And looking back, that was an important part of learning how to invest—in myself, in something I loved, and eventually in understanding money. When you like something, you give it your attention. When you love something, you want to see what it can become. You invest because you want it to grow. What I hadn’t figured out yet was how much growing I still needed to do.
As I move through the grades of my life, I keep realizing that the universe had left lessons everywhere. At the time, I thought I was just going to school, trying things, and getting through the day. Now I look back and think, “Oh my goodness. That’s where that lesson began.” Grade 10 left me a particularly memorable one. There was singing involved. There was hope. There was an audition. And there was whatever came out of my mouth once the nerves arrived.
But before we continue, how are you? How was your weekend? Whatever you were celebrating, I hope you enjoyed yourself. I hope you found some balance. Hopefully, you didn’t drink yourself into a headache or eat yourself into a situation where your pants needed a personal day. Whatever you did, I hope you had some good time with yourself and the people you choose to invest in. Because you count as one of those people. Let’s remember that.
In Grade 10, I was at Wexford Collegiate in Scarborough. If you’ve been following my story, you know I had found a hankering for singing. I loved a good tune. I loved rhythm. I loved dancing. But singing felt like something I wanted to take a little further. I hadn’t really taken lessons. I just liked to sing. And when enough people say, “Hey, maybe you should focus on that,” eventually you start thinking, “Well, maybe I should.”
There is something exciting about discovering a thing you might be good at. Especially when so much of your life has involved trying to find somewhere you belong. I had already run away from home and lived in group homes. I wanted something that felt like mine. Singing was something I could recognize in myself. Something I enjoyed. Something I wanted to explore.
So when an opportunity came to audition for a musical, a friend encouraged me to try. The musical was—oh my goodness, what was it? Godspell. Yes. Godspell. I liked the name, and it became one of the first musicals I really fell in love with. So I thought, why not? Why shouldn’t I audition? That little “why not?” can open a door. Of course, you still have to walk through it and find out what you’re doing.
In my head, I had a reasonable plan. I liked singing. People had encouraged me. I would choose a song I could manage, rehearse it, and go in there. And I did rehearse. I really did. What did I sing? I think it was Gloria Estefan. Then I start remembering something else and think, “Give me one more chance”—no, that was Janet Jackson. Now I’ve got an entire imaginary playlist going, and I still cannot tell you which song I sang. But I remember thinking it was simple enough for me.
And I remember bombing. Oh, did I bomb. I quivered. I shook. Even if there was a gift in there, you would have needed some patience to locate it. In my head, I sounded great. I did. Unfortunately, my head was apparently holding a separate audition.
That experience could have become the story I told myself forever: “I tried singing. It went badly. I guess I’m not good at it.” And I almost gave up. When you care about something, struggling with it can feel personal. You’re standing there thinking, “This was supposed to be my thing.” Then one difficult moment has you questioning whether you understood yourself at all.
How do you build confidence after a bad audition—or after anything you hoped would go better? For me, it began with understanding that I had more to learn. Someone helped me see that being born with a gift didn’t mean I already knew how to use it. I loved singing, but loving it hadn’t taught me everything I needed to know about performing. That was a lesson.
I think of it like finding something growing in nature. Sometimes there is preparation involved before you can use it. You might have to peel it, break it down, boil it, or learn what part you’re working with before you get to the good stuff. My voice needed attention. I needed guidance. There were things I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
So, is natural talent enough? It hadn’t been enough to get me through that audition the way I imagined. I needed to develop what I had. That didn’t make the gift less meaningful. It gave me somewhere to begin. And that’s where the investment lesson started making sense.
You guess a couple of bingo numbers, or you happen to be right about a stock moving one day, and suddenly you’re a guru? Hold on. Let’s give that a minute. Getting something right once doesn’t tell you how much you understand. I was beginning to see the value of studying, asking questions, taking my time, and learning what went into a result. That connection would matter later as I worked through my own feelings about money and investing. Back in Grade 10, though, my classroom was an audition room, and my voice was making a very shaky presentation.
Practice makes sense. I don’t know about perfect. But practice makes sense because it gives you a chance to understand something better.
Before we go further, take a moment with that. What is something you care about that you nearly gave up on because your first attempt didn’t match what you heard or saw in your head? Maybe you tried singing. Maybe you started a business, posted a video, signed up for a class, or finally asked a question about money. What happened afterward? Did you decide you needed more information, or did you decide something was wrong with you?
You don’t have to force yourself to return to something you no longer want. But if you still care about it, consider one small investment you could make. A little practice. A useful question. Some guidance. A chance to try again with a better understanding of what you need. Take a breath. You’re allowed to learn before you decide what you’re capable of.
All right. Back to Grade 10. I started practicing. I got singing lessons. I went to Showoffs in Toronto, and I remember my teacher as Art Nevsky. He taught me little things I hadn’t realized I needed, even though I felt I had been born with a gift. That’s the funny part. You can arrive with something real and still need help developing it.
And I got good. I was very good at it. I enjoyed myself. I started doing competitions and having fun. But I’m getting ahead of the story, and Grade 10 deserves its own moment. That year established something for me: I could care enough about a gift to work on it.
What does investing in yourself actually look like? In my story, it looked like taking lessons and returning to practice after an experience that had embarrassed me. It looked like admitting I needed to learn without throwing away the thing I loved.
It also meant discovering that there were expectations around performing. Human society has a way of putting things in boxes. Singing, dancing, cooking—there are methods, techniques, and certain results people expect. Then there are people who can teach you how to work within those expectations. I had feelings about that. I still do. But I could see that learning how something worked gave me more room to use it in my own way. I didn’t want to lose what made singing feel like mine. I wanted enough understanding to express it.
And that’s a question many of us run into: how do you learn from other people without losing yourself? For me, the challenge was learning the skill while holding on to what I loved about it. I could listen, practice, adjust, and still have my own rhythm. My own expression. My own reason for being there.
Then there was another lesson waiting. Boy, was I sensitive. If somebody didn’t like a note I sang, I could get upset. I hadn’t learned how to hold that part of myself with confidence and strength. Singing mattered to me, and I didn’t yet know how to hear a criticism without feeling it reach much further than the note. Someone could be commenting on one moment, and I would feel as though the whole gift was under review.
How do you handle criticism when you’re still building confidence? That took learning, too. I needed to understand what was useful, what I could work on, and what didn’t need to become a verdict on me. I also had to learn that I didn’t need to share every part of my learning with everybody.
You can practice something privately. You can choose whose guidance you seek. You can give yourself time to understand what you’re doing before inviting a roomful of opinions into it. And when you do share, everybody isn’t going to respond the same way. I couldn’t make my confidence depend on everybody liking every note. There would have been no time left for singing. I’d have been too busy conducting a survey.
Practice gave me something steadier to return to. I knew I was putting time into it. I knew I was learning. I could begin making decisions from that knowledge. That’s why I keep saying practice makes sense.
Perfection is a silly quest for me. Where does it end? Who decides you’ve arrived? I wanted to do my best, understand my voice, and enjoy what I was doing. There was enough work in that without chasing an imaginary final version of myself.
Grade 10 opened a door to believing in something I loved. Through that, I started finding more belief in myself. Years later, learning about money brought up its own questions. Who is investing for? What do I need to understand? Where do I begin? I could recognize some familiar feelings: interest, uncertainty, wanting to get it right, and being uncomfortable with what I didn’t know.
I’m sharing that connection as part of my journey. Singing lessons didn’t teach me how to choose an investment. They helped me understand that caring about something and learning about it could go together. I could be interested without already being an expert. That realization gave me a little more room to ask questions.
And—why is my phone ringing? I don’t know that number. I’m not answering that right now.
By the way, that leads nicely into my other blog, “Why Does My Phone Make Me Anxious? The Emotional Weight We Carry in Our Hands.” Because if you use your phone to create, communicate, or keep up with things you’re learning, it’s worth noticing how you feel when you pick it up. Apparently, even my phone wanted a part in this story.
Anyways, thank you for reading. If you’re joining me through Don’t Crypto on My Mental Health, thank you for being part of this journey. Wherever you found this blog, I appreciate you stopping by. Having people take time to read your story in this busy social media world is a blessing.
Grade 10 didn’t give me the audition I had imagined. It gave me a reason to learn what my voice needed—and a chance to decide that I still wanted to sing.
Leave a comment and tell me what you’re learning to believe in again. Then follow my YouTube channel as we continue through the grades of my life. Give yourself a chance to practice before you count yourself out. Take care of you. Self-love and self-care will get you there.
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