So, a lot of you might be wondering about my origin story, okay?  That’s, uh, where someone comes from.  So, my origin story starts in the mid-90s in a country called Wales.  Wales is a very small country in the UK, there’s about three million people, and it’s a little different to the other countries in the UK because, in Wales, we have our own language.

Now, here’s the thing.  A lot of people can’t speak the language, like me, I’m not fluent in Welsh.  But we still learn it at school.  In Wales though, most people’s first language is English, and by most, I mean like 99%.

So, I was born in the mid-90s, and I sort of grew up in Wales, and as I became a teenager, I started to develop some kind of personality, like many of us.  And so, I became a theatre kid, if you can believe that.  So, I really enjoyed acting, and being in plays, and, well, being the centre of attention.  I’ve always loved being the centre of attention, I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s a problem with my ego, who knows?  But I’ve always enjoyed it and it’s a reason why I’m making podcasts right now too.

Um, so that’s what I did, and when I reached sixteen, in the UK, we have to do something called work experience, okay?  So, work experience is when you are sent to do a job, you become an assistant somewhere, you get a taste of work life.  Because in the UK, at least at that time, you could leave school at sixteen.  So, it’s getting you ready, getting you to decide.  Are you going to leave or are you going to continue in education?

So, I didn’t really think much about what I was going to do.  I just chose somewhere close, somewhere familiar.  So, I ended up going back to my old primary school as a teaching assistant, okay?

Now, I’m only sixteen so I didn’t have to do much, just sort of look after kids, maybe the teacher needed a certain book or something, I’d go get it, tell a story, that kind of thing, you know.  It wasn’t really hard work, but it was my first taste of teaching.

Okay, so I think it’s very important that I bring it up because of where my life has led.

So, anyway, I got a little bit older and when I hit eighteen years old, it was time to go to university.  Now, like most teenagers, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.  So, I just chose what I liked.  You know, my hobbies.  I like making videos.  So, my first degree is actually in film and television studies, which might be hard to believe.

But while I was there, I joined the improvisational theatre society, okay, we usually just call that ‘improv’, okay?  So, I joined it, it’s acting, and you don’t need a script, so it fits in quite easily with university life.  I don’t have to spend time remembering lines.  I can just go, show up, and then in the daytime study, in the evening go to my job in a restaurant.

So, yes, I went to the improv society for a couple of years and then we had elections to get the new president of the improv society and I thought, you know, why not?  I love improv, I like teaching, you know I haven’t had much experience yet, but I’d like to give it another go.

So, I went for it and, yes, I was elected president of the improv society.  So, every week after that, I was teaching acting skills to groups of adults.  You know, eighteen to… probably the oldest was around 35, okay, with mature students.

So, that was really cool, that gave me a good taste of teaching and what it felt like to actually be a teacher, even though it wasn’t in such a professional role.

So, my degree came to an end in the mid-2010s, and I had that kind of crisis that a lot of people have when they leave university.  They still don’t really know what to do.  They don’t feel ready to grow up, they don’t know what job they’re gonna do, so I had that problem.

So, I thought the best thing I could do is take a break before I look for a job with my degree, which if you remember is film and television studies.

So, one day, somebody came to my university to give a talk, and they talked about working in China.  Okay, they’re a company that they send people to China to teach English, okay?  But they will send any native speaker pretty much.  You don’t have to be too qualified for this company unfortunately.

And, you know, I was a dumb kid.  I was just twenty-one so, yeah, I thought why not?  This would be a good opportunity for me to teach, which I like, and figure out what I’m gonna do with my life.

So, I took a very quick teaching course.  I think it was 60 hours, but it was online and I learned to teach.  But here’s the thing guys, I got some real qualifications later, and, looking back, I must admit nobody is qualified to teach for just learning for 60 hours online.  You may have heard of something called a TEFL certificate, okay.  A TEFL certificate can be gotten in even twenty hours, maybe even less, they’re very cheap, and you can do them online.  Sometimes there’s no test, you just click through the slides, okay?  So, this is a problem but it’s the kind of certificate I had in the beginning.

So, I went to China, and I taught for six months.  Mostly I taught children but soon I was being invited to high schools and different schools in the area to give guest lectures, weekly classes, and things like that, so I got a taste of a bit of everything.  And then, on weekends, I was offered some more work to have conversation classes with adults.  So, I really enjoyed that, I got a taste of beginner to advanced, child to adult, different settings, and then it came to an end.

I was only in China for six months and then it was time to come home.  But, I still had that crisis, okay?  And I’ve come to call it a quarterlife crisis, okay?

So, there’s a phrase in English, ‘a midlife crisis’, so it’s when somebody turns around late-40s, early-50s maybe, they panic.  They think, “I haven’t done anything with my life”, so they buy a sports car, or they go skydiving.  They do some crazy things.

But the quarterlife crisis, for me, I think that’s a panic time, okay?  You’ve had a quarter of your life already and you still don’t know what to do with it, okay?  So, that was a very hard time for me.

I was in the UK; I didn’t really expect to teach abroad again so I just got some work where I could, and I ended up working in a supermarket which was fun at times and not so fun at other times.  It is very hard work and, you know what? I gained a lot of respect for supermarket workers because of that.

Now, a supermarket worker, at least in my country, doesn’t make much money.  So, I couldn’t afford to rent my own apartment, I couldn’t afford to do anything really after food or bills.  So, I ended up living with my mother that time and life was just really getting me down at that time, okay?

And then it was just late one night that I thought, you know, “I need to change something, I need to be happy”.  It’s very difficult to get a job with my degree, which again is film and television.  It is difficult to get a job in that field.  So, I thought, “Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do.  I’m just gonna do something totally different”, just like the midlife crisis, “I’m gonna just move abroad and see what happens”.

So, I found this company online and what they do is match you up with people who need workers, okay?  So, you work a few hours, and they’ll give you a bed and they’ll give you food, okay?  So, I ended up moving to the Netherlands where I worked in a hotel.  My job was to clean the rooms some days and be night watch the other days.  And that was a nice job, you just slept in bed and if the doorbell rang, you answered the door.  Okay, that was quite nice.  So, I just worked two or three hours every day and I got somewhere to sleep I got some food.  So, that was quite nice.

But it was five weeks and, again, it wasn’t paying so I couldn’t do it long term.  But, in that five weeks, I found some work at a summer camp in Italy, okay?  So, my job was going to be go to Italy and teach these kids, you know, play games with them in English, teach them some songs, and make some acting show with them, okay?  And again, that pulled on my experience of acting.  Again, I really like to act.

So, I took that, and I realized very quickly that, you know, actually I really like teaching.  I may have done my degree in film and television but actually that’s not what I want to do.  I realized that, actually, I like teaching English.