<p>I am a high school senior who has extensive experience in theatre. I've been in a wide variety of productions and have played a handful of challenging and complex roles. Aside from being an actress, I am a writer as well. Throughout my life, all of my teachers have acknowledged me as a very intelligent, mature, and unique individual. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, my circumstances have never been easy. My parents are divorced. My dad makes a decent amount of money, but he has never paid child support. He remarried shortly after the divorce and had two more kids with my step-mom. I have a step-sister, a half-sister, and a half-brother, and my dad spends a lot of his money on them. My mom is poor. I live with my mom, but since she isn't financially independent we live at my uncle's house. We've been living at his house ever since my parents divorced, which was over a decade ago. My mother has anger management problems and is extremely passive-aggressive. I hate being at home because I constantly get ridiculed and yelled at even if I am just minding my own business.</p>
<p>I have depression, anxiety, misophonia, chronic migraines, and chronic fatigue; all factors aside from my home life that make it really difficult for me to do well in school. I have struggled with academics since third grade. Even in subjects I love, such as English and History, I still do poorly. It's not that I don't understand the material, it's getting the work done that I struggle with. </p>
<p>There's a lot more I could explain about my life, but this is all I will mention for the sake for this thread. </p>
<p>My dream school is CalArts. I read their website thoroughly, and they claim that academic achievement is not a huge part of the decision making process for accepting applicants (they focus on talent), but I am still so worried that they will take one look at my transcript and reject me immediately because of how horrible my grades are. My freshmen year I had A's and B's, my sophomore year I had B's and C's, my junior year I failed two of my classes and had mediocre grades for the rest, and currently for my senior year I am doing even worse than I did my junior year. My SAT scores are average. </p>
<p>I am so stressed. I want to let CalArts know about my issues so they won't assume that I have bad grades because I don't care about school or because I'm just lazy. I can mention some of these issues in my personal essay/artist statement, but there is no way I can elaborate my issues thoroughly enough within that one piece of writing to make the school truly understand how much I have to deal with. I talked to my English teacher about this, and she said I should write a letter to the recruiter to cover everything I don't mention in my artist statement. Would that be a good idea? </p>
<p>I would love input from current CalArts students or CalArts alumni. </p>