November 15, 2021

I loved dancing before I really knew what dancing was. I would crouch on my grandmother’s living room floor and knead the soft carpet between my fingers, twisting and wrapping my body into the shapes I imagined that caterpillar mush makes in its cocoon. She always played the same two classical music CDs, and I had the songs memorized by age five.

Ballet offered stability, and with that stability came an almost meditative state. Barre to center to across the floor—pliés to tendus to degages—I soaked in the feeling of being in control of every part of myself from my toes to my ribcage to my fingertips to my eyebrows. As I improved, it became the most important thing in the world to me. If I wasn’t physically in class or rehearsal, I was watching youtube videos, practicing facial expressions, going over steps in my bedroom, reading ballerina’s memoirs, researching summer intensive programs, and stretching my feet every time I sat down in a chair. I was lucky to have certain gifts: high arches, hyperextended legs, flexibility, turned out hips. I worked hard, I earned roles and mentorship, and I was encouraged by my teachers to pursue ballet as a career. So it became my dream.

In high school came puberty and with puberty came resentment. I received increasingly less thinly veiled advice about getting leaner for the purposes of developing better lines, or working on being “lighter” in my steps, or trying out a nutrition plan until finally I was directly told to diet before a performance. 

My friends crossed their fingers and wished for bigger cup sizes and Kardashian asses; I asked the universe to be perfectly flat and thin. I became obsessed with parts of my body that were impossible to change: the width of my ribs, the length of my neck, the curve of my hips. I grew bitter about things I had missed out on for a class or a rehearsal or a photoshoot: dates, dances, family dinners, field trips, vacations, time—it all felt like I was losing time. 

Ballet had become fourteen to eighteen hours a week of staring at my body in a mirror, my only goal being to find what didn’t look “right,” and to try to “fix” it. I competed with myself during lunch breaks on eight hour rehearsal days to eat as little as possible, and I pored over my heroes’ diets and measurements. Costume fittings were humiliating and filled with comments of, “it fit this role’s girl last year” and “are you on your period? Maybe we should fit you when you’re not as bloated.” I compared my seventeen year old body to my prepubescent body and wished to look eleven again. My teachers had slowly stopped encouraging ballet in my future. It was not a mystery why. 

I didn’t dance for a year, ostensibly because of Covid, but more truthfully because I was terrified of facing my body in a leotard again, of discovering that I had gotten less flexible or that I couldn’t do as many turns. But I was also terrified of having given eleven years to something only to simply stop. When asked, I told everyone that I was happier— which was true, to the extent that I learned to accept my boobs and I lost my fear of taking birth control. But I felt, for lack of a less cheesy word, incomplete. 

My decision to audition for student-led dance companies was somewhat impulsive, but largely motivated by the fact that I was struggling with a sense of self. I wanted stability. I felt immediate regret upon entering the studio to audition, and old intrusive thoughts crept their way in when I took my place in front of the mirror. But I reminded myself that I wasn’t there to get the lead in a show or to prove to a teacher that I could be successful. My meditative state kicked in. I reminded myself I was there for me.