For about five years of my life, before coming to college, I was training to become a professional ballet dancer. I would take technique classes and rehearse for hours on end. I would take pride in my bloody toes and sore muscles, because that meant I was dedicated. Teachers told me that I had “such great potential” and “the perfect ballet body.” A fellow dancer once said she loved the flexibility of my feet so much, that she wanted to “chop them off.” I’m still not sure if that was a joke.<\/p>\n
Today, I consider myself a retired dancer, and until a conversation I had this past summer, I had been avoiding coming to terms with why I left that world. My seventeen-year-old coworker was explaining to me his plan to “make it” on Broadway. He asked me why I had “given up” my dream of dancing for a ballet company. I was completely taken aback. No one had explicitly asked me this before. It was a question that had been gnawing at the back of my mind for the past two years, though — one that I had repressed from the fear that I might deeply regret the decision I made to give up my “great potential.” But I answered with the truth: I hated the ballet world with its constant pressure to be perfect and its uncertainty and its dancers that would give you condescending glances if you were eating anything but a fruit or a vegetable. His response: “Yeah, you have to be tough to make it.”<\/p>\n
Of course I didn’t kill his huge dreams, because they were important to him, and they were to me at his age. In fact, I probably spewed the same line which alluded to the notion that I was a special breed of invincible. But as I’ve grown older, and (hopefully) wiser, I have revised my interpretation of “tough” in that you need to be tough to understand that you can no longer deal with a community you have grown up in. You need to be tough to get the hell out of it.<\/p>\n
Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely love ballet as an art form. The feeling I would get when I flew through the air in a grand jet\u00c3\u00a9 was incredible. Successfully balancing an arabesque until the music faded made me believe I could easily balance my life like that as well. It was the ballet world with which I quickly became frustrated. The competition that it bred was sickening to me both physically and mentally. When I moved from dancing with a small, local studio to training with a professional company, I immediately discerned that I was not welcome by many of my peers there. They would mock how I looked and danced in class and would send death glares my way whenever I completed multiple pirouettes. After four years there, I recognized that I felt like a stranger to myself and that I just didn’t want to feel miserable anymore.<\/p>\n
I was reluctant to stop dancing, because I had the potential to succeed and a love of leaping. However, a daunting feeling developed within me during my senior year of high school, a feeling that I couldn’t return to that environment and the doubts that came with it. Looking back, I am able to see that along with this elegant ballerina dream and hidden within a teenage invincibility-complex, was the fear that I may not achieve my goals. I had dedicated my life to ballet; I thought that I had nothing else, that I would be no one if I didn’t “make it.” I had to leave, if not for the constant pain and eating disorders and mentally paralyzing envy of others, to learn that I was someone without my pointe shoes.<\/p>\n
After this conversation I had with a seventeen-year-old who would have given John Lennon a run for his money in the dreamer department, I was able to analyze my own life and come to the understanding that I had not given up on my aspirations. I realized that artistic dreams do not have to be grandiose or full of hairspray, glittering eye makeup, and spotlights. They do not have to be absolute and unwavering — they can evolve and grow with you, never dying, but helping to shape the person you become. I do not regret my decision to enter the ballet world; it instilled a strong sense of discipline within me that I continue to apply to my everyday life. However, I also do not regret my decision to leave it, because I am so much happier now than I was five years ago.<\/p>\n
My toes are happier too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For about five years of my life, before coming to college, I was training to become a professional ballet dancer. I would take technique classes and rehearse for hours on end. I would take pride in my bloody toes and sore muscles, because that meant I was dedicated. Teachers told me that I had “such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3738"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6903,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738\/revisions\/6903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsatmichigan.umich.edu\/ink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}