Vital Signs

When I walked into my first ballet class at 15, it was a last resort. I was in the darkest place I had ever been and was searching for something, anything, to get me above water. I walked into that class hopeless. I walked out wanting to spend every moment of every day in the studio. I loved ballet enough to take classes with students three to four years younger than me since I was starting so late. At the time, I didn’t give it a second thought—I was happy to do whatever I needed to do get up to speed with my peers. In hindsight, I’m proud of myself for not letting my ego hold me back. I was lucky enough to go on to study dance in college and immerse myself in a wider variety of styles and methodologies. I got to dance every day, often for several hours, for four years, and also dive into history, technique, and choreography. No matter what else was happening in my life or the world around me, dance was a place I could retreat to. Dance reminded me that there was air in my lungs and blood in my veins, and that no matter how much it may hurt, I was alive.

While my love for dance never waned, life shifted. Toward the end of senior year, I experienced what I thought at the time was my career-ending injury. For almost seven years, I placed the hope of taking classes or performing on the shelf, accepting that my relationship with dance would probably never be quite as fulfilling as it had been before. Until this year, at 29, I took a leap. This past Fall, on a whim during a late night, I signed myself up for an adult ballet class. It is something that I had been wanting to do for a while—I had just been lacking the physical strength and the guts to do it.

This time I walked into class hopeful, but tentative. As soon as I saw the rosin on the floor and smelled the familiar scents of leather and sweat, I felt both 15 and 87. Though I am, as the cliché goes, older and wiser, I quickly found that in the years between my first ballet class and now, I had gained more apprehension and self-consciousness than I had had as a struggling teenager. My body humbled me quickly. Movements that I remembered feeling effortless were labored and clumsy. Yes, my training was embedded in my body to some extent. But unfortunately muscle memory alone doesn’t trump a twice-dislocated knee, an aging body, and years away from practicing my craft. My re-introduction to ballet was not a leap of abandon. It was, and continues to be, a slow, hesitant trust-fall.

This coming weekend, I will be participating in a dance recital. When I first joined adult ballet, I swore I wouldn’t perform. I told myself that it would be too embarrassing, that it had been too long, and that it would only highlight all of the skills and abilities I had lost over the years. But here I am, ordering ballet tights and a shade of lipstick I haven’t seen since my last Nutcracker performance. Do I feel a bit silly? Yes. Am I terrified of how I will look on stage after so long? Also yes. And regardless of all that, I am proud.

I’m proud of myself to trying again. I’m proud for not letting myself let go of something I love. I am proud of the fact that I will be walking out onto that stage scared and doing it anyway. A few months ago, I asked my family and friends not to come to my recital out of fear that it would seem childish. But each day it becomes clearer to me that there is nothing childish or insignificant about chasing after the things that breathe life into your bones.