I Miss What I Learned To Distrust
The Dark Side of Passions
This story is about the relationship between your Self and your craft. What you call your life’s work, your purpose, or maybe your career. Whatever you choose to call it. The labels are a bit hazy, but that’s ok.
For me, it is dance — my passion, but also the source of my pain, something I’ve only recently been able to accept. I’ve been trying to wrestle with this reality, but navigating this dynamic has been nothing short of a feat. The thing is, dance is also my lifeline.
They say that to tackle a big task, you have to break it down into smaller pieces, so it doesn’t feel as overwhelming. Thus, I decided to dissect my experience with dance. Up first, ballet.
That one has been a rather complicated onion to peel. Layers and layers of trauma. Something I’ve avoided, simply because I have no interest in reliving those experiences. Which is why I never thought I would say I miss ballet.
In fact, I am craving it.
How is this possible?
I have to take a step back.
I’ve been taking class since I was five. I’ve been dancing since before then. (The difference between the two is a story for another time). As I’ve continued to take class all these years — struggling, breaking down, trying to feel, growing, learning, and everything that comes in between — I have developed a certain awareness of this practice I love so much. An awareness that has taught me countless lessons, one of which establishes a direct line between dance and my eating disorder.
I finally admitted to myself that the two are intimately intertwined. This discovery didn’t happen until I was out of the danger zone. Once I recovered weight and was no longer at risk of, well, dying, I started reflecting on my experience, looking back at the hell that had happened to me, and that continues to happen to me.
I thought and I thought. Remembered. Observed. Dissected. Criticized. Analyzed. Wrote. A lot. Little by little, my eyes opened up to the reality that my passion was also my affliction. What was bringing me so much joy was also hurting me deeply. Just like food. Slowly, then, I became wary. Just like with food.
I had just uncovered a pattern.
Can I Trust Dance To Be The Thing I Need It To Be?
Somewhere along the way, this passion — in normal times, something that happens organically — had turned into an obsession. It no longer flowed; instead, it became forced.
Indeed, I had convinced myself that dance was what I needed, was what I wanted to be spending my time doing, was my “be-all-end-all”. I had bet a lot on it — leaving behind other ventures like gymnastics, volleyball, and tennis in order to focus on this. I thought dance was all I had to live for. It could absolutely not let me down.
The thing is, eating disorders don’t just affect you physically; they are, first and foremost, mental disorders. The effects it has on your psyche are layered and complex; you often don’t realize what they are until after the fact.
While I was practicing ballet — among other styles — I simply took what was said to me at face value: the corrections, the notes, the tasks. The “suck your stomach ins”, the “tuck your butt unders”, the “close your ribcages” (a more polite way of saying don’t show your fat). There was an endless list of things to think about as you went through the motions: tighten this, turn out that; squeeze this, not that; do this, do that.
As time went on, I got weaker and weaker, both physically because I was losing weight, and mentally because that weight and energy loss also depletes your brain (few people talk about this). My eating disorder had officially settled itself in my whole being, slowly picking away at the thing that first made me feel love.
Eventually, dancing—but ballet especially, due to its very regimented format—became an exercise. A mechanical action to be completed, not performed or felt.
Ballet In Particular
I hone in specifically on ballet because it is a beast of its own. It’s what produced the deepest scars. The values it preaches, the lessons it teaches may seem aspirational at first glance, but if you look behind the curtain, you’ll uncover a monster lurking behind.
Underneath its shiny surface of pointe shoes, tutus, and perfectly coiled buns, ballet hides a dark and ugly truth: it is based on the pursuit of an unsustainable toxic model of perfection. It exists on the premise that you must achieve a very specific preternatural bodily ideal; that you are worthy only if you look a certain way. Meaning tall, thin, and lean. Or in my case, emaciated, empty, and depressed.
This awareness — or dare I say awakening — had suddenly birthed distrust.
I suppose I can say that my wariness for ballet was foreshadowed by my physical experience with an eating disorder. My body had been trying to let me know that something might be awry. Could it be that ballet was simply not for me?
Ballet Is An Expert Seducer
The worst part is that it makes you want to be that way. It turns you into someone who will do whatever it takes to reach this apostheosis. Even if that means making yourself puke, ignoring pain, working with injury, starving yourself, neglecting all other aspects of your being, and precipitating your descension into an abyss of exhaustion.
The idea is that until you’ve broken yourself, you’re not there.
If you’re not suffering, well then, sorry honey, but you’re not doing it right.
That is what ballet teaches you — or taught me. Underneath it all — underneath the perfectly pointed foot, underneath the luxuriously lengthened leg, underneath the jaw-dropping jumps and pirouettes, underneath the awe-inspiring arched arms, underneath the seemingly magical curvature of the spine.
It is suffering masked by near-flawlessness.
Is it worth it?
It Isn’t All Evil
This being said, I want to make clear that not everyone has this same relationship with ballet. Each person’s experience is different, so even though I use some generalizations, what I write about isn’t the only truth ballet has to offer. I don’t mean to alienate anyone.
Ballet is just, complicated. It isn’t just mischief. Otherwise, why would we be so attracted to it?
I admit that it displays a certain type of beauty. Its enthralling aura draws you in like an appetizing little cake. Its elegance pulls you in and keeps you in, like this cake you keep going back to for more.
I, personally, can never completely let go.
Part 2 to come soon.
