Dance Out Of The Darkness
30-Day Writing Challenge #19
Prompt: What career advice would you give your 16-year-old self?
It had to be 16.
My loyal readers know that when I was 16 years old, my world was forever changed. I was tossed into darkness by a brutal assault that I barely survived.
I also already had a career.
I was still a student at the time at the School of American Ballet in Manhattan, being primed to join the New York Ballet Company the following year. But I did a lot of paid performances, modeled for costume catalogs, and had been earning my own money for many years.
I hated it. Viscerally. I wanted an escape more than I wanted anything. And then the assault happened.
For the two months that I spent in the hospital, I longed to be in a ballet studio. I longed for weigh-ins and measurements and calorie counts and iced feet and bleeding toes because all of the pain of ballet was self-inflicted.
Sort of.
The pain of my assault was incomprehensible and much like I keep repeating to myself through this illness… I wanted my life back. Even if at that time, it was a life that I despised… it was a life that I recognized and understood my place within. I returned as a very different dancer. “Dance…
