Ballet Killed My Confidence. Pole Dancing Built It Back Up.
“You’re all just hiding your fat butts.”
“You shouldn’t be wearing those shorts,” our ballet teacher said during a challenging set of tendu’s.
“You’re all just trying to hide your FAT BUTTS.”
He laughed — or rather, stuck out his chin, bared his teeth, and loudly expelled air, like a reptile inflating its collar. The kind of move that scares off predators with its unpredictable suddenness.
I was too shy to even secretly roll my eyes at him. Or maybe shy isn’t the right word. I was mortified.
He’d seen right through me. I did have a fat butt. I was wearing tight shorts over my ballet leotard to hide it.
My face burned. I didn’t dare look at anyone else. I tilted my head and gazed at my left hand. At least I got my hands right. Most of the time.
A big potato
To be honest, this was just a tiny bit worse than what we were used to. Our class was being trained to be dance teachers, not “actual dancers”. With the exception of one or two, all of our teachers told us not to set our sights on having a career on stage.
My first-year ballet teacher once asked me if I was ‘going to do it like this’, or if I was ‘going to work, because I looked like a big potato.’ This last word was spat at me.
I retold the stories at home as if they were a big joke. The truth is, I took those words to heart — mostly because they were partly true. I was not an exceptionally good dancer. Graceful enough, with a fair sense of rhythm and musicality, but not strong or bendy.
I had loved ballet ever since I was four years old, but by the end of my four-year training as a dance teacher, I was convinced I was just about the worst ballet dancer on the planet. I was embarrassed to dance even before the five-year-old girls I was teaching myself, who obviously adored me and wanted to be ‘just like me when they grew up.’
I was sure of one thing: I would not be a ballet teacher when I grew up. After four years of staring at myself in a mirror, I was desperate for a change.
In an attempt to get judged on something other than how high I could lift my leg, I went to university to get a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian languages and cultures. When I got my first grades there, I hardly knew how to feel.
With ballet, I had (quite literally) worked my ass off and always gotten marks between 5,4 and 5,6. Now, here I was, blinking stupidly at a 9,5 at the top of the sheet. I had forgotten what it felt like to be rewarded for hard work.
Halfway into my third year at university, I decided to take a beginner’s course in pole dancing. The first weeks I could basically do nothing. I felt embarrassed and didn’t tell anyone about my background as a dancer. But I kept trying. One day I was suddenly hanging upside down. Other pole dancers smiled, applauded, offered to take a picture.
For the first time ever, I was fascinated with what my body was capable of. During those four years at the dance academy, I had learned my body was useless. Now I looked at the picture of me hanging upside down and felt pride.
‘Don’t you feel that it’s a little degrading to be pole dancing?’ an uncle asked me. ‘I mean, you, as a feminist…’
I retorted: ‘Feminism, to me, means not telling women what to do with their bodies.’
Honestly, I do see his point. ‘Reclaiming’ something as a feminist act is a little more complicated than just deciding that I wanna do it and I’m a feminist so now it’s feminist.
But pole dancing made me feel powerful and genuinely happy with my body for the first time in my life. I was surrounded by encouraging students who helped each other getting in and out of tricky poses. The teachers were nothing but positive and optimistic. When someone slumped out of a pose with particular gracelessness, there was friendly laughter instead of tension and shame.
There was no way I was going to give that up.
Looking at videos of myself doing ballet back then, I think: well, that’s actually not so bad. In hindsight, the problem wasn’t that I was such a lousy dancer.
The problem was that I was terrified of messing up. It made me work incredibly hard, and it also sucked me bone-dry of any confidence, because guess what? If you want to get better at something, you are always going to fail. At first you’re going to suck, then you’re going to continue sucking for a bit and then you end up sucking slightly less. Then you see a hundred new things you suck at and start the whole process from the beginning.
I had done ballet since I was a kid and had assumed I’d be good at it. When I found out I wasn’t, I became scared of being bad, scared of making mistakes. It made me unwilling to experiment and stifled any spontaneity.
With pole dancing, I knew I would be bad. I went in into that classroom absolutely confident I’d be making a fool out of myself, and determined not to let that stop me from enjoying myself.
Pole dancing taught me that there are things that my body can do that I never thought it could do.
It taught me that sometimes, attitude matters more than how high you can lift your leg in comparison to someone else.
It taught me that surrounding yourself with people who will build you up can sometimes be more important than hearing “constructive criticism” from experts.
It taught me that dancing, when done with a touch of grace, a big helping of courage and the willingness to fail and look like an idiot, can be absolutely enchanting to look at, extremely liberating, and best of all, fantastic for your confidence.
