Ballet Shoes and Bravery

I participated in a ballet intensive this summer, and if you’re a dancer, you know those tend to never end. You keep going, and days go by, and weeks, and somehow you’re still back in the same studio for eight hours trying to make something of your dancing, hoping that if you just keep dance dance dancing, something will change.

But change, real change, is often beneath the layers and layers of effort. They start to stack up, pile on, and now they’re toppling over, and beneath is a little problem, a problem that I am too afraid to address. And so I bury it in hard hard work and ask myself why things aren’t better, because I really am trying so very hard.

A little voice says “bad.” Deep deep down “Look at you. Disgusting.” And I blink back a little ocean in my eyes and layer lots of work on again and again, hopeless striving against something buried in my heart, too scary to think about. “Your leg – bad. Your arm – weak. Your coordination – insufficient. Your shoes – horrible!” And that voice finally became too loud. It was grating my dreams, sliver by sliver, until I could hardly remember why I wanted to dance. So this summer, I did something. Something miniscule. But also terrifying. I decided to try a new brand of pointe shoe. This meant a plethora of scary: a new balance point, new strength to build, adjustments for every releve and turn. But I put those shoes on, and something awoke inside of me. I started to love ballet again. I felt a courage awakening inside of me that had been all but extinguished by the screaming in my head. I had made a choice. I had gotten out from beneath the pile of “try hard” that I had deemed necessary to succeed, and finally made a decision that has begun to change my dancing forever.

Sometimes, change can only be found in the seconds, minutes, and hours of work, dusty planners, late nights, endless to-do lists, and a hopeless treadmill. But other times, change is waiting beneath fear of failure, buried in perfectionism, extinguished by the voice of “not good enough” always harping on every action, warning against every possible negative outcome. During the Cincinnati Ballet Summer Intensive, I broke through one wall of this fear through a simple small decision. One day, these little decisions could mean something more than a change in my own life. Practicing the courage to make a change despite the risk of failure could mean the chance to change lives, to make impacts on a broad scale, perhaps one day, even globally.