Although I am no longer dancing, the dancer in me has never left- though I wish it would
sometimes. I find that when people think of dance, specifically ballet, people either make
fun of it or love it for the beauty of the art form.
Though *gasp*, the dance world is not as beautiful as what is presented on stage.
I have always been so confused as to why nobody ever talks about the ugliness of the
dance world because it is so incredibly prevalent. So I have taken it upon myself to start the
train of truth, because I know that so many young dancers out there deserve to feel that
they are not alone. So I will start by saying, if you relate to any of the things that I talk about
within this article, you are seen and you are heard. And most of all, you are not alone.
Growing up with a different body than what the ballet world wanted is the most
traumatizing thing that I have ever endured-hence the reasoning for writing this article. But
I think one thing that made the experience even worse was the fact that everyone was silent
about the matter. I had never heard any professionals ever talk or write about any potential
body image issues and I felt like it was just a me problem. Being a more muscular and curvy
girl in ballet felt like being a hippo in a pond of swans. No matter where you went or what
you did, you always stood out- and not in a good way. And just to make things worse, the
formal ballet attire is a tight-fitting leotard paired with tights, so every single flaw was put
on display. Mind you, I was at the studio 7 days a week looking at myself in full body
mirrors hours upon end, just comparing myself to the stick-figure skinny dancers around
me. I think body dysmorphia was pretty much a given.
Ballet wasn’t always stressful for me though.
From the moment I took my first ballet class at 2 years old, I fell in love with the beauty
and freedom of the art form. In my early childhood, like other children, I was experimenting with everything from soccer to taekwondo. But nothing made me feel the way dance did. I wanted to be at that dance studio every single day of my life.
I really started to get serious about dance, specifically ballet, when I was 11 years old. I
auditioned and joined my dance studio’s official company as a trainee. At this age, I had
finally shed all of my baby fat and had the body type to thrive in ballet. On top of that, dance
just became my outlet. From the moment I woke up in the morning, I would look forward to
going to class later in the evening. If I could have lived at the studio, I would have. I longed
for that infinite feeling of escape and freedom, and I knew from that point onward, I wanted
to feel these things my entire life.
I was starting to move up through the ranks; I would get chosen for good roles in all of
the ballets, I would travel with the company to Regional Dance America and things were
really good for a while. Until they weren’t.
Like every normal person going through puberty, I gained some weight. Enough weight
to make me stand out and lose the favor of my teachers and artistic director. I hated myself.
I thought everything was wrong with me when I started getting more minor roles and was
not getting paid attention to in class anymore. I had been so used to getting praise and
corrections, but when I gained this weight, all I got was silence. It was as if I was not worth
anyone’s time anymore. It was as if I wasn’t worth anything at all. From that point onward,
food became my worst enemy. I was in 8th grade.
The summer going into my freshman year was my first attempt at extreme dieting. I
knew that I had to lose at least 15 pounds in order to get a good role for Nutcracker season,
so I did what I felt like I had to do. I went to this woman in Maine named Marcelle who ran a
women’s weight loss program. I practically fell to my knees with relief when she told me
that I’d be able to lose 20 pounds by the time of Nutcracker auditions through her program.
I did not actually start her program until I returned from a summer intensive at Festival
Ballet Providence, but I was so eager to start. We started by 2 days of fat loading. I would
start the day with an omelette, eat strawberries and heavy cream, yogurt, and anything you can name that had a substantial amount of fat. Then after that 2 day period, I was only allowed to eat 400 calories a day. Marcelle’s “secret” was a serum that you would put under your tongue before every meal. You would hold it under your tongue for a minute and then swallow it. It always burned. I was 13 and a full fledged athlete only eating 400 calories a
day. I did end up losing those 20 pounds, but I was miserable.
Only when I lost the weight did people pay more attention to me again. I had people say
“you look great!” all the time, as if I didn’t before I lost the weight. Mind you, I was not an
overweight person- but in terms of ballet, I was. I needed this validation though because it’s
what kept me going. All I cared about was how my teachers thought of me because they
already had every show casted in their minds. I never thought to care about myself and how
I was feeling because I hated myself and couldn’t forgive myself for gaining that weight. I
thought that I deserved to feel the way that I did; tired, lonely, and depressed.
Fast forward to the summer going into my sophomore year. I had won a scholarship to
attend Carolina Ballet’s 4 week summer intensive and had a really great time while I was
there. I met some amazing people and I had gotten to take classes with one of my favorite
prima ballerinas, Megan Fairchild (who is a principal dancer with New York City Ballet). I
remember being so shocked that she actually took the time to give me corrections and
actively watch me. That was not the case with a lot of the ballet teachers and I’m sure that
you can guess why. But I learned a lot and my technique improved while I was there.
However, when things go well for me in the dance world, there always tends to be a catch.
By the time I had returned home, I’d gained back a lot of weight. I started panicking
because my time to lose weight before Nutcracker auditions was limited. This time around,
I turned to the keto diet. All fatty foods and protein, no carbs, no sugar. It was torture, but it
did the job.
I had never felt so tired. After I got home from school everyday, I only had about an hour
and a half before I had to head off to dance for the night. Instead of using that time to get
homework done, I would go straight to my bedroom and take a nap. Then, I would go to dance until 9:30, head home, and begin my homework at 10. And then I would repeat this the next day. And the next. I was exhausted. I hadn’t realized until then how important carbs are. They are quite literally our main source of energy, and I wasn’t eating any. I was a full fledged athlete with no energy whatsoever. My body was not being fueled, but hey, I was
losing weight so I guess it was all worth it right? Because ultimately how I felt did not matter. But how I looked was everything. I think that this was where my dance career took a turn. Because after all this time of dieting, even after Nutcracker season, dance started to feel old. What once was my outlet became a leading source of my stress. It sucked everything out of me. Not only did it take my body mass, it took my sanity. My time. My socialization with people. My god, dance made high school even harder. I had no time to go to the sleepovers or the parties or the dances. I was at the studio every minute of every second of every day. Getting to socialize with friends outside of school was impossible. Because of this, I had no best friends. Rather I was acquaintances with people. I felt so out of place that I would friend group hop. I knew people, and people knew me, or so they thought. But it was really hard. I had to try so hard to be friends with people, because I never had that time to connect with them. Where forming relationships should be liberating, it was draining for me because I actually had to try. I cared about so many people who did not care about me. While I would sit with a group of people at the library, they would make plans without me right in front of my face. All the while, they had no idea I was suffering. They never even asked how I was most of the time. I was so good at playing it off like I was a happy person (seriously, where’s my Oscar?), because I felt like it was what I had to do to get people to like me. But after all that time, not just in sophomore year, but freshmen as well, no one knew what I was going through. What I am still going through. I was suffering even more due to the fact that dance was not the only factor draining me, but school was too. I had to become my own best friend. And it was impossible because dance had taught me to be ashamed of myself. I didn’t know how much more of myself I could give to dance, or how much more of me there was left.
This was also the year that dance was the hardest for me. Particularly because of one
teacher who made me feel even worse about myself. I would take class on Wednesday
nights with a teacher named, well, we’ll call him Mr.Moon for security purposes. He had never really invested any time in me, but he would with my 2 close dance friends and I was
so jealous. All he would do was stand in front of me and make weird faces and make fun of
the way I held my arm at barre. But this year in particular, he started making comments
about my body. He would come up to me at barre, poke my stomach to see if I was holding
my abs, and say things like “this shouldn’t be squishy”. He would also make fun of the little
kids he taught earlier in the day for eating a meal before ballet class because their bellies
were “too big to function”. But this is what stumped me most- one class, he gave me the
correction to straighten my front left knee in fifth position, but it was physically impossible
for me to straighten it because of my thighs. I told him this, and then he started talking
about this woman that he knew, how she used to have thighs like mine, and then she started
doing this exercise with dumbbells that made her one of the most fit people he’d ever seen.
Then he physically showed me the exercise with theoretical dumbbells and made me learn
it. I looked and felt ridiculous. Here I was in ballet class doing a weight-lifting exercise that
would help me lose fat in my thighs. In front of the whole class. He was giving me
weight-loss advice, made me learn the exercise, while the whole class watched. I was
humiliated.
I stopped taking his class not long after. After so much time, I realized this was wrong.
Everything was so wrong. How could I just sit there and let him dwindle me even more
when there was practically nothing left? There was nothing left that could be taken from
me. I became hollow. I didn’t fit in at dance, I didn’t fit in at school. It felt like the whole
world was caving in. What was I good for? I realized that it wasn’t just about me knowing
little about other people, it was about knowing little about myself. I didn’t have any hobbies.
I couldn’t tell you what I liked to do in the free time that I never had. I didn’t know how I
was as a daughter, a friend, a student. I had no identity. I was a dancer. That was it. That’s
who I was, all I was. And I wasn’t even welcome in the world of dance. I’d always had
depression and anxiety while dancing, but I never had thoughts about ending my life until
that point in time. Here I was at 15 years old feeling like I had no place in this world, that I
had already met my end. And nobody knew. I never wanted to burden my parents, and
friends at school never bothered to ask how I was. I never actually attempted to end my life,
but I thought about it. A lot. How I would do it, and when. But I never actually tried. Almost everything in me told me that if I left this world, people wouldn’t care. There was one
kernel of something, though, in the back of my mind that begged me to listen. One beautiful
thing about being an adolescent is that you have hope stored in you somewhere. Because
deep down you know that you have so much more life ahead of you. This is the part of me
that still wanted to find purpose, a soulmate, and a passion. I realized I could not have been
put on this Earth to feel this way, to not have a purpose. There is something I had to do, to
fulfill before I would eventually cross over. And what a beautiful thing to be able to put
together the puzzle pieces of my life as I go. I found that my puzzle had so many missing
pieces. And so I stayed, because I knew that I had yet to find the pieces that would make me
complete. In order to start this journey, I knew I had to give up dance at some point. But
given that I had danced my whole life and was in a very serious place in my career, it felt
impossible to leave. Dance was the only thing I knew, it was like a security blanket. It’s not
even that I was so passionate about it that I didn’t want to leave, it was because I was
nervous to leave my comfort zone and try my hand at life without it. If I was going to leave,
it had to be at the right time. I couldn’t just do it on a whim, it had to feel right.
The pandemic saved me. During lockdown, all classes were taught on zoom and dance
just felt so insignificant. Meanwhile, my body dysmorphia was becoming worse and I was
eating less and less. Being left alone at home allowed my brain to torment me about my
body every second of every day. I’d wake up thinking about my body and go to bed thinking
about my body. My paranoia about gaining weight was through the roof also. I remember
crying when my mom cooked me a bowl of pasta. And this was how I lived March to mid
April.
Eventually, my parents caught on to how I was feeling because I had major depressive
episodes where I wouldn’t speak days upon end. There was one specific instance when I
had an episode that lasted for a few days. When I was on my 3rd day of silence, my mom
pulled me aside and forced everything out of me. I couldn’t contain it anymore. I was about
to rupture and break if I kept to myself any longer. So I told her everything. How I had been
feeling those months. About Mr.Moon commenting on my body (because I hadn’t told
anyone). About school. About absolutely everything. And just like that, she said “we need to get you out of there”. Now here’s where the pandemic saved me: it was a wonderful excuse
to leave. I knew I had to write to the company about my decision and why, and I didn’t want
to tell them the truth because I didn’t want anyone convincing me to stay. So the pandemic
was a perfectly good reason to put into writing. And it did the trick. Just like that, I was out.
It was like flipping a switch; one minute, dance was in my life, in the next, it wasn’t. But the
feeling after sending that email was like taking a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been
holding. I was free. It didn’t even feel real. But what’s funny is that something that had felt
like the largest choice of my life was only a tiny step in my healing journey. At the time, it
felt like that choice was the peak of everything, but I didn’t realize that I had just begun the
climb.
2 years later, I am still climbing. It’s amazing how I still feel the effects of dance on a daily
basis. The perfectionist within me has turned its attention towards academics- which is a
blessing because my grades reflect well, but a curse because I work myself to the bone as I
never feel like what I do is enough. I still also seek validation for my body, but nowhere near
as bad as when I was dancing. Now it’s just me constantly going to my mom and asking “hey
do I look any fatter than I did last week?”. But I do it a lot more than I should. Eating is still
scary, but it is getting so much better. I can eat pasta and dessert without feeling like I’m
going to cry, and I’ve been eating the right amounts. I am also in therapy, which I should
have done several years ago. And most of all, I met my 2 best friends who have shown me
nothing but support throughout my healing process. My body is nourished, and I am
happier than I’ve been in a really long time. And if you are going through what I discussed
in this article, the world will always try to criticize you, but you were born to stand out. Let
the world see you, and let you see yourself. I promise that you shine.
If there is one thing I have learned throughout my healing process, it’s that your body
standards don’t matter. Let’s put it this way; say you are given a free car. It doesn’t matter
what car it is, it’s free and you are guaranteed to get one. The only catch is that it is the only
car you’re gonna be able to have throughout your entire life. So you’d want to take care of it,
right? You’d want to love it and care for it because it’s the only car that you’re ever gonna
have and you want it to last. The same goes for your body. Our body is our vessel. This is what we have and you will never get another one in your lifetime. So care for it. Nourish it.
Love it. Because it is so strangely and uniquely yours. Rather than focusing on what our
bodies look like, we need to focus on what they can do. How cool is it that we have a beating
heart? Or that women can literally carry and grow another human being? This is what we
have. This is what the universe gave us. How beautiful is that?