Growing up, the phrase “follow your dreams” was plastered all around me, from refrigerator magnets to tv shows—the sentiment surrounded me in practically every walk of life I took. When I was little, my dreams changed at the start of each new day, and like the seasons, my dreams of who I would one day become changed too. Maybe I would be a gymnastics star, a figure skater, a performer on American Idol, or maybe my dreams would keep me homebound working at a local grocery. I aged and my dreams changed, more with age but less with the days, and my ideas of who I would become eventually became blurry. The age-old “follow your dreams” seemed to take less precedence in where I would end up, and instead sat sidelined to how much money I could make or what I could “realistically” do. Friends who I thought supported me would soon tell me that my dreams were unrealistic and that I needed to choose a new dream.
When I started school at Kenyon College in the fall of 2017, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. Psychology seemed like a relatively safe route, one that those around me agreed with, and one that would be interesting as well. But just as they did when I was a child, my ideas changed with the season. Intro psych turned out to be nothing that I had anticipated and picturing myself in 20 years, I didn’t want to be sitting in an office or teaching at a chalkboard. It just wasn’t me. It just wasn’t my idea of a dream. People told me that my freshman year of college I would change my mind about what I wanted to do with my life at least once, but what they didn’t tell me is that I would change my mind about who I wanted to become too. I changed my mind like a gambler changing his deck of cards, and with each new visit home, it seemed I had a new interest, a new idea, a new plan of who I would become.
Then, I got in a class, a class that I didn’t need for distributions or for majors, but a class that I simply needed to fill a credit slot. During the spring semester, I wound up in my first ever dance class, “Beginning Modern Dance,” and I fell in love. The class taught me about the connection between mind and body, of how our movements can impact not only ourselves but those around us; it taught me more about myself than I had ever imagined. I learned not only about dance as a discourse but about how to be self-aware and confident in who I was becoming. When I came home and promptly told my parents that I wanted to be a dance major, they were baffled. “You’ve only taken one class,” they said. The general consensus was that I was rushing into something I didn’t know. When scheduling came for classes, I signed myself up for three dance courses for the fall of 2018, and, in turn, signed myself up for a possible rude awakening, heading everyone’s warnings of what my life should be turning towards. I turned the opposite way.
Over the summer prior to classes starting, I found myself choreographing dances in my head, researching dance professionals online, and yearning for more involvement. When classes started I dove into the dance readings excited and nervous, and when I had my first day of “Directed Teaching,” I realized what I was truly getting into. Within this course, students are given the opportunity to teach children about dance and movement, and despite my love of both children and dance, I came out of the course feeling less than.
Dance had been there for me for so much of my life. Whether it be dancing in the kitchen or camp dances as a child, I found comfort in the way that I could express myself in movement. It had been a part of me that I never knew I wanted to explore, not like these people seemingly had known forever. Fast forward to the first day of class when the professor asked us all for our experience in dance, and all of my classmates had been dancing since they were young. Years of professional training that I had not had the opportunity to have nor realized I wanted before it was too late. Coming from a small town in the middle of rural Ohio, with other interests and time commitments on top of being from a middle-class family, dance training had never been a stepping stone that I was lead to step on. Disheartened, I realized maybe passion wasn’t all it took to chase after your dreams. I came back to my dorm in tears, allowing myself to realize that my expectations of myself weren’t enough.
The next week in the same class, I was assigned an excerpt of Hiking the Horizontal by Liz Lermon, and in the text, there was a passage that put everything back in perspective for me:
“There was a time when people danced and the crops grew. People danced and that is how they healed their children. They danced as a way to prepare for war. With so much on the line, how did they decide who got to do the dancing? Who did they trust with the best part? Maybe it was given to the oldest person, the one with the most wisdom. Maybe they gave it to the fattest, the one who carried the most weight. But,” I said with a lot of emphasis, “it did matter, and it still does.”
After reading the passage and talking to my family and friends, my perspective was back to where it should have been all along. I realized maybe passions come and go exactly when they need to, and maybe technique doesn’t only come from experience but from desire as well. I realize now that maybe I will have to work two times harder than the other students in my class, but I also realize that maybe I will bring something to this discourse that they don’t have: a fresh perspective. If I never try, I might regret that choice for the rest of my life. So, I try, I learn, and each day I get stronger and better than I was when I started. Some people will question my choices or my outlook, and some will tell me that I’m making the wrong choices moving forward into the unknown, but at the end of the day, they’re my choices. At the end of the day, I have to be able to realize that my passions and my interests can change and develop in new and interesting ways and that those choices will and have always mattered, and they will continue to matter. My life is all about my dreams, and just like Lermon states “it did matter, and it still does.”