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 your feelings” took on a whole new meaning to me. My instructors and choreographers saw me as a “better” dancer.

I was a traumatized dancer.

I always had been… but this was a whole new level.

I stayed in ballet far longer than I wanted to. By the age of 16, I’d been hating my life for about six years. I would hate it for six more. I danced until I physically couldn’t anymore. But to this day, I have never wished that I’d left sooner.

I know how strange that sounds. Even to me, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But as much as I wanted to escape, I never did. And I could have. My father would have gotten me out of there if I’d told him I didn’t want to do it anymore. But I never said a word. And when I was told about my injuries from my assault and the healing process was explained to me, I asked the doctors when I could dance again.

It was one of the first things that I asked them.

Dancing wasn’t the life that I wanted, but it was MY life. And I may not have wanted it, but (I will be super cocky here) I was very good at it. No one makes the company at 17. But I did. No one is a principal dancer within a year. But I was. Ballet allowed me to travel, and though it destroyed me in so many ways, it also gave me a sense of purpose and extreme pride in my talent. There were times that I hated that talent and wished I sucked at dancing so I could have had a childhood. There are times that I still wish I’d had a childhood… but there are so few people in the world that can say they did what I did and achieved what I achieved. And all before I was 20 years old. It was traumatic and gave me a very harsh view of myself in any mirror and definitely destroyed my body… when it was over, I burned all of my posters and portraits and pictures. It was cathartic to completely end that chapter of my life. There was definitely a lot of anger involved and there still is. And I suppose part of me wanted to erase it from existence… but burning pictures doesn’t do that.

I hate ballet for many reasons, but it’s part of my story, and I’ve lived through a lot of life experiences in a short amount of time that taught me not to believe in regret.

After ballet, I followed a path that I’d never see through to completion because I thought I wanted something that I really didn’t. I don’t regret that either. I have a graduate degree that I worked hard for and a weirdly large knowledge of serial killers that I use to make people nervous because I have a warped sense of humor. The time I spent with my FBI Agent mentor was one of the best times of my life. I didn't join the FBI in the end, but I’ll never be sorry about the time that I spent training for it.

I believe that everything that I went through and everything that I did was necessary for me to find my path in life. Maybe if I hadn’t been a traumatized dancer that had no one to speak for her and didn’t dare speak for herself, I wouldn’t have the same passion to speak for animals. I care about creatures without a voice because I was always too afraid to use my own. I found it in them. I found it FOR them. But I had to lose it to find it.

If that makes any sense.

So what career advice would give to my 16-year-old self?

I wouldn’t.

I’d simply tell her that there is a purpose to the path she’s on and to follow it. It will lead somewhere she’ll be proud of. It will hurt. But pain is not new. And it definitely ends. She dances out of the darkness, makes a wrong turn, but then an opossum helps her find her way and her voice at the same time. The destination is worth the journey.