Pirouette

Flint & Steel Full Circle Writing Challenge

She danced before she walked.

My father spoke those words with pride. To my mother, they were her ticket to getting me out of the house and out of her hair. A born ballerina.

My first pair of ballet shoes have been coated in silver and sit in my mother’s curio cabinet that I avoid looking at when I go to her house. Once my greatest joy, now a memory that haunts me.

Can you call it a memory if you don’t actually remember it? It’s more of a story that I’ve been told so much that it feels like a memory but those shoes were slipped onto my feet when I was only two years old. They turned to pointe shoes a year later. My ballet instructors warned against it. The damage that they would do to my tiny growing feet would be irreversible and I wasn’t ready. But apparently, I whined a lot about wanting to dance like the big girls on my “tippy tippy toes” and in the end, my mother insisted on them giving me my demands simply to shut me up.

I had the talent, I had the feet, I had the tiny frame, and even at such a young age, I had the discipline. Ballet became my entire existence. If I wasn’t at school, I was at the performing arts studio that was molding me for what was to come next… a full-fledged ballet school in Manhattan.

I auditioned and was accepted at the age of seven. My home was a little over an hour outside of the city so to go to the school, I had to live at the school. I was scared but I loved to dance. I lived to dance. My pointe shoes were a badge of honor and my skill a mark of pride. It seemed to be the only part of me that my mother liked. I was going to do it and I was going to be the best. I was going to show her that I was worth loving… even if that meant she finally got to get rid of me once and for all.

I don’t have an accurate count of all of the bones that I broke in my career. I do remember the sound. I do remember the realization that a broken bone came with a searing heat, a flash of intense agony, and a crumple to the floor. Tears were unacceptable. I learned not to cry. I learned to dance through it. I learned to smile as I danced on an ankle that I came to break six times in total.

It still hurts when it rains.

I don’t have a single toe that I’ve never broken at least once. They were buddy-taped and stuffed, swollen and purple, back into my pointe shoes. Dance, little girl, dance. And don’t forget to smile.

I hated it by the age of ten. I resented my talent. I resented the instructors that saw my pain and told me to hide it rather than guiding me through it. I resented the sudden realization that I had no childhood.

I still have surgery on my toes every couple of years to remove my toenails that grow inwards now. Sometimes, when I can’t afford the copay, I do it myself, pulling my skin apart and yanking the nails out with clippers and tweezers.

It doesn’t even hurt anymore. I don’t really feel my feet at all.

My weight was my worth and I learned that food was my enemy before I even hit puberty. My bone structure had been measured and my muscle mass was checked in on weekly after I stepped on a scale to be held accountable for every calorie. I ate what I was told. I never complained of hunger. I never dared to ask for more. Smoking curbed the hunger. I started when I was twelve. Most of us did. Some were even younger.

My education was secondary. An afterthought to ballet. I was a ballerina and that was “my dream”.

At least that’s what they told me.

To accomplish “my dream” required strength, discipline, fortitude, and a fake smile to make sure the world saw me as a demure little waif that loved to spin, spin, spin… on my tippy tippy toes.

I was formally offered a spot in the ballet company when I was 17 years old. It wasn’t long before I was dancing as the black swan in Swan Lake for large audiences on some of the biggest stages in the country. No one knew how much I hated it.

I hated my life. I hated ballet. I hated my talent and my stupid fake smile. I hated the pills that I was given like candy to keep dancing through pain that no one was allowed to see. I hated how badly I longed for an injury that could end my career.

Quitting was never an option.

I was 22 when I got my injury. A bad landing (no, it wasn’t on purpose) caused the upper meniscus cartilage in my right knee to be torn out completely. It was free floating and in need of surgical repair. I came out of anesthesia to hear the words I’d been waiting for since I was ten.

Your dance career is over.

I would be able to walk and run, I’d even be able to dance… but I’d never again have the dexterity I needed for the intricate choreography I’d been performing and perfecting for my entire life.

I was free.

I still fear the effects of food on my waistline.

It took a long time for me to finally quit smoking because the weight gain that often comes with nicotine withdrawal terrified me.

I had no idea who I was or how to make choices for myself but for the first time in my life, I was presented with that opportunity. I got it wrong a couple of times. I earned a Master’s degree in a field that I never even entered. Some people would consider that wasted time and money but I was trying to find out who I was and who I wanted to be.

I’m now a vet tech. I found my voice by speaking for creatures that did not have one. I even started dancing again… not ballet… a cute little waltz with my dogs in my kitchen. I throw dance parties with my cats. I spin pirouettes with a chinchilla on my head.

They’re not as perfect as they once were. I don’t worry if my fingers are placed in the pretty position and sometimes I don’t bother to spot and get dizzy on purpose.

My ballet career came to a crashing and abrupt end but my personality and my life had finally come full circle. I could be and do anything that I wanted. I could do things based on my love for them, not just because I happened to be good at it.

I once loved being a ballerina. It’s forever part of my identity but it’s also a trauma that I had to survive to come into myself. I do not attend the ballet. I know too much about the fake smiles that hide pain to enjoy the performance. I have escaped that world… physically. My brain is still haunted there.

But I am finally free to be myself. Maybe I was a born ballerina who danced before she walked… but it took a lot of spinning on my tippy tippy toes to truly know that fitting in somewhere, does not mean you belong there.

And… curtain.

Thank you again, Ellie Jacobson for this beautiful challenge. Of all of the full circle moments in my life, this one is the most complete.