saving grace

{02.08.2017}

I dance 7 days a week, 20+ hours a week. And it's looked down upon from a few angles, as easy and as if it isn't a sport. But it's my saving grace.

It's bull if you think that someone is going to do something that often, for that long, just to gain nothing from it. It's bull if you're going to tell someone that something they've worked for their whole life, is worthless, as if it's been a waste of their time.

Myself, I'm going on having been dancing for almost 13 years, with only one injury. Unfortunately, it's permanent. A few months ago, I got tendonitis in the arch of my left foot. Here's the funny thing, I wasn't even dancing much at the time. But what sucked was that I needed to dance, because I was going through a rough patch as far as friends go. I spent weeks on the verge of tears, lack of appetite and lacking sleep because I'd been through a huge fallout and it was stressing me out. And not dancing certainly wasn't helping anything. I was dying to get back in a pair of pointe shoes, tap shoes, barefoot running a lyrical solo, anything at all. I wasn't even at my home studio at the time I was injured, so I was also missing all of my littles and my best friends.

About a month into switching studios, I decided I wanted to go back to my home studio, so I did.

I went back and tried to forget about the tendonitis. It still pops sometimes, because it's chronic and doesn't go away, so I'm pretty much stuck to deal with it as long as I'm dancing, which will hopefully be a long while. But fortunately, I've learned how to work around it and how to deal with it. We make do with what we have and forget what's out of our control.

Dance has been my saving grace for so long. It's an escape, dancing and writing. Leave everything on the paper that you write on, or on the marley. The same marley floors that give you callouses and bruises can take away all the stress from any of the problems that you could ever have. And you forget everything when you're with your second family, and to me that's what dancers are. I'm involved with a couple studios and a couple teams, and they're all equally important to me, they're all my family. We're all always there for each other, and we know when something's wrong. I'll walk into rehearsal after a long day, and it's so reassuring to know I have those girls that are there for me when I need it.

Honestly, I complain about dance so much. About how busy it keeps me, the constant soreness, the repetitiveness of all of it. But at the end of the day, I'm not me when I don't leave everything on the floor behind me when I walk out of the studio every night.