The Warehouse

I spent most of my formative years inside a dance studio, a dusty warehouse with its metal ballet bars, its body-warping mirrors, its worn flooring, and its echoing ceiling. From ages 3-14, it was my full time job. The routine always went like this: I’d go to school, make my way home, rush into my baby pink tights and leotard as my mom stabbed me in my parietal lobe with bobby pins to get my hair in a bun. The car ride to dance was intense, my mom wasn’t great at time management and therefore always got me in trouble, because being late was considered a heinous crime. Dance etiquette is no joke. If your hairline wasn’t receding from how pulled back your hair was, it was impolite. If you yawned at your pointe class that was held at 9:00 at night, you’re disrespectful. If you had to use the restroom during class, you were careless. If you didn’t remove your sweater after plies at the odd-smelling metal barre, you weren’t trying hard enough. So you could imagine that at the ripe age of six years old, being fostered in an environment that demanded such perfection had some pretty poignant impacts. 

As I’d quickly adapted to meeting every demand and expectation that my coaches threw my way, I’d soon become a world class people pleaser, so terrified of disappointing my coaches that I’d feel sick before even stepping foot onto the marley-stripped floors. This debilitating attitude manifested itself in every aspect of my life. I was persistent in being the best inside and outside that sacred studio, because that’s what I thought was required of me. Anything less than excellence was a defeat, a disappointment, and nothing else. Little did I know, I was being indoctrinated into a league of devout “mirrorball” listeners (Taylor Swift folklore reference), working for the happiness of others, but never towards my own.

My training began to get more intense, with higher stakes and tighter competition, so I got to spend more quality time within the four walls of the humid, nightmare-inducing studio space. My hours surpassed the five hour mark on school nights. My coaches were adamant that I could always be doing more, getting more flexible, doing more turns, learning more acrobatics. But at a certain point, the hours I was putting in at the same dingy dance studio began to feel redundant. I was no longer the best, I couldn’t meet the expectations I’d been given, and that feeling gutted me. In quitting, I would disappoint the coaches who’d invested their time in me, and my parents who now spoke fluently in “dance parent.” However, in quitting, I found a sense of self. I realized that I wasn’t disappointing anyone, I was moving on. I’d grown into a different person, one that no longer wanted the validation of a dance coach to make me feel better about myself. I’d finally done something for myself by walking out of that dusty warehouse with its metal ballet bars, its body-warping mirrors, its worn flooring, and its echoing ceiling.