A bit of background information for this post. I trained for sixteen years to be a professional ballet dancer, and a month before I joined a company, my adrenals failed. I was forced to stop dancing completely, and for about two years I stuffed down my grief. I left ballet behind forever, or so I thought. This post is taken directly from my journal entry right before I stepped back into the studio for the first time in two years.

Life is so funny.

I’m sitting here at the counter, with a leotard on, and a bun. I hair sprayed my hair, I have ballet slippers in my bag…. It feels like it should be 2018, but no, here I am, 2021, about to go to a ballet class.

Life is so funny sometimes. 2019 left me ragged. Lost and hurt. I threw out a lot of things (which looking back I wished I hadn’t) because I thought my time for dancing was over. And yet, here I am, about to go to a ballet class.

I have so many emotions right now. Excitement, gratitude, awe. Complete mystification at the way life works itself out. How is it that I am about to step back into a leotard and dance, after two years, but I am a completely different person now than I was then.

I’ve grown so much. I’ve experienced so much. I’ve broken out of my shell, built up walls, climbed over those walls, and come out the other side. My perspectives on life have completely changed; my storehouse of experiences has expanded.

And yet here I am, about to go to a ballet class.

About to step into the dance that has called me ceaselessly for two years. For two years I have fought with myself; do I go to college, or do I fight for ballet? It’s funny that it wasn’t until I let go of ballet that dancing came back to me.

So, yes, excitement, gratitude, and awe. But also fear, sadness, worry, and anxiety. Fear of what will happen. What if I hurt myself, or fall? What if I fall back into old habits, or slip back into my old thoughts? What if I love it? What if I love it so much that I feel completely full, but then it gets taken away from me?

What if my family wants to talk about it, and I don’t? What if I have a huge emotional release? In the middle of class? Driving there? Driving home?

Worst of all is this: What if I hate it?

What if after all this time dreaming of what my career could have been, of longing to be back onstage, and of wishing I could just dance, what if I hate it? What then?

I know these fears are useless; I won’t have an answer to any of them until they happen. I know that my egoic wonderings are just attempting to protect me. But compounded with all the other emotions, my heart feels like it is going to burst.

Life is funny sometimes.

It picks you up, shakes you down, takes you on a long blind-folded car ride, only to end up placing you right back home, although heaven knows you’ve changed along the way. Who knows what today will bring. But I know now that life has so much more in store for me than I ever dreamed of planning for myself.

How incredibly transformational two years have been. How much I’ve healed. How strong I have become. Especially the last few days, I have felt so much more myself. I feel lighter, more full. I feel like I can honor who I am now because I am starting to understand who that is. I’m starting to understand that my identity is not composed of who I am on the outside, or what my life is like right then.

Who I am is completely internal, and the ways I express that can show up in my circumstances. But for the most part, looking to the outside to determine who I am is like looking at an apple and trying to decide what a whole apple tree looks like. The outside circumstances are the creations, the offspring of the who I am, but they are not me.

I can look at the tree to see the apple, but not the apple to see the tree. And I think I am finally starting to understand that. To understand that other’s opinions don’t matter as much as I thought they did. They only have the power over me that I allow them to have. That it’s okay if not everyone understands who I am, because finally I understand who I am.

Its okay to do things differently, and it’s okay to take risks.

Its okay not to plan, and to go with the flow, and to trust that the next step will be clear when it needs to be.

I’m stronger than I thought. Braver than I knew. And so, so much happier and whole than I ever imagined being two years ago.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thanks for reading! Looking for something to read next?