Dance

So, I'm a dancer. Well, I was anyway. I did ballet. Not the petty competition school, pay two-hundred-dollars-for-an-ugly-sequeny-costume-I'll-only-wear-once kind of thing. I'm talking hardcore, seven days a week, several hours a day, dance till your feet bleed kind of ballet. I was serious about it. All I wanted to do was dance.


I had some problems though. I wasn't thin enough. I'm not now and never have been, though I wasn't ever actually "fat." I'm 5'5 and weigh 120lbs. Not bad, right? Well, when I was a dancer it was. I needed to be no more than 110lbs to be close to thin enough. Or so they said.


Not only was I too fat to dance, as my dad told me in those exact words (that's a whole nother story), I wasn't good. In fact, I sucked. Bad. I couldn't dance. I wasn't as flexible as I needed to be (even though I worked REALLY hard for it...I slept in the splits for pete's sake), I wasn't as strong as I needed to be, my feet weren't as nice as they needed to be. I just couldn't do it.


But those weren't my only problems.

The owner and instructor of the school was really hard on us, whether we wanted to be professional dancers or not, he made us work our butts off. He was constently telling us we weren't good enough and that we weren't doing it right. Everyday he yelled more and more. It go to the point of physical abuse. He hit one of my classmates...we'll call her Jess...and he hit her hard. So hard that it left a mark. It was a small rehearsal so not many people were there, about eight. And so my instructor..Bob...wrote it off as an accident. He said that HER leg "flew up and hit his hand." B.S., I know. No one would listen to me.

So I decided to leave. Physical abuse is where I draw the line. After eight years of dancing and putting everything I had into it, all of my time and money, after all the blood, sweat, and tears, I had to let it go. There weren't any schools besides my own that were good enough to send their students on to be professionals, and I obviously wasn't good enough to make it anywhere else. I gave it all up. All of my hopes and dreams. My entire life, gone. In an instant.


That was a year and a half ago. For almost a year I cried myself to sleep basically every night. I put on a fake smile and pretended like it was all okay. I was over it. "It's just ballet." I would say with a slight laugh. People actually believed me.


Then I met Andrew, who is now my boyfriend. Because of him, I stopped crying myself to sleep every night. He helped me forget all of my pain and be happy. That only lasted for so long. Finally I got comfortable with him and let him into my heart completely. Thats when I realized, I'm not over it. I never was, he just helped me see that there is still good in my life.


I still tell everyone that I'm over it, that I don't care. That what Bob did didn't break my heart. That all of the comments about me not being thin enough didn't make me anorexic (although I'm healthy now). That all of the words spoken meant to hurt me, didn't. No one but Andrew knows that my heart is broken.


Until now. Anyone who reads this blog will know, and I'm glad.