For an hour and half every Monday, my brain is empty, my chest loosens, and I’m occupied only with how I’m moving my body. Which muscles are working? Am I still pushing my belly button into my spine and keeping my shoulders down? Once a week, I tap into the mental freedom I used to take for granted. My body decompresses while it works itself to its limit. I leave the happiest I’ve felt since the Monday before.
After a six-year hiatus, I’m back at ballet.
I sewed my shoes too tight; my leotard doesn’t stretch over my skin quite like it did when I was sixteen, and my feet don’t wing-out as nicely when I tendu, but it doesn’t matter because every week I show up and move my body in a way I’ve missed.
It hurts, and I sweat more than I did when it was easy, but ballet never felt as good as it does now. My therapist says it’s because my intentions are different; that back then, I was doing it because I wanted to win, to be the best, receive a perfect technical score from strangers who would forget me after my three minutes on stage were up. Now, I’m simply doing it because I want to. There’s nothing to win.
I don’t tell her that I still want to be the best, even in a class mostly filled with adults who haven’t danced before (I’m tired of picking apart my perfectionism, especially when it’s so painfully stubborn), but she’s right, mostly, when it comes to the latter.
After my first class, I spent the night (and every night after) writing furiously. On my laptop, in my journal, on scraps of paper I found in my purse, and in the notes app on my phone. It was the kind of creative fervor I hadn’t felt since the pandemic. I’d walk eight miles in the morning and then write for ten hours straight. My feet and wrists ached for weeks at a time, but the well never dried.
In the last few years, I lost that—the walking and the incessant creativity. I’ve spent all my time since trying to lure it back. Through drinking (bad idea), travelling (expensive idea), and reading (writing-time-sucking idea). Nothing broke the dam that had raised itself in silence.
What’s behind that dam is all my energy—my scrappy young writer energy— that fuels the projects I’m passionate about. Swirling within all the good is the bad—the feelings I can’t look too closely at, the ones I’m too afraid to feel.
It’s a blockage, a gravely emotional one, from all the freezing I do when fighting or flight-ing fails me (because yes, there is an unfortunate third option: The Freeze). Ballet does what traditional meditation and mindfulness could never accomplish. It relieves the pressure, empties my mind, and pulls my focus so acutely that the guard at my dam loosens her grip, thinking she’s safe.
It all rushes through then, before she can reconfigure her hold. I barely feel the salty stuff as it passes through, barely taste its bitterness on my tongue and the sting at the back of my throat, intimately focused on the angle of my knee in attitude and keeping a soft elbow in second.
I don’t want to be frozen, so physically and mentally affected by what I can’t control that I can’t do the things that I love, like write stories where two people kiss on a sailboat or where a girl loses her goddamned mind in a monastery. It’s one thing to decide that creating art is worth more than self-protection, and it’s another to let that protection go. To give your guard the night off, whether she’s willing to forfeit her control or not. Finding a way to wrestle it out of her hands is only half the fun (the other half comes later, after you’ve cried with relief on the subway ride home, hunched over your desk with a pen).
So, in steps the ritual: I climb the stairs of the studio. Wrap the skirt around my waist. Adjust the elastics on my shoes. Take my place at the barre. Break down the dam again. And win.