Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet (16 page)

I hoped I would not have to talk to Peter again; I would rather have just slunk away. No such luck. The air was heavy with resignation and disappointment during our final meeting. I’d been given chance after chance and hadn’t been able to conquer my weight. I was done.

Directly from Saratoga I had a gig, or freelance performance, with James Fayette and other dancers from City Ballet in Vermont and Nantucket. Often during our layoffs dancers would take performing opportunities outside the company for the experience and the extra money. James had asked me
to be his partner on this gig months before, and I’d accepted. Much to my surprise, I relished the dancing for the first time in a long time; it was my first solid, challenging dancing in months, and I knew it might be my last. When I got home, my life would completely drop off a cliff.

There were two performances, and I danced a pas de trois by an up-and-coming choreographer at the time, Christopher Wheeldon, as well as the pas de deux from Balanchine’s
Stars and Stripes
. Though the other dancers on the gig were some of my oldest friends, dancers I had gone to the School of American Ballet with, I told none of them I was fired or even leaving the company. I kept things superficial.

Finally I returned home and had to face the facts: it was all over. What had been my life, in essence my god, had been ripped away. The weeks after that gig were probably the darkest of my life. I was twenty-four years old, and I felt utterly worthless. I had failed at everything that had been important to me my entire life. I was supposed to be perfect and successful: I had been fired. I was supposed to be beautiful: I was overweight and gross. I was supposed to be smart and in control: I couldn’t eat a meal without overeating until I felt sick. I was supposed to be funny and friendly and loving and generous: I’d shut out all of my friends and family. I was supposed to be a Christian: I still hadn’t made God the priority of my life.

I don’t remember much about how I passed the time during those weeks. I holed myself up in my apartment with my favorite compulsive foods and movies and books. If I went out to shop, I wore baggy clothes and a baseball cap to cover my face. I played every sad song I owned over and over, crying on my living room floor, grieving over a song because I couldn’t grieve over my own losses and sadness. It came to me also that I never danced in my apartment anymore—a heavy stillness in my body permeated my days. Even great music couldn’t inspire me to sway just a little when I was home. Whatever had been in me, inspiring me to dance even just for the enjoyment of it, was gone.

Looking back, I realize how completely self-absorbed I was. I’d blown my situation way out of proportion; people around the world
were suffering terribly and had much worse things to deal with than weight problems and job loss. But I had allowed my psyche to be twisted by the ballet world until I believed that a successful career in ballet was the only road to happiness and self-worth. Wrapped up in my failure, I couldn’t see out of it. Despite everything that had happened to me, I still believed that I could only find meaning and joy in ballet, almost as if I suffered from Stockholm syndrome and City Ballet was my captor.

One night during those six or so weeks, I sat in my bed sobbing and talking to God. I cried out in anguish to Him, asking Him why this was happening to me. I told Him I was worthless and repulsive. It didn’t occur to me to ask for help or forgiveness—I was too repellent even for God. I told Him I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I didn’t think I could ever crawl out of the deep abyss in which I was trapped.

Then I grew calm, and I realized that there was really no point to a life like this one. It benefited no one and was a torture to me. Why was I staying in it? There was no reason. Perhaps I should just . . . kill myself. It would be the ultimate escape—an escape that no book or food could ever provide. I could even escape from my bondage to food.

If I were to end my life, how would I do it? I contemplated methods of suicide. In a clinical, dispassionate way, I thought about which techniques would be plausible. I settled on one, and in my mind’s eye I played the scenario out, watching myself do it, trying to imagine what I would feel during the act and then its aftermath, when I would leave my unbearable existence.

And then I thought about what would happen next. I saw my parents and my sister at the moment during which they learned what I’d done. I saw their terrible grief and the way my action would ravage their lives. I realized that I could never do anything so horrible to these three people whom I loved so very much. I couldn’t be so selfish as to wound their hearts so irreparably. I started crying again, knowing I needed to keep moving forward if not for myself, then for them. I would have to figure out a way to make a new life for myself, one dark night at a time.

I didn’t reach a resolution with God that night. But God was all I had
left. I was spent and empty, and I knew that God was faithful. I’d been told of His faithfulness, had seen it in my life and in the lives of those close to me, and had read about it in books and in the Bible. Somehow, He is always faithful. I had to trust that even in these circumstances, God was working for me. He had a plan. Eventually maybe I would see where exactly He was leading me. Finally that night, I just laid my head down and fell asleep.

I devised a strategy of sorts over the next few days. There was no City Ballet schedule for me to call anymore to tell me what to do; I had to figure out a plan for myself while I waited for God’s plan to take shape. I had very few credits left to earn at school and knew that if I went full time for one semester, I could finally graduate with a BA in English. Indeed, in true perfectionist fashion, I did end up graduating summa cum laude
.
My parents wanted me to move in with them, but I stubbornly insisted on staying in New York; it was where I’d become an adult, and it was my home. They told me they would pay for my college but not for my rent. They were trying to be responsible parents and didn’t want to fund an easy existence for me in New York City. I would have to find a way to pay rent on my own.

I had some sources of income: there was some severance pay from City Ballet, and I could collect unemployment insurance for a time. Also, a former City Ballet dancer, Rebecca Metzger, whom I’d danced with before she retired, ran the company’s New York City Ballet Workout program, which was taught all over the city in New York Sports Clubs. She certified me in the program, and through her efforts, I soon taught several regular workout classes at gyms around the city. I not only earned a bit of money but also regained a little self-esteem.

Rebecca also talked to me about weight and emotional eating and gave me some tools to battle my eating disorders. She took me to live with her in her apartment for a week to model healthy eating and exercise habits, and otherwise tried to help me out of my depression. She offered me lively, intelligent conversation and an understanding ear and could speak to me as one who had gone through the rigors of the
professional ballet world and was now living successfully and happily outside it. Just spending time with her and being accepted and taught by her meant more to me than I could express at the time.

I also tried to find work at a temp agency, but when I interviewed, I was told that I had no business skills and was pretty much useless. The woman I met with told me to take some courses and come back later when I had something worthwhile to offer.

In the late summer of 1997 I learned that All Angels’ needed a receptionist. I asked if they would hire me part time. I could work in the afternoons, which would give me time to go to school and teach the workout classes I’d scheduled. I was hired. I would need to answer the phone, do some simple data entry, and man the front door when visitors came.

I loved the job. In many ways it was, of course, tedious. I would finish my assigned tasks rapidly and end up with a lot of free time on my hands. I remember creating a huge rubber-band ball out of the large quantity flopping around in every drawer of the receptionist’s desk. But I was in a great environment, surrounded by Christians doing meaningful work, and felt that I was contributing to something good. And there were no mirrors anywhere.

There was one day when the Xerox machine in my little desk area broke down. We needed to print the programs for the weekend’s church services right away. I stared at the monster with its blinking lights and decided that I would fix it. I took the entire thing apart, opening every compartment one by one until I found a wad of papers clogging one of the moving parts. After I removed every last one of the papers, I closed it all back up, pressed print, and suddenly the machine was a whirling box of productivity again.

Maybe it sounds silly, but that was a huge moment of triumph for me. Perhaps I wasn’t going to be a dancer anymore, but I could learn to function in this other, nondancing world. I wasn’t completely without skills or hope. I had the ability to learn, and things to offer.

Throughout that fall I did what I could. I attended college courses,
taught the ballet workout, and worked at All Angels’. I tried my hand at writing children’s stories, a secret dream of mine, and sent some of them out to publishers. I prayed regularly with Kathy and Fay, and slowly, slowly, my food cravings and disorders began to ebb away. My depression began to lift. I was weaning myself off my therapist, feeling stronger without her. I returned full force to House Church. I began to have a normal relationship with food for the first time in a long while, and was starting to feel like I had a regular life: I had nondancing jobs, was going to school, and had nondancing Christian friends. No one cared what I looked like or ate or how much I weighed. I was valued for the kind of person I was, not how I appeared on a stage. In my head I had quit dancing completely and was looking forward to starting a new life. I was thinking about joining a master’s program in psychology.

One day I happened to bump into my ballet teacher from Steps, a public dance studio on Broadway and Seventy-fourth Street where anyone can take classes. Many professionals take classes there when they find a teacher who particularly helps them to grow as dancers. My favorite teacher there was Nancy Bielski; I’d taken classes from her since my first summer course in the city when I was fourteen.

Nancy had never judged me based on my weight and had always focused on teaching me to dance, caring about me as a dancer and a person but never basing her approval on my professional success. When we saw each other on the sidewalk, I was happy to talk to her and tell her what I was up to.

She looked at me there on the street and said, “You should come back to class.”

“I don’t know, Nancy. I think I’m done with that. I don’t think I would feel comfortable anyway,” I replied.

“You should come back just for you. Not to dance professionally or anything. I think it would be good for you to just dance and move to music. I don’t care how you dance or what you look like, and you can take classes for free as my guest. Just come back.”

I gave Nancy a noncommittal answer, but over the next couple of
days I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Maybe it would feel good to dance again with no one pressuring me to do it. I would just be going to dance for myself, to make my body feel good, and to do exercises that I’d been doing since I was a child. Since I was no longer a part of a company, I didn’t have to worry about my appearance. My body was now my own, and I could enjoy dancing without being anxious about what I looked like as I danced. Lots of people took dance class for fun. Why couldn’t I?

A few days later, I walked into Nancy’s classroom at Steps. I was suddenly terrified to enter the studio and had to talk myself into actually going through with the class. I had to remind myself that I was free from anyone else’s judgment, that I was a Daughter of the Lord, and that I was just going in to take a ballet class for the fun of it, for me. Nancy greeted me with an encouraging smile, but I still had the remnants of the shame I’d been dancing with prior to having been fired; I wore a giant T-shirt and large “garbage bag” shorts that obscured my shape. And I was relieved that no one from City Ballet was in the class that day.

The class was like a renewing rain. From the first chords the pianist played for the plié combination, I felt a sense of happiness and familiarity. Nancy’s class had a rhythm I was comfortable with, and it felt good to be doing the barre exercises that I’d done in one way or another since I was ten years old. My body moved into the ballet combinations as a train travels down the tracks: the path my limbs traced in the air seemed inevitable.

Even the center work felt good, even though I was out of shape and couldn’t dance anything very well. It was simply wonderful to dance to music again, and I found a freedom in the familiar structure of a ballet class. Nancy gave me corrections as if I’d never stopped and treated me as simply another student.

The one thing I did find was that I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. As comfortable as I was growing in my new regular life, I couldn’t see my reflection in a ballet setting without hearing the old voices of
disgust and condemnation ringing through my head. My solution was to simply not look so that I could enjoy dancing again.

After a few days of this, I had a moment in the middle of Nancy’s class that was a culmination of all the healing that had slowly been taking place in my life for the past few months. Everything seemed to come together: the prayers, the conversations, the new friendships and new jobs, the new, daily reliance on a personal God. As Nancy was giving the adagio combination in the center, I was in the middle of a group of dancers trying to learn the sequence. The dancers in front of me shifted just enough so that I could see myself in the mirror; I locked eyes with my reflection.

I stared at myself for an uncomfortable moment or two, immediately going into self-hating dancer mode. From the beginning, we ballerinas are taught to look at ourselves in the mirror to find out what is
wrong
or
bad
or
ugly
. We try to perfect the shapes and lines our body is making and feel unsatisfied if our feet aren’t arched enough or our legs aren’t high enough or our arms aren’t well shaped. I know some dancers who were told, ridiculously, that their necks were too short. They would wear their hair high to try to disguise the “problem,” but I’m sure that most of the time when they look in the mirror, they think, “short neck.” Me, I stared at my hips and thighs and arms and waist, disgusted by them and ashamed that I’d even walked into a ballet class.