100 Lives Lived - Dance

Dear reader,

A few of the lives I’ve lived and one I am currently living are heavily intertwined and have spanned my actual lifetime. This is part of the problem I realized when I was making videos about the 100 lives I’ve lived. So it may take a bit to fully understand everything but we will get there, I promise! So let’s actually start at the beginning now - the very first life I lived in my 33 years of life - that of a dancer.

I started ballet, tap, and jazz at the ripe ole’ age of 6 months old. This was obviously not a choice that I made myself, but it was one that I enjoyed immensely. It is also the first indication that I am non-binary. It was always an internal battle with myself over getting all pretty, wearing dresses, and the etiquette involved which I did enjoy learning, but it did not feel like me; it wasn’t right. It felt like I was being a character. I would come to fight my bio mom about these things for the first 2 decades of my life. But it was in dance that I realized I wanted to be a performer and what lead me to want a career on the stage and in film. It’s the first career I can ever remember wanting, when I was in my single digit ages. 

But as my body changed (as I hit puberty at a very early age), and as we all learned more about the world, I was told: that it wasn’t a feasible career, that I was too ugly and fat to be an actor or dancer, that no one would hire me, that I should choose something more sensible, basically everything to discourage a young child from following their passion. It sort of worked because I didn’t exactly follow my dreams for a very long time, I found other artistic outlets and I studied the sciences more intensely, which are thankfully another passion of mine.

However, this basis of dance early on in my life allowed for me to develop an early understanding of what it meant to be a performer and a deep love for the stage, both as a performer and as a crew member. I continued my lessons in tap, jazz, and ballet until it became too expensive, as I was an ideal candidate for pointe. This was furthered stopped when I got my first major injury during cheerleading in 3rd grade. I would resume some dance in a less formal fashion just a few years later during the first ever musical I was part of - Grease 2000 - and then again, still informally, through Junior Thespians and my high school career. 

I still want to get back into dance and I regularly practice the ballet positions as part of my morning stretch routine. Being who I am, I also tend to just get up and dance whenever the mood strikes - usually because no one is watching, but sometimes even if they are. Additionally, over the past year or so I have also started to learn swing dancing, thanks to a partnership a local big band has, whose performances I attend regularly. Although my art school years didn’t include dancing formally nor regularly, through my theatre time, I did still get to participate at some level, and now that my body is at a place where I can dance again, I can’t wait to get back to it. 

For your viewing pleasure, here is a photo of me in my early years, before a jazz class recital.

Until next time—