(This is the third and final piece in a series of posts. To start at the beginning, click here.)
Lost and Found
The soft afternoon sunlight filtered in through the white honeycomb blinds. Empty shelves lined the room on two sides, their contents having been removed a few months before and replaced with a light layer of dust. No one came in here much these days, except for me, when I came home on the occasional long weekend.
I stood in front of the closet door mirror, staring at my reflection, feeling disappointment and disgust. It had been nearly a year since I’d graduated from high school. After that year of not dancing, and knowing I had put on weight, what else had I expected? I had practically lived in my dance clothes in years past, but when I left high school, I thought that part of my life was over. And for a whole year, it was. I’d changed in that short amount of time. Of course when I put those dance clothes back on they showed how lost I’d become. They hid nothing. You could tell I was a mess inside just by looking at me.
I had come back to my childhood home to gather all of my dance clothes because I had an aching that I could only think of one cure for: beginning to dance again. And in spite of my growing sense of shame about how I looked, walking into those dance studios at BYU would prove to be the best thing I could have done. Because as I worked to remember how to get my body to lunge and carve and leap, I found myself.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing how essential getting out of my head and into my body was for me. It not only improved my sense of well-being, but also saved me from self-destructing. I am convinced that my love for moving my body (and my relationship with God) is what kept me from ever falling off the edge completely. Because even though I obsessed over and despised how it looked, how could I fully harm the thing that gave me that joy?
Downward Spiral
I felt so much happier in those dance classes that I changed my mind about choosing a “practical” major. I worked hard in school and in my dance technique classes. The next April I was accepted into the dance major. I think I could have become quite happy during that time of my life -dancing, going to school, working, spending time with friends, and dating- if it hadn’t been for the obsession I was developing over my body image. Even though my efforts to lose weight were paying off I felt like a mess inside; I felt that everyone could tell that by looking at my waistline. What started out as some reasonable goals to eat better and get some exercise quickly turned into a way that I could control, fix, or at least cover up all that was wrong with me. (Read more about this time of my life here.)
Dance was a two-edged sword for me: on one hand, it helped me maintain a precarious grip on the idea that my body was good; on the other hand, it became a huge source of shame for me. (Aren’t all the things we love dearly that way?)
I loved to feel the smooth texture of the floor beneath my bare feet; to feel the connection from my spine all the way to my fingertips as I carved through the space around, above, and below me; to not only hear the music being played by the accompanist, but to actually feel the space between the notes deep within my body as I prepared to spring into motion. It was not just the glorious feeling of motion, but the emotion that could be conveyed through it as mind, body, and spirit became one. When I was in that place of actually living inside my body, dance was a joy and offered a healing balm that I could get in no other way.
But, when I was not in that place (as was becoming more common), I felt shame. Shame, not just because of what I saw in the mirrors of the studios I spent time in, but for the beliefs I had about myself. I constantly told myself that I was not good enough to study dance, that I was not good enough to teach it when I graduated, and that I was being selfish and foolish for studying it. I worried that I was wasting my intellectual gifts by studying an art form. I believed that I had no future in dance, that one day I’d have to give it all up anyway, so why was I just delaying the inevitable?
The boys I came in contact with who tended to objectify me felt I had a certain appeal because, you know, dancers are hot. And people in general made assumptions about my intelligence when I told them I was studying dance. They’d kind of pause and say condescending things like, “Oh . . . How fuuuun!” (to which I wanted to reply, no, it was hard work that required every ounce of me) or, my personal favorite, “Not to be rude, but do you have any real classes?” I wanted to shout at them that I really was smart.
All of my hard work seemed to be paying off, but I was becoming more and more unhappy as time went on. Autumn came and after only a year’s time since I’d begun dancing again, I was in the highest level contemporary dance class.
I found myself in a crowded studio with the best dancers in the program. For a few weeks, I showed up to that class. We faced the narrow side of the studio as we moved through the material. Since he’d been an athlete long before he became a dancer, the dance professor had a challenging, but playful approach to movement, and I enjoyed it. But facing that narrow side of the studio, being crowded in with all those phenomenal dancers, and I felt like I was dancing in a shrinking tunnel. My anxiety was so high I could have crawled up the walls. The beast that rode me used to only whisper in my ear all day about my unworthiness. It now had such a strong hold on my mind that it was more like a shout. “Who let me into this class?” I asked myself. “I’m not good enough to be here.” I was itching to crawl out that studio and out of my own skin. So I quit. I quit dance and a while later, I even quit school.
Recovery Begins
Things got bad enough in the months that followed that I finally got help and started going to therapy for an eating disorder. I decided to go back to school and finish the dance program. I felt drawn back to dance, like a compass that must always point north. At first, it seemed that everything got worse. (Read more about this here.) Every day was a battle. Many days I never even made it out of my apartment. Sometimes I wanted to disappear. But mostly, I just kept praying, doing what I could manage, and holding on to the hope that one day, I would be happy and love myself again.
One of the days that I was able to drag myself to my technique class, I stood in the back left corner of the dance studio. Even though it was a large room–with ceilings three times as high as a normal classroom and an enormous window that spanned the whole wall and let the autumn sunlight, with its crisp colors and vibrant warmth, into the room–I felt confined. “What am I doing here?” I wondered.
The instructor finished teaching us a center floor combination. It was complicated and intricate. Quick weight shifts and torso-initiated movements were part of his unique style that even after two months of classes, I had not been able to grasp. With a jolting sound, the strong beat of the drum shattered the silence that had begun as the class prepared to move. I tried to stay quick on my feet, to feel stability in my core as I shifted my weight forward on my left foot, sweeping my arm around to the side, so fast that I felt the air sweep past my face.
As I attempted to focus on what I was seeing in the space before me, instead of letting my focus drop, I heard a voice speak sharply from somewhere behind me. “Travel Sarah. Come on. Push. Travel!” His commands distracted my thoughts. “Please,” I pleaded inside, “this time I have to get it right.” I focused on the person ahead of me. She always moved with clean agility and speed. If only I could cover as much distance as she could.
It never worked. I managed to get through the semester -barely- discouraged about the progress that I just could not seem to make. Throughout the school year, I repeatedly heard the same urges to travel from my other teachers. They were telling a young woman trying to recover from an eating disorder to take up more space. To travel. Use my long legs. Get energy in my fingertips. Bring my gaze up. And I could not get myself to do it.
I began to realize that all the corrections I was getting from my technique teachers were just ways that my inner struggles were manifested outwardly. I just didn’t know what to do about it.
One day in the spring —one year after I had begun recovery— I was asked to say the prayer before technique class (I went to a private, church-owned university). I felt a deep stirring. This body, that I had felt so much animosity towards for so much of my life, was a creation from God. I knew I should take care of it. Taking care of it didn’t mean starving it, or overeating, or pinching my fat and scowling in the mirror. I felt deeper than I had ever felt before, that my body was a precious gift. I didn’t want to damage it anymore. I wanted to learn how to love that creation.
Things didn’t all of a sudden get easy after that. I still had days that I wanted to detach myself from my body because I didn’t like how I looked. But I had learned from the joy of dancing that there was no real way to be happy feeling split in two like that.
Things Begin to Come Together
What happened over the course of the next year is hard to explain in words. It was a kind of unfolding. Just a natural process of all the impressions and moments I had collected over time beginning to slowly come together. Impressions like these: the time I spent in anatomy lab where I first began to marvel at how amazing the human body really is, when I had expected to be disgusted by the cadavers instead. That moment I sat in an institute class and felt a truth pierce my heart: that I had beliefs about myself that were making me unhappy. When my therapist gently spoke to me about two ways I could approach my relationship with myself: through shame or through trust. The words I read in a book about how my body gave me signals and I could trust them to guide me to a healthy weight. Many lonely, restless nights that made me want to learn to love my body and let others know the real me. The clarity I felt when it dawned on me that my personality was alive in the way I danced. The difference I noticed between all the times I worked out and went to dance class because I was desperate to fix myself, and when I did those same exact things because I cared about myself.
I knew that dance was helping me. How, I didn’t exactly know, because before it had been a huge source of shame for me. All I knew was that dance was helping me feel whole again. Movement became my vehicle for healing.
Now, after all these years, I can put words to much of what happened during that time. I was learning to experience mindfulness and to feel the mind-body connection. As I did this, it got easier for me to redirect my thoughts to more positive things. I was reclaiming my body by noticing what movement felt like from the inside, rather than worrying about what it looked like to others. Connecting with my body in this way felt good. When I could do that, I realized that I was already whole. The pieces of me were together. They always were. I couldn’t really reject my body, treat it as some thing separate from who I was. That was evident in the way that I struggled to dance in the way that my teachers urged me to.
I couldn’t physically take up space if I wasn’t willing to do it in other ways. When I was in the grips of shame, every inch of my being was imploding, pulling in on itself, fearing my flaws, imposing on no one, pretending I felt no strong feelings, hiding in the recesses of my mind where no one could hurt me and where I could hurt no one. That sense of pulling in was evident in the way I moved: not connected to my core, not traveling, not putting energy in my fingertips, dropping my gaze. And not until I saw that clearly, and began to challenge it physically and mentally, did I begin to feel that unfolding, that sense of expanding, having height, width, and depth of body as well as of soul.
I Find Somatics
It was during that final calendar year in school that I took a class called “Somatics and Conditioning.” Somatics is a way of studying body movement that focuses on internal physical perception. It combines objective, analytical thinking with feeling and sensing your body from the inside. Somatics took everything I loved about moving my body -everything that was helping me recover- and combined it with the way my brain loved to think. Never before had I felt so excited about what I was learning. Something inside me lit up in that class: I had found my purpose.
By design the movement in this class was more basic. This allowed me to connect with my body and the way it moved on a deeper level. My way of thinking about it and within it changed. I began to be fascinated not just by the human body in general, but by my own body, what it was capable of, and how much it was a part of who I was.
My idea of movement expanded to beyond just dance. It began to include the way I moved my body all day, every day. I began to see that if I could change the way I moved, I would change the way I experienced life. That class shifted the way I viewed myself and the world around me; the possibilities thrilled me.
Moving Forward
My last fall semester began. Getting out the door was an arduous task some days. My poor body image remained, but I was learning to be happy anyway. Outside the leaves were changing colors to vivid reds and oranges. The air was brisk and I breathed it in, feeling the air swirl into my lungs as I rushed to another technique class. I had the same technique teacher as last fall and though his teaching styles remained the same, changes were beginning to take hold inside of me.
Class was held in a studio that was significantly smaller than the year before. Its ceilings were lower and would often quake with thunderous noise under the feet of the folk dancers that were rehearsing above. There were no windows; as a result, time seemed to pass indefinitely as we learned combination after combination. Humidity was always a problem in that studio, and I would drip with sweat so badly that I would frequently have to wipe my forehead to keep the perspiration from trickling into my eyes. Even in this smaller, more crowded room, I felt more free. I was determined to take chances and see what happened.
I prepared myself for an across-the-floor sequence. “You can do this,” I urged myself. Lunging forward into a deep plie, I twisted my body and reached around and upward with my right arm. My focus was starting to drift downward, but I fought the urge to look down, and instead opened my eyes to take in the other dancers and the blank cinderblock walls around me. The space around me was tangible and as I traveled across the room, I was able to mold it with my body. I felt immense satisfaction as I realized that I had finally begun to disperse my uncertainties.
Using the space around me as I danced was evidence of how I was letting go of shame and my fears. I was stepping past the false beliefs that I had given myself. I was beginning to let myself be seen and take up space. There was something liberating in the knowledge that I was capable of more and that the inhibiting factor in my life had merely been of my own making. Habits had to be broken, but I knew I had the power to change my attitude towards myself. As I began to believe in myself and step past my physical boundaries, I was able to see the potential that I had in all other aspects of my life. I was on my way.