Ballet.

So here’s one little known fact about me:

I have been going to the exact same ballet class every week for the past three years. While my hipper friends are journaling about the k-hole they were in the night before, or sleeping off a hangover, or cuddled up with their dog on Friday mornings, I am ready to go. Friday is the most important day of the week for me. On Friday’s, I am setting an alarm, putting on a pair of running shorts, and getting ready to plie and dance. I keep a pair of socks in the arm rest of my car for this very reason - so that just in case I wake up somewhere random, I can head to this specific ballet class on Friday mornings. It starts at 10 am and it is a professional level ballet class. When I began taking this class, I didn’t have the focus to progress through the entire class, and pretty soon - the game for me of dancing in the class had nothing to do with how good of a dancer I wanted to be and just became “stay in the room, just stay in the room”. I have faced almost all of my demons in this specific room at a dance center here in downtown Portland. “Medicine journeys” be damned, I have ballet to think about. How do I know that I am living in my truth if I am not dancing? Being in this room is one of the ways that I have found my “true north” throughout my early twenties. Doing the same thing every week gives my mind a sense of peace. So dance and plie, on Friday mornings, I do.

This routine has brought a sense of purpose to the lost moments of my mid-twenties. The moments when I feel like there is nothing for me to physically or spiritually grab onto. It’s easy to begin to feel lost in a city like Portland, or a city like Seattle, or a city like San Francisco. More-so as the landscapes of these cities change, and become increasingly tech-oriented. I was cleaning out my car yesterday and stumbled upon a tote bag someone in the dance community had given me. It is worn and basically too tragic and disheveled to carry around at this point, and I had the impulse to toss it into the garbage bin. “How much longer are you going to hold onto this tote bag, Lizzie?” a voice in the back of my head said. “You can’t just hoard this bag forever”. But I looked at it, and the bold letters on it that spell out the words in navy blue “FUND ART” - and I just couldn’t throw this tote bag away. It doesn’t belong in the ocean.

This ballet class has held significant meaning for me. I’ve seen the way that people with degrees from Juilliard dance and move in this class. I’ve watched people who have taken five ballet classes in their entire lives attempt to dance in a professional class. I’ve seen my peers train for auditions. I have seen the comedy and the tragedy that is the dance world. I wanted to be a professional dancer growing up, but the money wasn’t there for me as a kid to take dance lessons. I always felt left out when I saw the girls who were in dance and cheer at school. As an adult I love going to ballet class. Going to ballet every week has kept me sober (ish), it has kept me physically healthy, and maybe even more importantly - it has made me face myself on days that I haven’t wanted to face myself. On days I haven’t wanted to look in the mirror I have been forced to have the people around me mirror me. Ballet has brought me revelations. Literally, the dance studio has been a place of revelations. It’s been a place of revelations about the folds of my body, about the folds of my memory, about my family life. The thing about revelations is that they’re not always good - sometimes our revelations are like bad dreams. In the Bible “The Book of Revelation” is the “Book of the Apocalypse”. The Book of the Apocalypse seems like an appropriate way to view many of the “wicked problems” that we are facing as a society in the modern world. Need I say more? I’m not here to preach, I’m here to make some moves.

Dance is my religion. Wherever I am, and whenever I begin to feel lost, I know that on Friday mornings I am going to dance. It doesn’t matter how great or terrible the week in front of me has been - once I step into the dance studio, it’s a clean slate. I am no longer in the default world, I am on the dance floor. Dance is like that. There is a place that I can go to actually learn something, to actually move my spine, to actually exhale all of those breathes that I needed to exhale during the week that I didn’t have the inner strength to. Dance is a place of letting in and letting go. As I have grown as an adult and a dancer, I have found ballet is a place of friendship. Every Friday morning brings a different challenge, a different traffic pattern, a different cramp in my toes.

Thankful for this continued journey of spirit through dance and life.