Dance your way to Self Destruction

I’d always grown up watching dance movies and musicals, Dirty Dancing, Grease, Breakin 1&2, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, films that inspired me before I knew what the word inspiration even meant.  I started dancing with my friends in Primary School making up routines pretending we were in a pop band, singing into marker pens in school assembly. I had initially started because I loved it, because I loved dancing to my favourite songs and I loved being creative and having fun.When I was a young teenager I wanted to dance because I wanted to be in a girl group.  Growing up watching Hannah Montana, Cheetah Girls, High School Musical, Camp Rock, The Step Up movie era, The Search for the next Doll, just to name a few right when I was a teenager, I like probably most other young girls wanted that Disney star lifestyle.

I started my dance training when I was around age 12 I think, I joined a local dance school with my best friend and we started learning freestyle disco, that crazy style where you overstretch your limbs to get really flexible and then throw yourself around a room at break neck speed to annoyingly energetic music.  It wasn’t really my thing, but at that time that’s all I could get in the area I lived.  It meant I got to perform in street carnivals and go to competitions, it made me feel more.  It gave me a purpose.

Already by this point now looking back there was clear signs of something not being quite right.  I remember when one of the teachers told us to look in the mirror and say something we like about ourselves, and I just remember bursting into tears and going home with a fake wrist injury to cover up why I’d been crying, my dad made me wear a wrist support for the rest of the week.  It happened again later on in high school in a Performing Arts class we were told to lie down and the room was dark, and they led us through a thought provoking meditation, and I was lay there with tears silently seeping sideways down my face.  I never knew why I was crying, or why anytime I was told to look inward it made me feel upset.  I’d awkwardly burst into tears at parents evenings when my teachers would say ‘I wish you were a bit more confident, why don’t you believe in yourself.’ With my mum sat next to me wondering what the bloody hell was wrong with me.

I’d recently found one of my old high school diaries from Year Nine, I was fourteen years of age and like most teenage girls I stereotypically had a crush on the most popular boy in my year.  I had written in my diary, ‘and maybe when I get better at dance,  he will like me.’  Reading it back made me feel so sad, and brought me to the abrupt realisation that from that point onwards dance hadn’t been about dance or enjoyment and creativity.  It became a platform in which I could tear myself down whilst pretending I was building myself up.  Where I could use all my negativity and self loathing as fuel to become more than I was, not realising I was already enough.  Where I could allow the constructive criticism of my teachers to reinforce what I already knew, that I wasn’t good enough.

After my stint with Freestyle Disco, I’d stopped after I competed in my first competition.  I’d hated all the makeup and the hair and the fake smiling and the running, and to be honest, the performing in general.  I was doing Contemporary as part of GCSE Dance, which I did enjoy, I loved watching dances in my spare time and dreaming about when I would be that good, imagining how much better I would feel.  I did love it though, I really did.  But I overthought everything, choreography was the hardest thing for me, I didn’t know how to express what I wanted to say through movement, and it used to annoy me so much.  When I was sixteen/seventeen was when I really started broadening my dance horizons, I snuck on the train behind my parents back into the city, to try a class at a studio I’d seen on youtube.  It was a hiphop style class, which I’d never done but that I’d been watching on So You Think You Can Dance and Step Up.  That was when I really started putting the effort in, I’d save my bus money and walk home from college so I could afford to get the train to classes.  I was intimidated by everyone at the studio but I desperately wanted to befriend them and be like them.  For a while again it was my passion I loved putting the hard work in, and learning from all different teachers from all over the world.

I’d started training at another school aswell when I was 17 as part of a saturday academy.   The level here was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and the intenseness of the training was insane, but I didn’t mind.  At this time though was when I started self harming.  It came from one rejection and being naïve to life.  But that silly mistake started the ongoing battle that would probably never go away.  I would always cut on my left arm, its common to pick an area and to stick with that one place.  I got my first two major scars in that first bout of self harm.  I would cover it with long sleeve tops during dance training even if I was sweating beyond belief, or i’d wear an elbow support over my forearm.  I remember one particular time when in the class we were holding a plank position and my arm was stinging from the feeling of the sweat in the cuts and the bandage material snagging the dried scabs, and I remember not dropping out of plank or showing any inkling of pain because I thought that I deserved it and this was punishment.

The thing about self harm is that it so quickly becomes an addiction, a habit, when you feel a type of way its the only answer, a punish reward system, without a reward just guilt.  So it became a habit then, everytime I had done bad in class or I thought I had danced rubbish or I just didn’t like myself.  Another cut was added, like I was collecting them.  After a while I did stop self harming though, there was small relapses but it became not an issue like it was.  Little did I know that was just the introduction to something that would take hold again further down the line and send me on a downward spiral to a place I didn’t think I would return from.

When I started university, i’d done various amounts of dance training in different places, but this was the first time my training was really going to be solid.  Technique and Jazz and Commercial and Hip Hop I was excited to be finally getting the training I needed to make me a better dancer.  And here I must say that time really did make me a better dancer, but unfortunately it made me a less myself along the way.  Maybe that’s dramatic.  For the first year, or the majority atleast I was fine, I was stressed as much as any university student is, but I was in control.

By second year things had got out of control.  The year now to me is a haze, its difficult to remember times and duration.  We were training harder than ever, but the pressure from inside and out had gotten too much.  Spending all day looking at ourselves in the studio mirrors, analysing our bodies and our movement and being critiqued by our teachers and our peers, it had all gotten too much.  Self harm came back in my life in a dangerous way, it wasn’t an odd occasion thing or a weekly thing, it was daily.  I couldn’t get through morning classes without thinking how on my lunch break I was going to go and buy razors and tear my arms apart in the toilet while everyone else ate their sandwiches.  I’d lost myself completely and i’d lost my way completely, my attendance dropped from 100% to 50% as somedays I just wouldn’t get out of bed.  I’d gone through a phase of changing my hair willing it to change my identity as I went from brunette to ginger to bleach blonde with no eyebrows.  Looking back at photos and videos of myself at that time its so crazy to see myself functioning and looking so normal when on the inside I was destroying myself.  Its too easy to hide.

One of the most difficult decisions I’ve still ever had to make was my decision not to return to university in my third year, I said to myself and I don’t mean it to sound dramatic because I honestly believe it, I don’t think I would of lived to see my graduation if I would of carried on the way I was.  Even though it makes me sad and I think what could of been, I know I made the right choice.  I still struggled with self harm after I left, I still self harmed when I was living my dream life in LA the summer after I finished.  I still self harmed that Christmas.  I still self harmed April last year.  But slowly it gets further apart.  I kept with dance for a while after I left university, it was strange not doing it everyday anymore, but I was going to different studios and different classes still.  But then I started realising it just didn’t make me happy.  I couldn’t look in the mirror and see any joy when I danced.  Even when my mental health was stable again, dance was the thing that brought it back down.  I could never see the good in my body or movements or choreography, I could only see the flaws, the mistakes, the moments that were out of time and how I looked different to everybody else.

At this present moment April 2019, although I am not going to plead I am enlightened or spiritually advanced, but my beliefs and my mindset has switched since when I was at my worst.  I recognise triggers, and thoughts, I recognise when its not me talking its my unsolved underlying issues or my ego talking over me.  I know how to separate myself from my mental health, and know that its not me and it doesn’t define who I am.  The last time I danced was January 2019, I went to a class by one of my old teachers with a friend from college.  I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it, and I still couldn’t find peace with myself in a dance studio mirror like I have everywhere else.  The time that I danced before that was May 2018 before I went travelling, and that was the first time i’d taken a class since the previous summer too.  Sometimes its hard to turn your back on something that you’ve devoted so much of your time to, your money, your energy.  And I feel like dance will always be a part of my life, but it brings me too much sadness to find the joy in it that dance is supposed to bring.  So many of my friends from my dance training have gone on to do incredible things, professional dancers on stage and theatre, but I don’t think that was ever the path for me.  Nothing is meant to be easy, but if you don’t enjoy the journey then who says the destination will be any better.  Dance always made me focus on what i’d be and who i’d become at the end of this metaphorical time of ‘when i’d be good enough’.  The focus was always placed upon the end product and the rush to get there.  The focus was never on the journey of what it took to get there.