My Dream Career Was Just Beginning When I Let It Go

Just as I was reaching the peak of my abilities—and as the pandemic began—I left professional ballet behind, before ever giving my dreams a proper try.

This is I Give Up, a new series from Catapult magazine on the things—habits, expectations, jobs, ambitions, futures, and more—that people have let go of in the last few years.

*

There is a world in which I am a professional dancer with the English National Ballet. In the mornings, I take the Jubilee line to Canning Town, cross the red footbridge over the River Lea, and arrive at ENB’s glass box of a building—five stories of floor-to-ceiling windows and translucent white cladding. From 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., I rehearse. When I’m not rehearsing, I do my daily maintenance: weights, oversplits, theraband exercises. Then, on show nights, I migrate to the London Coliseum, or Sadler’s Wells, or whatever venue we’re performing at, where I mime and pirouette and jeté until I’ve sweated off my stage makeup. At the end of each week, I receive a modest check, just enough to cover a one-bedroom apartment in Soho, which I share with a fellow company member. On my one day off, I am too exhausted to do anything but laundry (and maybe a grocery run at Sainsbury’s, if pints of Ben & Jerry’s are on sale). All the time, I am sore and dog-tired—and immensely grateful. After all, this is the life I’ve been aspiring toward since I was seven years old.

But this is not that world. In this world, I lived independently in London, yes, and I danced at ENB’s training program, where I refined my technique with the intention of auditioning for ballet companies internationally. But then I stopped. Just as I was reaching the peak of my abilities, I left professional ballet behind, before ever giving my dreams a proper try.

In many ways, ballet has dictated the course of my life thus far. To accommodate my training schedule, I homeschooled throughout junior high. For high school, my family moved to New York City so I could have a (relatively) more traditional brick-and-mortar experience at Professional Children’s School, a singularly obliging institution that allowed me to fit all my coursework in before noon, when I’d have to head off for a six-hour session of ballet conditioning and coaching. At PCS—where aspiring dancers, actors, musicians, and athletes roamed the halls; where, on the first day of classes, teachers asked for our names, years, and professions—this was normal. That is to say, I was one professional child among many.

During the summer, while the New York rich kids would get away to their second homes in Aspen and Nantucket, I’d be busy stuffing my break with as many ballet intensives as I could manage—week after week of exacting instruction and grueling performances. I loved being able to dedicate myself to my practice without the looming pressures of academics, the anxieties of essay deadlines and chemistry exams. And with school momentarily out of the picture, I improved faster. I got cleaner, nimbler, stronger.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my courses at PCS—quite the opposite. I enjoyed them too much; I spent too much time revising papers, too much time filling out Punnett squares, and this was time I could’ve been allotting to foot stretching and core strengthening. Everything became a zero-sum game, divergent passions wrangling for insufficient attention. When my ballet friends and I weren’t progressing at the rate we wanted in our training, we’d use our academic commitments as scapegoats.

In my sophomore year, a PCS classmate told me that a distant acquaintance of ours had been accepted to Boston Ballet’s year-round program. “She got a lot more flexible,” my classmate explained, “because she homeschooled last year.”

So when the PCS administration informed me I had enough credits to graduate a year early, I leapt at the opportunity. I would apply to college, as almost every student at PCS did. Indeed, for some, this was the goal. But for a number of musicians, conservatories like Juilliard and Curtis were the holy grail; for many actors, Los Angeles was their North Star. If I were to be accepted to college, my plan was to defer enrollment and pursue ballet full-time—at least for a year. If I determined I hated dancing all day, I could matriculate at university the following year and rejoin my original class. But the career of a ballet dancer is terribly short, often over by the time you reach your midthirties. When I was fortunate to get into both the English National Ballet School and Stanford University, then, the choice was easy. I moved to London. At seventeen, I needed to get cracking.

Surprise: I didn’t hate dancing all day. In fact, doing tendus at 9:00 a.m., I was the happiest I’d ever been. Fully devoted to my art form, I came into my own as a dancer. I started standing at the front of the room during class, and when guest teachers and choreographers stopped by, I made sure I was seen. I worked diligently on my technical shortcomings—correcting my alignment, leaning out my legs—and rejoiced when my instructors made note of my improvement, especially if there was an audience of peers around to hear. Our tutors asked us: Who can turn the most, jump the highest, balance the longest? And they’d select a student or two to demonstrate a combination, while the rest stood back and observed in equal parts awe and envy. I thrived on the propulsive nature of this pedagogical style, the drive it inculcated in me, the strange sense of camaraderie it built. Now more than ever, I could envision myself as a professional ballet dancer. The dream, hazy and conjectural for so long, was finally feeling within reach.

As the year pushed forward, my confidence bloomed, and opportunities fell into my lap in turn. In April, I’d be performing in ENB’s premiere of Creature by Akram Khan, one of the world’s foremost choreographers, and touring the UK as a soloist in a brand-new school production of Cinderella. In May, I’d debut my own composition at ENBS’s choreographic showcase, and in July, I’d soar across the New Wimbledon Theatre stage in our annual final performance.

The year, however, was 2020. Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

*

I’d been ready to let my Stanford admission expire, to shelve college indefinitely. But when Covid-19 hit and I was forced to return to the US in March 2020, I decided to enroll. A few experts were already predicting Covid would linger for twelve to eighteen months. Though I didn’t want to believe them, I did. As the world burned, the Soho-Sainsbury’s fantasy jockeyed for the reins of my consciousness with another vision of the future: a vision that was angst-ridden, paranoid—but entirely conceivable. In that vision, I’d fly back to London in the fall of 2020, and not only would ENB not have a spot for me, but no company would be in a position to hire, what with the hundreds of canceled shows and thousands in lost revenue. I’d be flailing around in a foreign country, no job, no source of income, global pandemic raging. What was I supposed to do then?

I was catastrophizing, absolutely, but what was Covid if not a catastrophe? It was better, I figured, to let London float away, better to foreclose both possibilities—both the best- and worst-case scenarios—than let myself be stranded in the latter. I hadn’t gotten into ballet for security—it isn’t exactly a field known for its cushiness—but, suddenly, certainty and stability seemed like things I ought to be prioritizing.

I hadn’t gotten into ballet for security—it isn’t exactly a field known for its cushiness—but, suddenly, certainty and stability seemed like things I ought to be prioritizing.

Besides, I didn’t think I was turning my back on ballet by any stretch. At first, I told myself I would return to London in the spring of 2021, provided the world had calmed down by then. Come spring, though, I’d settled into the rhythm of college classes, and I’d missed this kind of learning, I realized. Not to mention the world was about as calm as my secondary education was normal—case counts were still high in London, and my parents were still wiping down groceries. So I kicked the can farther down the road: I said I’d take a leave of absence from Stanford after my sophomore year.

But as I write this, my sophomore year is coming to a close, and I’m not planning on going anywhere. As Covid extended throughout 2021 and into 2022, so did my purportedly brief hiatus from dance. And the longer I stayed away, the less I felt the urge to come back.

Something had broken inside me, but whether that something was precious or toxic, instinctive or imposed, in need of preservation or disassembly—I don’t know. I do know that, looking back, I don’t love the person I was in the ballet studio: obsequious, self-serious. I wonder, now, if the way I positioned myself in the classroom, front and center, was not so much a display of self-assurance as the byproduct of a nasty competitive streak, and if my delight in teachers’ approval signaled a dangerously prodigious reliance on external validation.

At present, I recognize, too, that many of my “technical shortcomings” were less matters of technique than issues of body type, of genetics. I may have leaned out my legs by better engaging my rotator muscles, but I also did so by dropping a lot of weight (and I didn’t have weight to lose). Ballet is a culture where thinness is couched in aesthetic terms: line, facility, uniformity. I bought into the jargon.

And I’m still unlearning. At Stanford, I continue to do ballet, for fun, and before anyone comes to see me perform, I stress that I’m “out of shape,” dancing only twice a week these days. I suppose I’m implying that I can’t do the steps I once did, that I’ve lost strength and power and agility. But I can still execute clean double cabrioles, quadruple pirouettes to the right and left, a solid 120-degree arabesque. What I really mean, when I say I’m “out of shape,” is that I’m not as skinny as I once was. Logically, I understand how deeply harmful ballet’s distorted body ideals can be and how my notions of being “in shape” are unhealthy. But that doesn’t stop me from looking in the mirror and mourning the person I once was: rail thin and unaware of it. Which of these two qualities I’m mourning—the fact that I couldn’t see how slim I was, or the fact that I am no longer that slim—fluctuates. Either way, I miss this prepandemic version of myself: his conviction, his perseverance.

Yet, of course, that was the same person who, watching some of his ballet friends go to Ivy League schools, marked them as failures because they didn’t chase after life in a professional company. Who, in his devotion to ballet—which was actually just tunnel vision—couldn’t fathom that college could be anything more than a plan B.

I thought I had grown past these sentiments by the time I began at Stanford, but then my freshman year was on Zoom. I tried to make friends in virtual escape rooms and watch parties; played Among Us and skribbl.io and Jackbox Packs; unmuted myself, muted myself, double-checked that I was muted. I’d be under the impression I was having fun, and then I’d close out of my windows, the green light of my computer camera would dissipate, and I’d be left only with the contours of my face, reflected back to me by a blank, black screen.

For months at a time, I didn’t bother going outside. I was living in Connecticut—my parents vacated the city after I graduated from PCS—and in one of the state’s most suburban towns, no less, so it’s not as if stepping into the sunlight would have immediately placed me in an airborne viral load’s line of fire.

“Vitamin D,” my dad would say. “You need vitamin D!”

And while I could grasp, on a conceptual level, what he was getting at, the indoors simply held more allure: my cats, a couch. I acclimatized to the inertia, the insipidity of virtual interactions. I was so comfortable in my dissatisfaction and desktop-induced disembodiment that all I could do was sit back and watch myself grow ghostly pale.

As I was starting over, taking my little intro computer science courses, I saw my former classmates move on to the professional careers I’d been dreaming of for the past decade. They were performing with the Birmingham Royal Ballet. They were being coached by Carlos Acosta and Nehemiah Kish. There was a tract between the best- and worst-case scenarios, and my peers—if I could still call them that—were getting to live in that middle ground. Right when I’d think I was content, I’d hear the music for Cinderella, or see a friend’s behind-the-scenes Instagram post, and all I could mull over was how much I’d given up.

*

I keep returning to that decision not to go back to London, how emotionless, how calculated it was. I knew people who had sustained career-ending injuries, who had undergone multiple unsuccessful cycles through the job market and been depleted of all morale. That wasn’t me. I’ve never even stepped foot in a company audition, never afforded myself the opportunity to fall short or, for that matter, to flourish.

Instead, I invented worlds in which everything went wrong, and I chose the option with the higher floor. In the end, progress toward a Stanford degree sounded a hell of a lot better than being stuck abroad with nowhere to go and nothing to do. This was pragmatism, or a lack of faith, or a sign of cowardice, or perhaps some twisted cocktail of the three—rationality sweetened with fright, rendered sour by self-doubt.

Is this a way to live? To ask What will I regret? and not What do I want? If there were a single right heuristic, we’d all be following it, I guess.

Is this a way to live? To ask What will I regret? and not What do I want?

Nor can I string together a single right account of my past two and a half years with ballet. Nowadays, it is a hobby for me, and yet it will always be my profession (notwithstanding that I paid tuition for it). I shit-talk ballet, but I am fiercely defensive when others speak poorly of it. And although it made me painfully hyperconscious about my weight, whenever I dance, I feel weightless.

My assessment changes by the day: One moment, I think it’s liberating that I let go of the one thing that made up my identity for so much of my life; the next, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to follow through with anything, if I’m forever destined to recoil at the junctures that matter most. Today, I say, “I’m a ballet dancer,” but tomorrow might bring another variant: the noncommittal “I do ballet,” the apologetic “I used to train seriously in ballet,” the nostalgic “I was on track to become a professional ballet dancer,” the fatalistic “I was a ballet dancer.”

From age seven to age eighteen, I had known precisely what I wanted to do with my life. Then that knowledge grew legs and walked off.

But I’m not rushing to fill the void formed in its wake. I don’t need a new thing to replace what I’ve lost. I want to wade in the loss, to acknowledge it both as a loss and as the creation of newfound space—a space where latitude might reemerge, where a daydream might be more capacious than an itemization of logistical details. There is a world in which I am not beholden to the glamor of a single path. Let it be this one.