I didn’t really choose ballet.
I've been doing ballet for almost 20 years. It’s now my main hobby and one of the biggest pieces of my life. But if you'd asked me 20 years ago whether I would be doing ballet in my 40s, I would have looked at you incredulously at such an odd thought. Because I didn’t really choose ballet.
Back in 2007, a friend asked me to go to ballet class with her. I went because she didn’t want to go alone. The studio was looking for adults who wanted to work toward a performance a few months later. There was no experience required. She and I took the classes and attended the rehearsals. A few months later, we did the performance. And then she stopped, but I didn’t.
I kept showing up for class week after week, year after year.
Then, in 2016, some of the women I regularly danced with asked me if I had gotten my shoes yet.
What do you mean? There was a pointe workshop starting up. I hadn’t even considered learning pointe because I didn’t think it was for me.
But the other women I danced with regularly were going to take it and assumed I would too. Then I realized, “Apparently, I’m doing pointe now.” So I signed up for the pointe workshop and bought the shoes.
I kept going to workshop after workshop and class after class. They stopped soon after, and ten years later, I’m still here doing pointe.
I find this whole experience of how I got into ballet funny because I didn’t choose it for myself. I was open to what others around me suggested, and I kept going. Sometimes I think simply continuing carries more weight than actually making a grand decision about something.
I didn’t make any big decisions. I don’t even feel like I made tiny choices: to go to class, take another class, return the next week, get the pointe shoes, sign up for a workshop, and keep going.
But when I look back on 20 years of little actions, suddenly I have a life full of ballet. Something I just tried casually at someone’s suggestion is now a central piece in the fabric of my life.
I didn’t have the urge to dance as a child, so it wasn’t a lifelong dream that I wanted to fulfill. I wasn’t even the one who initially decided to go. The women who started with me and urged me on? They stopped.
And I’m still here doing ballet 20 years later, not because I decided to or had some grand plan. I simply continued.
Sometimes I imagine life is made of big decisions - where to go to school, where to live, what job to take, and how many children to have.
But sometimes life is built from the things we casually say yes to. You try something, you keep going, and one day you look around and realize that this is a part of who you are.
Ballet didn’t come without some challenges. There were times I took breaks because life required it for school and travel. There was even a time when I wanted to quit. Ballet was hard and frustrating when I didn’t progress as I wanted, and it tested my love for ballet. But what would I even be quitting to? At some point, ballet had become too much a part of my life to imagine my life without it.
And now here I am, almost twenty years later, writing this little note after coming home from ballet class, which is perhaps the funniest part of all.
I never really decided to do it for twenty years.
I just kept going.