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Outside the Official iowa hawkeyes 2023 big ten women’s basketball tournament champions shirt and I love this studio, I latched onto ballet as my identity. I wore my hair to school in a tight bun, and when I started needing a bra, I wore a leotard under my clothes instead. Some nights, I went to bed without washing off my stage makeup, and wore it proudly to school the next morning: I wanted everyone to know I was special. Anyone who entered my bedroom at home would be confronted by a veritable shrine to ballet. I collected pairs of pointe shoes autographed by New York City Ballet dancers and nailed them to the wall above my bed. (We would leave notes at the stage door, complimenting our favorite dancers and asking for their worn-out shoes.) Inside the dresser were drawers of oversized T-shirts emblazoned with the logos of various summer programs I’d passed through. The wall above it was dominated by a giant poster of Degas’s La Classe de Danse, and I would fall asleep studying it: the girl posing in an eternal arabesque, the girl pouting on the sidelines, the girl primping in the back.Puberty hit, and I looked on in horror as my reflection in the mirror changed. I had spent years learning the precise contour of my calves, the quirks of my toes, but all of a sudden, my body was foreign to me. The mirrors lining every studio became instruments of torture. One year, I was in the running; the next, I was mostly ignored. For the third year in a row, I was cast in the same small role in The Nutcracker. Then I was kicked out of SAB.
And yet I couldn’t accept that my ballet career was over. I told myself that my teachers had made a mistake and I enrolled in a less prestigious program. On my first day, I looked around at my new classmates, with their flat feet and their indifference, their messy buns and their barely concealed chatting during class, and wondered how I had fallen so far. I spent the Official iowa hawkeyes 2023 big ten women’s basketball tournament champions shirt and I love this next few years drifting around, dreaming of re-auditioning for SAB, making a dramatic and increasingly far-fetched comeback. The first time I skipped ballet—conceding, at 15, that my prospects had dimmed from implausible to impossible—I felt like a truant, a criminal. I puttered around after school, confused as to what I was supposed to do with this strange pocket of free time, waiting for—what? For someone from the studio to show up at my door, to call? To the best of my memory, no one ever did. This was just what happened sometimes. A girl was absent for a few days, and you would hear rumors—she had moved away or gotten a boyfriend—and there was one less girl to compete with.
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