I Remember This Road...

Something that people may not know about me is that I'm a dancer. A few months ago I would've said that I WAS a dancer but now, I'm beginning to say it again. I AM a dancer. When I first auditioned for the Biggest Loser, they asked me what my reason was for wanting to lose weight. I listed off several important reasons why but got choked up when I got to the point where I said, "I just want to dance again".

I took my first ballet class when I was three and instantly fell in love. I can still remember the day I got my first recital costume. I was a little mouse with a pink, sequined tutu and it was my favorite outfit of all time. I think I knew even then that dance was my chosen form of expression and that it'd be a huge part of my life. As I continued to grow and take more and more classes, I became obsessed. By the time I was 13 I was spending so much time in rehearsals and competitions that it was pretty much the only thing I did. I lived, breathed, ate, and slept dance. At one point my mom even found me sleep-walking in the living room, practicing the night before a competition. So when I'd say that I could do the dance routines in my sleep, it was a completely true statement!

When I was 14, I tried out for the high school dance team. I'd grown up in our town watching them perform, knowing that I wanted to be out there with them someday. The first morning of tryouts, I went to the coach and sat down with her to talk. At that point I'd already been struggling with my weight for about six years and though I was in shape, I was bigger than the other girls. I asked her if I even stood a chance at making the squad because I wasn't sure I'd fit the uniforms. She smiled at me, so kindly, and said "If you're good enough to make this team, we'll order the right size for you. Don't worry about the uniforms, just dance."

That's exactly what I did and a few days later when the list was posted, I was shocked and thrilled to find out that I had made the team. I was one of only three incoming freshmen to make it. It's been over 10 years and I can still remember how I felt at that moment. It was one of the best of my life, knowing that the coaches believed in me and thought that I was good enough and worth the extra effort they'd have to put into working with me. It was and still is an incredible gift. I danced on the team with so much joy that first year and loved every second of it. The girls became like sisters and though we didn't always agree, we stuck together and supported each other through everything. It was the best year.

Unfortunately, for me, things changed. The second year, my coach had to move away and leave us. I was crushed. This woman who'd given me so much and helped me grow was no longer there to keep us together. We got a new coach and all of the sudden things were completely different. She wanted a top-notch, competitive team that she could take to nationals and began training us with that mindset. We switched from afternoon practices to mornings where the primary focus became about conditioning and whipping us all into shape. If we were going to be at the level she expected us to get to, there could be no slacking. Girls began dropping left and right. People cracked under the pressure. But the one who cracked the most... was me.

See, although our new coach was great at what she did, for me it was no longer fun. All of a sudden, I was hyper-aware of my weight and how it affected my dancing. I looked around at the new team and felt out of place and unwanted. The dancing became less like expression and more like work. I had to sacrifice other school commitments because I was so focused on trying to keep up. I slipped into depression and had no idea, at 15 years old, what was going on around me. I started blacking out at practices, stopped eating because I was stressed out over my weight, and couldn't concentrate at school so I began failing classes. Things were just not okay and I didn't understand why. So I did something that I wish I hadn't but at the time made the most sense. I walked away. I took a "sick leave" of sorts from the team and sat out of competition season. I thought that if I stayed, I'd bring the team down and make them look bad so I chose to sit and watch. That's when the binge and emotional eating really began.

By the time I came back to the team, I'd done a lot of damage to my body and it was very apparent that they were all at higher levels than I was. So when tryouts for my third year came around, I was cut. I was no longer a part of the team. That stung.... hard. The morning after the list went up and I learned that my time was done, I had to go to practice and teach a routine for our spring show. I remember fighting tears through the entire rehearsal, knowing that my teammates were disappointed in me. Knowing that I was disappointed in myself. One of the assistant coaches, who'd been there for both years and seen me at my best and worse, pulled me aside afterwards and told me exactly how she felt about the situation. She said that she understood what I'd been going through and she was proud of me. In spite of poor choices that I'd made, she still believed in me. I remember her begging me to not give up and let my passion fade but I was so upset that I didn't listen. My spirit felt a little broken.

After that, the weight gain became a serious problem. I continued to dance but only when it was for theatre and choir, never competitively again and never for self-expression as I had. In college, I had a similar experience happen again where I had to audition for the dancing ensemble in the musical every year. Each year I was kept until the end of the auditions, never cut, but was never put in the dancing ensemble. That too was something that just killed. It kept the pain of what I'd done to myself fresh in my mind. I felt completely lost with no way of getting back to where I'd been. At that point my weight had gotten so out of control that it was just torture watching others do what I so desperately wanted to but couldn't.

Now, fast forward to today. Over the past few years I've realized that I cannot go on living without dance in my life. It is truly one of my strongest passions so I found ways to get it back. I began to teach. Though it's not exactly as it was before, it's slowly worked its way back into my life and now is something I do regularly. I'm even blessed enough to have dancers who let me choreograph for them which is my greatest form of therapy. Though I'm making all of this progress... I'm still not quite there yet.

This journey to health is about so much more than my weight. It's about physical strength, absolutely, but it's also about emotional strength. The fact is that I need to be dancing again to be truly healthy. At the end of this process, I want to be so strong that I can begin auditioning as a dancer. I want to continue to choreograph but FINALLY be able to dance in my own pieces! That's something that's been missing for far too long and as I continue to move forward to a brighter future, that goal is another that I'm striving towards. Each day that I get stronger is another step closer to being a better version of the girl I once was and have been trying to find for so long. I feel it coming back.

I've got a dance that will be 6 months in the making. But it's the dance of my life and I can't wait to share it.