Challenge Retrospect

When they call it a thirty-day 'challenge,' they mean it.

I started doing a 30-day choreography challenge on a whim on 2 November. Initially I said it was because I wasn't doing NaNoWriMo and felt I should work on some creative project for the month of November. That was true, but there was a second reason that I didn't make public: I was not in a good place, mentally/emotionally, especially on 2 November. I decided to go practice dance in order to get my mind off how useless I felt, but I needed some reason to even bother practicing. The best way to do that is to set up some kind of accountability system -- like pledging to post each day's work on social media for thirty straight days.
The decision to do this challenge was actually more a first-aid response for a period of acute distress than it was a thought-out plan. Dance, so far, is the only thing I've found that relives some of the mental distress really at all (and even that doesn't work 100% of the time), so by locking myself into a month-long challenge, it meant that I had to do something -- choreograph four sets of eight -- every day. The time it would take to choreograph that much dance would be enough time to let my mind reset and not wander so far down into the abyss.

At first it was fun -- I started out choreographing some stuff I had really wanted to choreograph for some time but just never bit the bullet on it. The response on social media was initially relatively enthusiastic. But within a week, interest and engagement began to drop off. It began to be less fun. I started thinking, how can I get them back? What could I do to get their attention again, to show them I was actually good at something (I hoped)? I began to expect more elaborate and complex things of myself, and I began to expect myself to execute them perfectly. I was trying to make drastic leaps of improvement every day and prove it with a video record of 32 perfect counts every single day, on top of work and school commitments. On Day 18 of the challenge, I had a bit of a meltdown in the studio because I COULD NOT land a double pirouette -- on my good turning side, and it was even a decent turning day. There were plenty of valid reasons that might have explained why it wasn't working -- I hadn't had a lot of sleep, I had just gotten off work, I hadn't eaten in a few hours, I hadn't been doing a whole lot of pointe lately, I was in desperate need of a physio appointment because my body was so out of alignment -- but I wanted to power through all that. The show must go on. Real performers don't get a free pass for ANY of the above reasons. Why should I? What makes me more special than them -- the ones who have actually earned this life? If I planned on even having a tiny hope of being any kind of performing artist, I had to stop with all these excuses -- however valid they might be. Mere hangers-on have not yet earned the right to such pedestrian excuses. But the more I pushed myself, the more angry I became that I wasn't improving.

For years I've been pushing away the idea that I'm an attention whore at heart. I won't make a scene in public, but if I do something -- anything -- I usually quietly expect some recognition. This month really brought that out. Seeing the public engagement with my posts fall off so sharply brought this right out into the light. I'm not the kind of person who gets insecure if her selfies don't get a certain percentage of Facebook/Instagram likes, but I do get insecure when I post a dance excerpt that I'm proud of or that shows some growth and LITERALLY nobody says anything. I don't know how this works in the brains of other people, but in my head the logic is 'nobody noticed. Again. As usual. See? You're not good enough. You're not worthy of their attention. If you weren't such a crappy dancer, maybe they'd notice you. You're not working hard enough. Quit lazing about and improve already. If you don't, you've no business calling yourself a dancer. So prove it. Now.'

So I push harder. Don't give me this 'it takes time' crap -- how then do you explain all those sixteen-year-olds who are prima ballerinas of companies like the New York City Ballet or the American Ballet or the Royal Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada? You cannot tell me it takes time, because for them it did not. For them it took sheer determination. And if I'm not at that level -- or at least reasonably close -- then apparently I don't have enough determination. My body has an expiry date. My window into the dance world shrinks with every second I draw breath. The clock is ticking, the hourglass is running out. How many metaphors do I need to use to get you to understand the urgency of the situation? And how many times do I have to remind myself of this before I actually start improving?

I'm at a loss. I am too old to pretend to be serious about this if I'm not going to be seriously good. But I cannot, cannot give this up. I chose this life. Now I need to earn it. This challenge is another stepping stone to that -- it makes me practice and it (hopefully) helps me gain a social media presence, if only among my friends and associates. It gives me visibility. And hopefully it will give me ability enough to earn that visibility.