Crossroads

I don't know how to preamble this post.

 

I've been thinking lately about officially giving up dance. Possibly both dance and choreography.

 

I tell myself it's a time thing. While I like my job, it still takes away from my creative endeavours. I anticipate staying with this company for a long time (with construction and fast food, I always knew those were stopgaps and not a career). But I'm not fully convinced that's the real reason.

 

Maybe it's fear. Even though my two most recent performances were very well received, the memory of having an entire cast and assistant choreographer turn against me no matter how hard I tried to accommodate their self-professed 'lack of ability' (which was really a lack of commitment and/or self-confidence) still burns deep into my brain.

 

I know I don't really like making the videos. Shooting practice footage is fun, but I feel the need to make 'real' dance videos, with visual themes and costumes and stuff. I don't even mind editing, but I hate trying to scout viable locations and trying to motivate myself to practice enough and trying to put together a costume that isn't either stupid expensive or the same as literally every other dance video ever.

 

And I've 'locked' myself into making a dance video that's supposed to premiere in May.

 

I have the dance memorised and relatively clean (other than the ending -- which is probably also a contributing factor for the resistance I'm encountering). I love this song and I've been wanting to do a video to it since the song was released. I've already test-driven it in front of a live audience and heard nothing but positive feedback. There is absolutely no reason for me NOT to do this.

 

Am I just letting the fear and the bad experiences win, or am I finally being rational about my time and energy for once in my life? Is the distance in my soul a call from God or a siren song from Satan?

 

Despite all the pain and discouragement I've gone through in my career, this is the first time I have legitimately, peaceably, rationally considered quitting. (I had decided to quit performing once before, in 2019, but that was mostly for attention/as a way of self-harm. It was not, by any possible stretch, a rational decision.) I'm really not sure what to make of this. Even when dancing was difficult due to health, lack of motivation, busy schedule, emotional trauma... I never considered quitting, not truly. I still saw the dancers in my head. I still danced to music when doing housework. I still do.

 

What I loved about it was the feeling of flying. The air rushing between my fingers, my muscles firing, the elation of 'solving' a difficult passage and being able to perform it automatically. Performing in front of people or cameras was cool, but those weren't my driving force. I just loved the act of dancing. I love the way my body and mind felt when I danced. It cleared my head like nothing else. Maybe this is the same high people get from meditating?

 

As far as I know, I still love the act of dancing. The alphabet superset I did for Nachmo this year was a lot of fun. I've lost relatively little from the extended pandemic/apartment life drought, and what I had lost seemed to come back with little difficulty. I came out of Nachmo with one full piece that I really love, and some great starts to quite a few others.

 

And yet... I'm still sitting here, wondering if I should officially walk away.

 

It wouldn't be hard, really. I stopped posting the rehearsal videos years ago, when my in-laws banned me from posting on social media. As far as most people are aware, I've already stopped. If we're perfectly honest, the only person acting under the delusion that I'm still actively choreographing (let alone actually dancing) is me.

 

Would life be simpler without dance? Absolutely. Without a doubt. No question.

 

I would have free time. The imposter syndrome would have far less fodder. There would be less paper cluttering the house and annoying my husband (I find it easier to choreograph longhand). It would be so much simpler to just stop even thinking of myself as a choreographer and focus on my day job, or marriage, or housework, or entertaining, or writing.

But twelve years ago, I was on this very blog saying that I felt called to walk this path, no matter how difficult or lonely it got. I believed it then -- in many ways I still do believe that. I believed God had called me to dance, to choreograph, to somehow bring hope to people through it.

I don't think I've done that. If anything, I'm farther away from that now than I was when I started.

Is the work done? Is my work done? Is it time to pass the torch? If so, to whom? Both my sisters have also stopped dancing. M is dead. Most of my surviving dance friends have already moved on to 'real life.'

And if my work is not done, than what work is it, and why can't I see the way forward?

 

And if I can't answer those, there's always the question I would have asked twelve years ago on this very blog -- which option gives God more glory?

 

As usual, I don't know. I never know. I'm always paralysed by fear and uncertainty and indecision and it characterizes me as a person and the way I live my life. 

2026 Goal Update

We're two months into 2026 already. Time to check if I've even started on any of my goals.

 

Financial: I did get a little bit of Christmas money. It has not been invested, however it has made it as far as the 'we forget this money exists' savings account (which is better than usual). There have been several opportunities to spend it, but so far I have stayed strong. I'm not sure it's enough to actually invest. I haven't set up the autotransfer yet because my unemployment benefits didn't kick in until literally last week, and the plan was to schedule the autotransfer for the days that I'll be receiving the payments. I applied for a job opportunity that someone mentioned to me that I'm actually really excited about and would be a great side hustle (and then I could dump most or even all of that income into savings/investments), but I haven't heard anything back yet. That makes me nervous.

 

Dance: The Nachmo alphabet project went well overall. I have gotten very little feedback from the hand-picked group that I emailed, which is disappointing. But I did get my 50th YouTube subscriber! I guess it's not a lot by most people's standards, but considering how little I actually advertise my YouTube channel (and by that I mean I literally never mention it at all), that's not bad.

In February, I switched to working on actually memorising the dance I want to film in the spring as well as developing another longer show (similar to Sottovoce). I'm already one piece deep into the longer show (already memorised and everything!), and I'm intentionally taking a lot of time to really slow down the dance I'm planning to film in the spring and nail down the exact footwork and dynamics. This piece has the potential to be incredible, but it will take a ton of work to get there. While it is possible to shoot from the hip on this piece (that's exactly what I did when I performed it live last year), familiarity will make it really shine.

I'm still planning the Project Board, however the corkboard in the size I want is over $45. This is a significant amount of money considering we lived on $50 total (for gas, groceries, meds, etc) for the entire past two months. For now, I'm testing out smaller-scale versions in journals with post-it notes and colourful pens. I have also made a schedule for the videos I want to create in 2026. I have written down dates to start memorising, filming, editing, AND uploading (not just an 'upload' date). Hopefully having multiple milestone deadlines will help the ADHD spend some sustained amount of time on it rather than trying to cram the ENTIRE thing into two days and then inevitably getting angry when it's decidedly sub-par. (That being said, I have put myself in a position where that's exactly what I'm doing for my next YouTube post.)

 

Kyrie: This is actually the area where I've made the most progress. That one-sentence-minimum has been MAGIC for this thing. I finished the 'date' scene that I'd been stuck on for two years, and the next day I did over half of the following scene. I have, like, actual momentum for the first time since I did the first rewrite in 2022.

 

The WIP pile is still much larger than I had hoped it would be at this point. I only just finished the Christmas gifts at the beginning of February. The sewing projects are on an indefinite hiatus again as my sewing machine has broken in a way that renders it completely useless. It will cost over $120 just to diagnose the issue. So it's on ice until money grows on trees.

Sleep: I spent January marking down, with colour-coded pens, what time I 'go to bed' (with my pile of music and books and other assorted crap) and what time I actually turn off the light and go to sleep. The 'go to bed' time hovers anywhere from 12:15 to 1:30. The 'go to actual sleep' time is consistently after 2:45am. I think it's been before 2:45 ONE time in the entire month of January. I was very close to despairing over this goal. I honestly didn't think it's attainable in any universe, and it's been made very clear to me that the goal is not just 'better/less bad,' the goal is ABSOLUTE PERFECTION. I don't even know where or how to start with this.
In February, my goal was to at least brush my teeth before 1:30am. Brushing my teeth seems to be the sticking point that prevents my brain's programming from jumping to the 'initiate actually going to bed' sequence. It actually sort of worked, I managed the goal 2-3 times most weeks, and probably 2-3 times outside of that I was less than half an hour late. This is progress. For March, I want to walk back the time to 1:00am, and I'm much more worried about that.

Community: can't invite people over if we don't have money for ingredients to feed them... I'm perfectly okay living on soup and sandwiches for weeks on end, however I feel that guests should get something with a little more thought put into it. Since our financial situation had us living on rice and whatever was in the freezer, we have not invited any guests over other than my sister.

That being said, I did make some connections at the local church (yes, I'm going to church even after everything that's happened over the past decade or so), and will be attending a Bible study on Tuesday and see how that goes.

Something I've been trying is picking one major month-long project to focus on, with two other main projects to touch on daily. January's project was the Nachmo alphabet project (with the secondary ones being Kyrie and one of the crochet WIPs). For February I chose to focus on a writing opportunity with an early March deadline as my major project for the month, with Kyrie as a co-focus (I work on both during my writing session). The secondary projects are usually dance/choreography related, and so far the third has been continued work on the WIP pile.
The project for March is kind of two-fold: the writing opportunity will be the main one until the deadline at the beginning of next week, and I might shift to a dance-related primary goal after that.

Grief, Ten Years Later

The Year From Hell (2015, for any new readers) is now ten full years ago.

 

In retrospect, this was probably the time when we should have started to suspect my brain wasn't quite up to par. I was sending college update emails trying, trying, trying yet again to explain the depths of the pain I was in. I was writing five and six thousand word emails to everyone back home, trying to make sense of everything that was happening to me. And to be fair, it was a lot. How many other 21-year-olds are mourning three deaths in two months, two family-destroying divorces, and a late-stage aggressive cancer diagnosis (for one of the very few not-dramatic members of the family) while also trying to graduate from an extremely demanding program from a very tough college?

 

By all rights I should have been making friends and going on dates to find the guy to build a family with and starting a career. Instead I was losing friends, losing family and watching money divide what little family survived all the deaths.

 

I was such a baby adult, and instead of getting 'real life' drip-fed to me over the course of 30-40 years like everyone else does, I got a full lifetime (maybe more) of pain and betrayal in one three-month wallop. And I could not understand how everybody thought I should just pop right back up and continue on with life as if nothing at all happened. I still sometimes think if none of those things had happened and the only bad thing that happened to me in 2015 was some kind of romantic break-up, I would have gotten ten times the love and concern from home compared to the amount of love and concern I did get during the Angel Of Death rampage that actually happened.

As the anger from the readers back home mounted about my (rightful?) despair, my emails grew longer and longer as I tried to make them see just how bad things really were. But of course they never saw. I was still in that naive autistic phase of 'if I just explain better/more then they'll understand.' I know now that some people have absolutely zero intention of understanding and that explanation in general is essentially worthless. That's a big part of why I don't really talk to people at all anymore. I'm so completely done with the wilful misunderstanding.

 

I can't even tell you how many times people just sent a terse email saying 'you need counselling,' only for me to fire back that I was, in fact, in counselling twice a week. Two hours a week was not even close to enough time to process everything. I would sit in the counsellor's office, talking non-stop for the full hour (and sometimes a little bit longer if his next person wasn't there yet), and leave without any appreciable difference in my soul other than the tiniest modicum of relief that I didn't get scolded for simply acknowledging all the bad things that were happening to me, in real life, in real time.

 

If I wasn't neurodivergent, would my grief have been smaller, easier to manage? Would it have been easier for all the email recipients back home to relate to me and show a little kindness? Would the pain have gone away at some point instead of still lingering in the shadows even today? Would the angry replies from back home have added less hurt to the already-insurmountable mountain range of pain? Would I have a slight hope of ever being happy again... without looking over my shoulder, still fully expecting to see the Angel Of Death leering over me, scythe raised?

I dreamed last night about a child drowning and I woke up crying, with the ever-familiar ache of loss in my chest. I didn't actually know or recognise this child, but in the dream, in the story my brain spun, it was my brother. He didn't look like either of my real-life brothers, but when he died the pain was the same.

 

Ten full years and I still dream of death when I sleep.