After Eden

It is the nature of all things to ripen. Time creates the sugar that makes the apple sweet and indulgent. Decay is inevitable. Left to its vices, the apple will give in to its eroding character.

Once-sweet nectar devolves into an alcoholic venom, poisoning itself and those who eat from it.

The apple is meant to be consumed, to nourish. But if left to sit, if overexposed to light and oxygen, it will play a game of deceptive revenge as its sweetness goes unacknowledged. From its soft inner-core, the apple will begin to degrade. It won’t happen all at once. A few places here and there will begin to spoil. Maybe that’s okay? It still looks like an apple. Maybe it even still feels like an apple: crisp and firm, bound and whole. Sometimes you have to be willing to take the good with the bad. If you can find a way to cut out the bad places, maybe there’s still something left to enjoy?

Defenseless against its own defenses, the rotting apple will bite back with a putrid sweetness. It waits for you to come along so it can teach you a lesson in its uniquely vicious way. Slowly, the rot bleeds to the outside. We anticipate that the good will turn bad and foolishly hope we will catch it right at its sweetest point, before it’s too late. Once the corruption is visible and the apple is riddled with holes, only then will we know it is irredeemable. The truth is revealed, hope is abandoned, and denial is fruitless as ripeness slides across the threshold into rot.

If you doubt what you see and grasp too tightly, your fingers will pierce through once thick skin and sink into the mush. Exploring with your fingers inside the rottenness, you’ll find dark black seeds whose hard outer-shell protects them from the spoiling bacteria they swim in. What happens if you plant them? Perhaps a tree will grow nourished by the sun, water, and healthy soil. If you wait long enough and hold on to hope, you may find yourself with a sweet, freshly picked apple that’s ready to nourish you.

What is the half-life of perfection? How long does it take for something good and sweet and nourishing to steadily decay into a fraction of what it once was? What is left in its absence? Can nothing ever be enough?

***

“Are you a dancer?”

I’m never fully comfortable answering this question. “Yes” is both too limiting and an over-exaggeration I feel I have not earned. The few moments when I have chosen to answer “yes” and honestly meant it were accompanied by an overwhelming sense of pride. But the feeling never lasts as shame slides in to take its place.

“No,” however, feels like a betrayal of all the hours, effort, heartache, and joy I have poured into my craft. Saying “no” is an act of protest, but I’m not sure who it is I’m fighting. Myself or the questioner? My experiences or another’s assumptions? “No” has become my defense against the all-consuming nature of the identity, or what I presumed was my identity.

Neither answer is satisfying. Their partial truth leaves me wanting for more and feeling as though I’ve made a promise I’m bound to break. Do I owe my whole self to my passion?

Ballet presents an unending tension between the resentment I feel towards my identity as a dancer and my desire not to lose the nourishing sense of awe and wonder I experience in the art form. As an essential part of my faith, ballet makes me feel whole. I find comfort in the certainty of its rituals the same way others do with their religion. The studio is my temple. Plies are my prayers, offered daily. Passed down as a fragile oral tradition, the classical canon is my sacred scripture, telling the story of who I should be and what is possible. In this faith, there is no room for doubt. After all, I traded Jesus Christ for George Balanchine. For Balanchine, when we make the choice to dance, our souls are at stake. He swears “la danse, madame, c’est une question morale.” Our inadequacy carries the shame of sin and demands repentance. When we fail to achieve salvation in the studio and on the stage, we repent our disgraceful lack of fortitude and lapse in devotion. We are to blame for our own damnation.

When you pursue excellence in ballet, the art form is no longer something you do. Rather, the discipline dictates who you become—excellence demands devotion and sacrifice. This identity is constructed for you by dancers across generations, so I embraced all of the trappings of what I thought it meant to be an artist in this lifetime without fully knowing what it entailed. Once I decided that a dancer was who I wanted to be, every other decision seemed to be made for me.

As a young dancer, my only job was to learn how to imitate the steps I saw my instructors make. Through the looking glass, I reflected back to them their youth and talent. Without question, I walked the path of those who came before me and trusted it would get me where I wanted to be. Every action—both within the studio and without—was endowed with sacred significance and a sense of certainty that promised to bring me closer to the perfect ideal. Who decided the ideal? Just another dancer with a god-complex.

Dancers have to love what they do and find fulfillment in the work because, with the demands made by ballet, that’s all they have. As Merce Cunningham reminds us, “you have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Our world of meaning is limited to the dancing reflections hanging from the stained-glass walls of floor to ceiling mirrors, images that are often distorted by the streaks and smudges of the other dancers’ sweaty bodies. Exploring other aspects of myself signaled an impoverished innerlife. What more could I possibly want? Intensified by the constant partnership of our own reflection, no mistake or insecurity can be avoided. Like Narcissus with his devastatingly beautiful image, we forget that the art form isn’t capable of loving us in return. At least not in the way we love it. True love redeems us, but this is a judgmental love, a conditional love, a suffocating love. So, I waited at the threshold of passion and obsession because love told me everything was at stake.

I learned as a little girl that beauty was the ultimate aim. There is no beauty without sacrifice.

The art form made its demands, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to appease it. Most of the time, both ballet and myself felt impossible to please. So I gave and I gave until I felt I had nothing left to give. I felt like I had to earn the honor of being a dancer, so no amount of work was too great. I didn’t think about everything I was choosing to sacrifice in order to make the incremental progress that was getting me closer to perfection. I didn’t allow myself to believe it mattered. Nothing else could possibly matter as much as who I was on the stage. I viewed myself and my own narrow perfectibility through an artistic lens that blinded me to everything else.

Unable to recognize beauty outside of myself, this tenet became my own twisted justification.

The Voice of the tradition crept into the soft inner-workings of my mind until all that existed was a clearly defined inner Voice urging me into the person I needed to be to pursue perfection. In its grip, every other thought turned to mush. It could be my fiercest champion or my harshest critic as it sharpened my focus and demanded my sacrifices. It spread through my consciousness and touched everything that I was. A depression marks the places of pressure. After some time, there was no competition between this seemingly divine Voice and my own. I willingly welcomed it in. Solemnly bowed in its presence, I waited for it to speak to me, offer its consolation, and acknowledge my piety. In response, the Voice boomed that I was never talented enough, never turned out enough, never thin enough, never good enough, never enough.

From plies to grand jetés, young dancers are reminded of the great distance that lies between where we are and where we are working to be. That realization is both the agony and the ecstasy of the process. “Prove you aren’t expendable. Work harder!” When it comes to the pursuit of perfection, casual effort just won’t do the job! The physical challenges we face are not nearly as daunting as the mental games we have to play with ourselves to keep going. Amidst the ache of injury, physical and emotional exhaustion, I told my crying body, “It doesn’t hurt that bad. Just shake it off and run the variation again. What kind of artist am I if I can’t romanticize the pain?” Gelsey Kirkland, that graceless saint of the ballet world, did.

Because ballet is so inextricably linked to who we are, dancers learn to justify the sacrifices to prove our piety in the hope that we can remain cloistered away with our sacred community for a while longer. The practice is constructed in such a way that dancers are kept submissive and childlike. No ballet master has all the answers, but because dancers are forbidden to ask questions, the instructor’s ignorance is unimportant and remains unchallenged. I certainly wasn’t brave enough to test wits with god. It’s a cruel form of gatekeeping where the sacrificial victim tends to be your own identity and sense of self. Who are we if not dancers?

Made in their divine image, the dancers who came before us defined what it meant to be fully human. Our passion to be more than human informed every decision we made. When it came to choosing between our humanity and our artistry, the answer seemed obvious. The daily ritual of ballet technique class is a transcendent experience. You are wholly present in your body as it breathes through the motions of the repertoire while at the same time you feel detached from your physical being. No longer your own, your body becomes a tool for telling someone else’s story. Observing yourself in the mirror and ruminating in your own head, you become an omniscient third-party making endless observations and critiques.You are limitless as the energy extends long past the ends of your fingertips and down through the line of your pointe shoes. Not even gravity can pin you to the earth. In this lifetime, it’s the closest we come to encountering the divine. Dancers are playing God as we engage in our own sacred form of world-making. This ritual is demanding, but it serves as a testament to our belief that perfection is a possibility instead of some abstract ideal. We aim for perfect practice in hopes of carving ourselves into the exalted image of a ballet dancer. Only once perfection is realized will you feel like you deserve to be “a dancer.” Only then can we achieve eschaton, the revelation of perfection manifest.

In order to keep choosing the art form, I came to see the process as a necessary evil that would get me where I wanted to be. I would do anything. I was willing to trust anyone that said they could make me the dancer I desperately wanted to be.

I would trust anyone. Even a snake.

When a snake enters the garden in which you were planted, in which you were cultivated, in which you ripened, you don’t always recognize the venom at once. Whether the venom is addiction, manipulation, or violence, it’s not always possible to protect yourself, or even recognize that protection is needed and deserved. Perhaps it was my youth, my desire to prove how dedicated I was to my art, or my trust that the people in my life loved me and cared enough to know what was best for me—even better than I knew myself—that led me to accept the cruelty I received and justify it as an attempt to toughen my mind and make me a better dancer.

Desperation blurred the lines between malice and tough love.

The response that this mistreatment begged from me was an obsession with trying to do more and push myself further to prove that I was as dedicated as I thought I needed to be to merit being treated any differently, to be treated with kindness and respect, to be treated like “a dancer.” I was truly rotten with perfection.

The harder I worked, the worse the abuse got and the more saccharin I became. In retrospect, the cruelty was never about ballet, but because ballet was every ounce of my life and who I was, I thought it had everything to do with the art form and my place in it. I clung to my belief in this perverted sense of justice. If I was going through hell, it’s because hell is exactly what I deserved. I blamed myself for my broken heart. I still blame myself for the time and love lost, but unlike Giselle, I refuse to allow heartache to disrupt my peace of mind. Ballet passed its judgements, and I conceded because it was the only metric I had. I accepted this false narrative as Gospel truth. Blindly dependent on its worldview, I had no choice but to trust its standards and modes of critique however irrational they seemed. “You’re not having a good day. Don’t look at yourself in the mirror,” I would tell myself, blaming my confusion and restless unease on some meaningless physical imperfection and waging war against my body as a result. Forgive me, for I did not know what I was doing. Because ballet was the only world I knew and I was desperate to see myself achieve salvation within it, my solutions didn’t aim at changing my world and getting out of the toxic garden in which I was growing, ripening, and turning to rot. In my mind, I could tolerate whatever bad came my way as long as I still had my dancing—as long as I was still in the garden.

Justifying the unbearable with false hope, I tried to carve out spaces that I thought the rot couldn’t touch. I began to travel during the summer to receive the training I desired but was missing during the traditional school year. “Just make it through the year, and it will all be okay this summer,” I convinced myself. The new experiences I created took me to the most otherworldly places—the gilded studios of American Ballet Theatre’s 890 Broadway and backstage at Lincoln Center where I watched Apollo’s angels prepare for flight—and gave me the opportunity to explore my love for ballet under the influence of some of the most exemplary ballet legends: Julie Kent, Franco DeVita, Robert Barnett. These artists served as embodied examples that both the joy and heartache were worth something greater. I would have sold my soul to train and dance like them with their spider-thin limbs, effortlessly bent into willowing lines that branched out from their elegant bodies. They shined as they piquéd en arabesque and smoothed the transition into multiple pirouettes. The ease with which they appeared to move was a testament to their hard work, refined technique, and lifetime of secrets. Dancers are the ultimate performers. In our lives and in our art, there is no such thing as an honest performance. To expose the truth would be to distort the magic. I was taught to put on a brave face, to be seen and never heard. This is the fraud that allows me to take the seemingly impossible and make it look easy, beautiful even. Even on my bad days, my audiences are none the wiser.

While on pilgrimage, I experienced different training styles, techniques, and new repertoires in environments where the mutual passion for our craft filled every studio. The days were long and grueling, but my efforts finally felt worth it, as I had a space and time away from the toxicity of my home studio. These truly sacred spaces served as a second chance where I could continue to develop my own talent and renew my love for ballet in a place where I felt at home in my practice and my body.

Summer after summer, I stepped out of my normal life and routine. I would return to communities where my own dedication was acknowledged and shared by the other dancers in the room. As fundamentalists, we clung to our unerring truths for their sense of artistry and wonder. As bastions of the tradition, we felt a deep, aching need to force these truths onto others. We shared the understanding that ballet was perfection in progress. But still, progress never seemed good enough. No longer were we content to only encounter the Divine. Impatiently, we were working to become gods. Desperately, we labored to shape ourselves into the false idols that inhabited the stages of our dreams.

The feeling of being connected with the other dancers as we attempted to shape our minds and bodies to endure the long days of rehearsal and the tireless pursuit of bettering ourselves was something I lacked at my home studio. When I would return to my studio for the school year, I was treated like a pariah because I was completely dedicated to ballet and saw it as an end in itself—it was my religion and I was the zealot. Friendship was nearly impossible. The pressures of competition often turn dancer against dancer. Everyone watched with anticipation as they hoped to see me fail and lose my religion. Those for whom watching and waiting wasn’t enough decided to pick up sticks and poke at me to see what it would take to finally get me to bite. Surely, they seemed to think, humiliation or bodily harm would do it. Once I was back in the garden and knew the truth about its borders, night fell and I entered a long period of loneliness and deep social isolation. Once you’ve been banished, you can’t go home again.

While I had originally become rotten with perfection and in constant pursuit, when I began to reach my goals I was met with pain, resistance, and isolation. No matter what I do, it’ll never be good enough. I became rotten with imperfection, and I no longer saw any meaning in my efforts. Any value was shrouded in the mistreatment I was facing. I still loved the art form, but I began to feel as though there was no place for me in it. I didn’t want to quit, but I also didn’t know if I could continue. It was my own confused crisis of faith. The garden tried to take what I loved more than anything in the world from me. This interruption to my identity left me feeling incomplete and aimless. Things went silent. My life as a dancer was no longer about the joy that I found in the art form. Rather, the work became a constant battle of trying to prove myself. I’d lost sight of what was originally meaningful and compelling about the art form. This lapse in faith carved out a deep hole. Where there once was love and devotion, apathy and fear slid in to take their place. I was rotten to the core.

I was absorbed in the awe of classical ballet. Without words ballet is able to tell a story, take you out of this world, and create a more perfect one. For me, that dream is what made my time spent rotting in the garden worth it. It was the sense of hope that promised I could enjoy those fleeting moments of perfection—that perfection was even possible this side of eternity. Hope is the foundation of my belief in perfection. Without hope, no dancer would be able to meet the art form’s demands and tirelessly work to create and re-create themselves. In a bleeding world, an artist’s hope calls us to make a choice to be more, to be better, to be complete, to believe in the potential of our perfection, and to nurture one another’s perfectibility. However, we must not allow ourselves to become rotten with it.

I had been too busy listening to the Voice in my head. I failed to realize there would come a time when the grand curtain would fall for my final performance, I would take my final reverence, and it would be up to me to figure out who I was going to be. I didn’t want to be standing up on a dark stage with the curtain closed—clueless, aimless, and banished. An exile.

If I wanted any chance of knowing who that girl would be, I needed to silence the inner Voice and replace it with something new. In the silence, I listened and quietly heard new voices begin to whisper to me through the healing rhythms of philosophy, literature, and poetry.

“Tenderness and rot share a border…” poet Kay Ryan’s voice rings in my ear.

“It is important to stay sweet and loving.” She reminds me in her poetic truth.

Voltaire chimes in:

“One must cultivate one’s own garden,”

Satirizing the naive optimism I once knew so well.

Gwendolyn Brooks joins the chorus, reflecting on performer-turned-activist in “Paul Robeson.”

“We are each other’s harvest:” she says.

“We are each other’s business:” she instructs.

“We are each other’s magnitude and bond.” My only option was to uproot.

I should have left sooner, but it was the evil I knew and there was a strange comfort in that. Every day, I knew what demons lurked and how to confront the uncertainty and challenges presented. “What if you leave and never find anywhere else to dance?” “Who are you if not a dancer?” and “How will you ever be good enough for anything else?” were ever-present fears that leached off of my own insecurities. The questions implied cruel, unsatisfying answers. But finally after too many years, it became too difficult to make the choice to continue to show up every day. I feared that if I stayed in this liminal space of coming and going any longer I would end up hating ballet and march myself past the point of ruin. I didn’t know who would be left in its absence. Ballet is at the center of my universe. The arts are how I make sense of my soul. When I finally left, I had to regain the ability to be my own judge and figure out who I was. I needed to take Gelsey Kirkland’s advice: “study something other than ballet, and use your mind. Try to become an artist and not just a dancer. You won’t find the answers in the steps themselves.” I needed to develop my own voice and not allow it to genuflect before others.

I now choose to unearth the parts of myself I have given up in my efforts to prove myself. I know that if I am going to learn what it means to be fully human, I need to live completely. Having ballet as the only aspect of my humanity isn’t going to create true wholeness. It is simply offering me an illusion.

Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, distance from the art form has given rise to feelings of homelessness and spiritual dislocation, but the space has also provided a new perspective and sense of clarity that isn’t available when I am looking from up close. In spite of my nostalgia, I now see that distance is what I needed to arrive at the truth. My false hope was the price I had to pay for truth, and my truth bears the weight of its own heavy cross. This parting has shown me that having my identity wrapped up in one thing for so long was as punishing and limiting as it was fulfilling and meaningful. I now see that it is no longer worth it to find an answer to the question “Are you a dancer?” if being “a dancer” is the only identity that matters to me.

Abandoning my reliance on absolutes, I have begun to care more and more about my own nuance. I am learning to answer “yes, and” or the occasional “no, but” when asked to define myself, and I see how much more meaning I can create in a well-integrated life. While I work to fit the pieces of my life back together, I’m learning to embrace my honest imperfections as the promise of my redeemability instead of that which is damning me and worth hiding in shame. What’s more, I realize that if I continue to allow perfection to be defined by the boundaries of a spoiled garden, more important aspects of my character will be pruned away.

Through my wandering, I stumbled my way into new gardens with fertile soil where I came to trust that I would be able to grow and flourish. Once I replanted in spaces where I was able to be kind to myself, honor beauty outside of myself, love and be loved in return, the more I was able to develop as a human being alongside my growth as an artist. I began to explore other passions with the same intensity and dedication that ballet had ingrained in me. I took my love of the arts, creativity, and deep engagement, and I developed spaces to honor those values within my academic pursuits. My love of classical music pushed me to explore the music that supports the dance, and I began to play the piano. In an attempt to heal my relationship with ballet and myself, I became a mentor to a group of young ballerinas, and I guided them through their dance training in a way that developed a love of the art form despite its demands. I felt as though I had a responsibility to communicate the lessons I learned the hard way to keep my girls from repeating my mistakes. I tried to help them see that the daily practice of cultivating the kind of person they want to step out into the world as is every bit as artistic as crafting who they are when they grace the stage. No longer a monastic, the world is now my studio and my stage; every moment is practice for my next performance. A good, honest performance will require nothing less than being fully human. My arts training has always been life training.

More important than the experiences I had and the skills I have acquired, I have stopped underestimating my ability to wrestle with discomfort and uncertainty. The more I have thrown myself into following other pursuits, the more confident I have become with my solitude. I now know that my worth isn’t dependent on my performance in the dance studio or how well I meet other people’s expectations for me. I am beginning to recognize my worth based on the totality of who I am instead of solely basing it on one small part of myself, as I am tending a life that is vast enough to hold the complexity and contradiction of every joy and sorrow. While I still find myself chasing perfection, I realize that it won’t be achieved in any wholehearted way if I only care about finding it in one domain. Letting myself venture out of the garden to explore has been an act of reclaiming my soul–a soul I am replanting in the hope that it will sprout and, in a process of becoming, grow into something sweet that nourishes myself and those around me. In the absence of perfection, my soul is what I have left. I’ll confess that at times I still feel a bit bruised, but at my core I hold on to the belief that this seed might be enough.

Everyone finds themselves originally planted in a garden. We accept the sacred and the profane because that is what we know. It informs so much of who we are becoming, and oftentimes we believe that making the choice between staying and leaving is an act of sacrilege. It’s difficult to live the questions when the act of questioning feels like heresy. We have faith that the garden will nourish us and provide for our flourishing, but sometimes we find ourselves planted in an unholy Eden where snakes slither about and once-sweet fruit lays on the ground putrefying under the glare of a hot sun. If we allow this garden to unquestioningly make its demands based on the certainty of our faith, this bounded awareness of perfection becomes a broken promise because true flourishing is never a possibility here. We owe it to ourselves and to those around us to flourish. We deserve to flourish. So our faith must allow room for doubt because sometimes the best choice we can make is to imagine the possibility of a new garden, uproot, and replant. We must cultivate our own gardens. We are each other’s harvest. Stay sweet and loving.