Dance Monkey: A Song Too Close To Home
An upbeat song most people bop along to, just makes me sad
Dance for me, dance for me, dance for me, oh, oh, oh
I’ve never seen anybody do the things you do before
They say move for me, move for me, move for me, ay, ay, ay
And when you’re done I’ll make you do it all again
It’s funny, I never used to write about my time in ballet. It was 20 years of my life… more than 75% of the years I’ve spent on this planet (I think, I don’t math well, that could be totally off), and considering most of what I write is personal narratives, I was often asked why I left it out.
Because it’s a part of my life that I’d rather forget happened at all.
When I started writing about it, it became at least a piece of nearly everything I wrote. Bits and pieces of the life I’d loathed bled into every story I told. When you open a can of worms… there is no closing it.
The can was open, the worms were everywhere.
I’ve told the story in parts. It became blurbs I’d pass over in other stories, a reference within stories that existed during that time period, pictures I painted without truly showing the whole truth. Now, I think, it’s time to tell it all. There’s an entire story behind that story. I’ve eluded to it all before… mentioned in passing the things you’re about to read… but what is writing if not to sit at a keyboard and bleed?
For two decades, ages two to 22, I was nothing more than someone else’s Dance Monkey. I danced for 20 years. I hated it for 12, and it taught me to hate myself.
I broke my first bone when I was four years old.
I’d begged for pointe shoes when I was only three. It wasn’t recommended and today, it would never be allowed. But my mother insisted that they allow me to do what I wanted so I would stop whining.
As it is, when you’re a ballerina from a young age, your body doesn’t form properly. You are formed. Not by your natural growth, but by the hands of instructors that push and contort you into positions and movements that your body isn’t meant to conform to… but what doesn’t bend will inevitably break and so your body learns to bend. Dancing en pointe at the age of three is incredibly bad for your little growing feet but I just wanted to be like the big girl ballerinas I saw at the studio on their “tippy tippy toes”, as I would say.
I had a natural talent for ballet. I danced before I walked, a story my parents still tell to this day. A story I once beamed with pride over that now makes me cringe. I should have just freaking walked.
I don’t remember much of my early ballet days. Most of the stories were told to me regarding the time before I moved into a dorm at the ballet school in Manhattan (when I was seven) but I do remember that sound.
The snap of a bone below me, right before I crumpled to the floor absolutely howling from the pain. My second toe had snapped. Broken. I was taken to the doctor and it was buddy-taped to my big toe. The doctor said that I needed to stay out of dance while it healed. They didn’t give me anything for the pain. My mother took me back to class the very next day.
I didn’t understand what was happening as she spoke to my instructors, as I was told to get dressed, as my mother left the studio saying she’d pick me up later.
“This is what you wanted, so you learn now what it takes to be a ballerina. Do not even THINK about crying.”
I was four years old when I learned to smile through agony. To hold back my tears and dance anyway. It would be far from the last time I danced on broken bones but it was a lesson I was far too young to learn. But the Dance Monkey danced.
By the time I was seven years old and moved into a dorm at the prestigious dance school in New York City to live on my own, over an hour away from my parents, I’d broken four more bones and rebroken the first one twice.
Not once did I stop dancing.
Not once did I cry.
I’d learned that you can outstretch a casted arm and force your fingers into pretty positions under the weight of the casting and through the depth of the pain.
I’d started having twice a year outpatient surgeries to have my toenails removed from where they now grew INTO my toes. The price of dance. The cost of being the best.
There were doctors on site at my new school and they would medicate the pain away. Missing classes was inexcusable and injuries were no exception. If you were injured badly enough to potentially end your career, you were to show up and watch, learn the choreography, and be ready to jump right in the second you were healed enough to not cause permanent damage.
Amazingly, broken bones were rarely considered that type of injury. Dancing on them was not only possible, it was common. Things that left you sitting on the sidelines were tears and joint sprains, not broken bones. The lasting damage to your toes was simply an accepted part of the program. It’s not like it’s something that they tell you about, you just find out as it begins to happen and deal with it as necessary.
By ten years old, I HATED dancing. It was something I HAD to do. Something I was GOOD at. But I didn’t WANT to do it anymore. If I had told my father that I wanted out, he’d have pulled me from that school in a heartbeat, but I never said anything. For as long as I could remember, dancing was the only thing about me that held any worth. It was all that I was good at. It was all that mattered. So I kept my mouth shut and danced through the misery.
More bones had been broken but I’d become exceptional. I was an exceptional dancer and I was exceptional at hiding pain. I knew the taste of Oxy before my age had reached double digits and I danced in a medicine fog that made me sleepy. While I never forgot a step, I forgot the pain they caused, and that allowed my instructors to push my body further, push my body harder, and push my body into more pain that I never knew I wasn’t feeling. I was the star of every class I attended. My peers hated me.
I hated me.
Nutrition training begins at puberty. It sounds like classes where you learn about ways to keep yourself healthy but words can be deceiving.
Nutrition training is where you go to a counselor and they weigh you. They measure your bone structure and density. They measure your muscle mass and the length of your limbs against the number on the scale and make sure it stays below what they deem acceptable.
They adjust your food accordingly.
Your meals are chosen for you. While you’re allowed some preferences and allergens are eliminated, without question or complaint, you eat what you are given and you do not ask for more.
EVER.
The shame that is screamed at you if you do is a massive deterrent.
This is when your own nutrition training begins. You start measuring yourself in your dorm mirror. Not the way that they do it, but by your own means. You test the circumference of your wrist bones, compare your body to your roommates’, and curl your fingers around your collar bones and under your ribs as you jut them out to make sure they can be seen and felt.
There is no such thing as too thin.
There is no such thing as thin enough.
You learn not only to never ask for more food but to force yourself not to finish what you’re given.
Snack foods and soda are considered contraband. Empty calories going into empty shells that didn’t want it badly enough. Public shaming was punishment for discovery and rooms were checked like prison cells. I’d never even tasted soda. I’d never had a hot chocolate. I was only allowed cake on my birthday and small slices of dessert on holidays.
I was not far into my teen years when I started throwing them up. By the time I hit 15, I could make myself vomit without the use of fingers or any other help. I just needed to go into the bathroom, clench my stomach muscles, and cough.
When you associate sweets with vomit, you learn to not even want them.
I was dancing parts usually reserved for adults. I was talented and I was willing to toe the line. I never complained. I never showed pain. I never let out the screams that were building inside of me born of a life I despised.
Life.
If you could even call it that.
I was earning my own money though. I booked modeling gigs for dance uniform catalogs and was performing with the company two years before I officially joined at the age of 17. But in between, I would endure a type of hell that no one should ever know.
Assaulted. Beaten nearly to death and hospitalized for two months. Another story I’ve told repeatedly in different ways but I was originally told to never speak of it. My assault left me with six broken bones, some of which I’d actually never broken before, though by that age there weren’t a lot of them left.
I was bruised and battered and sore but the only concern seemed to be when I could return to dance. It was an unwanted interruption to my career and I needed to get back. Every single day as I healed, strapped to a hospital bed so I couldn’t move and let a broken rib puncture my lung, I was reminded that new ballerinas were coming up behind me and I couldn’t allow them to steal my spotlight.
The spotlight was the only thing that mattered.
My assault was turned into a “car accident” and I was a parrot, repeating the words I’d been given to explain every injury.
This was the steering wheel.
This was the seatbelt.
This was the airbag.
This was the shattered windshield.
Not his fists that had punched me or the wristwatch that had snagged my eyelid.
Not his feet that kicked me and left the imprint of every detail of his sneaker in an angry purple bruise on my abdomen.
Not the knife he’d grabbed from my mother’s kitchen.
Not the rape that I couldn’t remember because I was unconscious when it happened.
A car accident. That’s all it was. A really bad car accident.
More tears that I never cried, more pain that I never showed, more internal screaming that I never released. Dance, Dance Monkey, dance.
But while my days and evenings were spent practicing and performing with my plastered smile I’d been taught so well to fake, my nights became my time for acting out. For the first time in my life, I started breaking the rules.
I was not permitted to study other forms of dance or go out to clubs. But I used the money I was earning to take tap, jazz, and hip hop classes in outside studios. I went to clubs I wasn’t old enough to get into, though I didn’t dare attempt to drink.
My fake ID was only to get me through the doors, but I always donned the wristbands that said I was allowed to be there but not allowed at the bars. Alcohol was more empty calories and some rules were too deeply embedded to be broken.
I became promiscuous and would stay out until dawn with boys whose names I’d later forget. Sex meant nothing to me. It was just another way to use my body. Like ballet, it was something I learned to be good at but the emotion behind it was faked to perfection. I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. Giving power to the act gave power to what happened to me. Power I couldn’t allow it to have.
After all, it was just a car accident.
Becoming a professional member of the company at 17 was a big deal. They didn’t usually accept dancers that young but I was that good. I was already dancing with them anyway, they just made it official and I made even more money.
My usual classes continued but they were different now. Now, they were with the company and I was training to be a principal dancer, whereas before I was training to be exactly where I’d ended up.
It would only take two years before I moved from the corps to bigger roles. I went from being hated by my peers to being feared by my competitors. I was younger, better, and any choreographer’s dream. I took my corrections in stride, danced until they told me to stop, moved as they wanted me to move, used as demonstrations, and molded into shapes no human body was meant to create.
I knew there were people silently hoping I’d be injured. I didn’t care.
I was one of them.
I longed for something, anything, that wasn’t a broken bone. Something I could not dance on or through. Something that couldn’t be vanished with a pill that put me in a fog. Oxy, Vicodin, Percoset… pop and swallow. I didn’t even need water.
I never questioned what I was given. It didn’t matter. I could somehow always remember my marks, remember my steps, remember the eight counts… it was the pain I forgot.
Pain is the body’s way of telling you that something is wrong.
Unless you’re a dancer.
Pain is fuel. Feed off of it. Use it. Dance it. Let it push you. And when it can’t, pop a pill and continue as though it isn’t there.
I danced all over the country on some of the biggest stages to huge crowds.
I was the black swan and my delicate grace and fake smile were coveted by young girls wanting to grow up to be just like me.
I wanted to warn them. To scream at them to just be little girls and have a childhood. I coveted their lives more than they wanted mine.
I dressed for galas and smiled and accepted roses and praise from donors who paid for my half-life existence to continue. A smiling shell that by all accounts resembled a human but wasn’t.
It wasn’t just the pain I’d learned not to feel. I didn’t feel anything at all. I was completely numb. I twirled and floated effortlessly through my gilded cage… until, at the age of 22, I landed badly and heard that sweet delicious pop of the end of my career.
My upper meniscus cartilage torn completely out of place. Free-floating in my knee, I limped off stage and swore that I was fine, I just needed to rest. By morning it had swelled to the size of a canteloupe and I was sped off to the hospital.
I counted down from ten, drifting away into surgery to put me back together. I awoke in a fog to find my parents had come to be by my bedside. My mother cried as the doctor spoke the words I’d waited so long to hear.
It was over. I would never again have the dexterity for ballet.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, I actually felt something.
Relief.
My mother tried to fight it. She asked for a second opinion, a second surgery, physical therapy, whatever it took… and for the first time in my entire life, I said the word I’d never been allowed to speak.
NO.
The Dance Monkey was finally going to LIVE.
I said oh my God I see you walking by
Take my hands, my dear, and look me in my eyes
Just like a monkey I’ve been dancing my whole life
But you just beg to see me dance just one more time
That was incredibly powerful, and incredibly revealing. I know a little of what it is like to want to be the best, and in my case, it was Skateboarding. You look at the injuries that others get, and the fact they get up and try it again, and again, and again, and the next day, and the day after that, after they leave the hospital for stitches and broken teeth, bones, vertebrae, torn ligaments, and by god you want so desperately to be like that, not immune physically to injury but psychologically to it, because it seemed that performing in spite of the massive risks was itself glorious, and in fact often in direct correlation with the level of risk.
We measured ourselves that way. I remember coming home from the hospital after spending 4 days in hospital with yet another broken arm, cemented in with a cast that prevented me from even bending it, attached together with metal pins and rods, and the first thing I did was find my skateboard and roll along slowly to find my other skater friends and go for a roll around. My mum was mortified by it, that's for sure. In fact, the reason I finally stopped skateboarding was a combination of the realisation that I simply wasn't able to overcome my anxieties about pain that held me back from pushing to the next level, and an injury that was so impossibly painful that I didn't walk for about a week: dislocating my ankle and the foot rotating around 180 degrees off the joint.
I was well into my 20s by that time, not too much older than you were when you had your major accident. However, I had it so much easier; skateboarding was all about individualism, independence, in body and mind. The way you describe ballet dancing, it sounds like the very opposite: dancers treated like mere puppets, forced at the youngest ages into contortions that should be impossible, their young hearts and minds manipulated, and to know the taste of Oxy under the age of 10 is horrifying in its implications.
I'm so sorry about the scars both physical and mental that you must deal with every day from that time, but what a remarkable and unique perspective you seem to have obtained, and a voice to speak your truth clearly. I was hooked to the very end. Bravo!