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Personal Essay
In Defense Of Quitters
If you hate squeezing, it’s probably good to find another way to get your juice
I quit my dance team this week, and it made me think of oranges. They say that sometimes “the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze”, and that predicament- to squeeze, or to go without- seems to be one of my least favorite to find myself in. I’ve quit a lot in my life, dance teams twice already, and when it became clear I was going for three, I was looking at myself like girl, maybe the problem is you. Well, it turns out it is about me, but the quitting isn’t the problem.
I used to have to endure. I’ve been dancing since I was about three years old and I’ve experienced a lot of what I would consider dance trauma. Little t trauma, sure, but nevertheless, some of the most impactful moments in my life, for better and for worse, have happened within the walls of a dance studio.
Take my very first ballet class. The smell of wet nylon and Aussie hairspray sting my memory to this day. Beats me why you’d ever put hairspray on a toddler anyway, but I’m sure it was part of the rules. This director was uncompromising, she insisted that no parents could come in, or even watch the class from the lobby. Inseparable from my mother, I’m sure I gave my greatest effort to resist, but somehow they got my little bum in the studio. Mid-class I must have signaled that I needed to use the bathroom, but the Mistress insisted I must wait until the end of class. Well, I was a potty-training tot, so it’s no shocker I had an accident. There on the oak floor, my brand new slippers spoiled, I stood in my wilted tutu sobbing pathetically.
This kind of superfluous dictatorship would prove to be the unfortunate dynamic in almost every dance class I stepped into throughout my childhood. The one exception was a new ballet teacher who joined our studio after his retirement from Miami City Ballet while I was in high school. He had lived his dreams, and had no reason to be jealous of us. He was truly skilled and passionate about the art, and just wanted to go on sharing it. I had a beautiful connection with him and the studio felt like a sanctuary, for once. That is until he was abruptly fired after a parent overheard he spends the occasional Friday night in drag and…
