In all the books I read about ballet, books that specifically
reinforce the fact that ballet cannot be learned from a book— not just the
technique, but maybe even more importantly, the etiquette— I always hear that
when it comes to a ballet mistress, cruelty is a specific quality found in a
good teacher. And I kind of thought that was a joke. Or I thought that because
I am an adult, no one ever in the world would take my ballet education
seriously enough to be cruel. But I guess I should step back a minute. Far
back.
Since the fifth grade patrol picnic, when I figured I could lead a
group of girls through the swamp, strategically knowing the places we could
step to keep out of the muck (because I was raised on a swamp and explored
them with my brother, because I was a Girl Scout, because I was tough, because
I devoured Nancy Drew books, because I was a wild thing, because), I have
had to learn how to fail, always alone, and always publicly. Because I didn't
know the steps, I fell chest high in the swamp, ruining my
white Levis cutoffs and Atlanta Braves t-shirt. No one followed
me, and there were no paper towels at the picnic, just toilet paper and napkins
(you can imagine how wonderfully I cleaned up). No one sat with me on the bus
back, and when I told my fifth grade teacher what happened when we got back to
the school (because of course he didn't go), he laughed and called me Swamp
Thing, which stuck for a few weeks, until it just didn't anymore.
The thing is, I have yet to find the one thing I am naturally good
at. You know, the God-given gift. I’ve looked for it for forever, thrown
myself, whole-heartedly, into lots of things. And so far, my excitement and
tenacity, my absolute desire and hard work, greatly outweigh my ability, until
I can give enough time and attention to overcome the deficit.
And because my desire outweighs my ability, I have a difficult
time seeing outside of myself when it comes to my desires, which used to lead
to big-time embarrassment, when I was a kid, but now I think it has made me
polarizing. This translates to the fact that I do something
truly ridiculous at least once a year, and my sarcasm, my ability to brush
off and keep moving, has always pushed me through (even when I fall from my
stilettos while reading Orwell out loud, in front of a class of 30 freshman,
and say oh noooo! in a Smurf voice, as I hit the ground, and
walk around for a week with a limp and a bruise that stretched from hip to
knee, I'm good). But that behavior doesn’t seem so excusable anymore.
And in a ballet class, especially since I've begun the
intermediate class (dancing with women who have danced since they were small)
after my own short, eleven month stint of dancing, there are a lot of standards
that are not familiar to me. My ability to very publicly fail has served
me well in my study of ballet, if only because after profound ridicule, the
kind that separates me from the everyone else, I take it in. I consider my own
faults that led to it, and I try, two-three hours everyday until the next
class, to make up for my deficiencies. But that takes time.
For the last three years, whenever I fail at something— it could
be making friends, publishing a story, getting a job, learning something new— Tim
tells me that Michael Jordan didn't make his high school basketball team. And
for some reason, that fact always makes me feel better. Every time, and for
anything. Even right now, it makes me feel like failure, and standing alone, is
pretty okay. When I was a kid, and the same kind of things would happen—I had a
hard time making friends, I didn’t get picked for a competition team—my dad
would tell me it’d be okay when I was older, because as long as I found one
good person in the world who I could be friends with, then nothing else matters
as much after that. And that kind of makes me want to cry because it is one of
those things I always believed, and it turned out to be true.
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