Hello newsletter friends,
I’ve got a whopper planned for next week – either called Forever Alone or Table for One, I haven’t decided yet. Suggestions welcome. Sound off in the comments, as the influencers say. So in the interests of maintaining a somewhat loyal readership, and to avoid turning this into a documentation of my slow fall into the depression abyss, this week I’m doing some light relief. Or as light as I can manage, anyway.
On Tuesday night I decided to go to a ballet class.
There were a couple of reasons for this. The most prominent, though I hate to admit it, was that I watched Save the Last Dance at the weekend and the montage where Julia Stiles decides she needs to get back into shape before her Julliard audition made ballet class look relaxing. The main problem with this parallel was that Julia Stiles’ character had about eighteen years of ballet training under her belt, so all she really needed to get back into shape were her feet (insert stereotypical shot of bleeding ballet dancer’s toes here), not her entire body, at the tender age of 29, in my case. The other reason was because when I used to dance (badly) at university, it was the first time I had ever done any activity where my mind went completely blank, consumed only by learning the steps and trying not to hit anyone in the face while doing it. So 7pm on Tuesday found me in a ballet studio inside a church in the East Village, wearing socks with seahorses on and leggings from H&M among a sea of ballet skirts and leotards. It did say those were optional. I checked the website several times.
A couple of things were poorly advertised about this class. First, that it was an adult ballet class. And yes, okay, there weren’t any infants running around. But when I read ‘adult’ I pictured a couple of twenty-somethings like me, and then a bunch of middle aged paunchy women who had seen Black Swan too many times and who couldn’t touch their toes. Not so. Adult, in this setting, apparently meant ‘22 and narrowly rejected from the Bolshoi Ballet due to a technicality’. Strike one.
Strike two was that it was advertised as a beginner’s class. That it was specifically designed for people who had never set foot in a ballet studio before. Cute. If I hadn’t, in fact, seen Black Swan too many times, I really would have just been standing completely still for an hour and fifteen minutes with no idea what was going on, but as it was I managed to pick out a couple of the barrage of French words the teacher was yelling at us and perform an approximation of what everyone else was doing. The teacher came over at one point to correct… I don’t even know what, I don’t think she knew where to start – and followed it, kindly, with: You’re doing really well for your first class. Which I imagine was intended as a compliment, as long as I forgot the part of the compliment where it was THAT obvious it was my first ballet class. I knew what a pas de bourée was! Did I get no credit for that at all?
I can only describe it using the way Hanya Yanagihara describes self-harm in A Little Life (surprised that’s my favourite book? Thought not) – a clean pain. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call subjecting myself to a ballet class ‘self-harm’, there are undeniably some parallels. Perhaps most notably that this was an embarrassment I had chosen, that I had brought on myself. That I could choose to never repeat if I wanted to. That I could actually walk right out of, if I wanted to, uncaring about the watchful stares of all the Natalie Portman-ass looking girls in the room. It was self-inflicted, and it was within my control. It wasn’t something that was just happening to me, tidal wave upon tidal wave of crap washing over me while I looked around and tried to work out how I had ended up here. And it was also an embarrassment that, internally, was entirely without shame. I wasn’t supposed to be good at this, because I was a nearly 30 year old woman trying to perform an arm movement that takes approximately seventeen years to master, in an art form whose knowledge of which I had formed solely from years of teen movies that portrayed it completely unrealistically. And that’s what made it so different to the other pain and shame and embarrassment swirling around at the moment. Because I am supposed to be good at those things. I’m supposed to be good at having my life together, and picking myself off the floor when I’m down, and holding a conversation and smiling at the right times and not drifting into reveries in the middle of a sentence. But ballet? Well, I never claimed to be good at that.
It was the first time I had felt like myself in weeks. Because I wasn’t good at ballet before, and I’m certainly not good at ballet now. So not everything has changed.
Hmm, that didn’t turn out so upbeat after all. I think what actually happened there was I compared ballet to self-harm. Interesting.
One good thing:
I was listening to BBC Radio Six this morning and they were having a disco/funk/something hour, and at the end of one of the songs, as they played out, the singer introduced his band one by one, and then told us their star sign:
On the drums… brother Leon Williams…
…
…
Aquarius!
They were also nearly all Aquarius(es) which is funny because I always thought that was a made up star sign.
One bad thing:
During my ~soul searching~ about whether or not I do want children, or how you know if you’ve changed your mind about wanting children, or if it’s even possible to change your mind about wanting children, blah blah BLAH (and more on that in a future newsletter), I managed to accidentally consent to popup alerts from a website called netmums.com. So now, in the middle of the workday, a threatening window will drop down from the top right corner of the screen, proclaiming things like: ‘My nipples were BLEEDING! : why no-one believes a breastfeeding mother’. Since I have no idea how to unsubscribe from these horrifying news bites, I guess I’m going to have to get a new laptop. Or spend every day being reminded of my failure to be interested in doing something that will make my nipples bleed.
One last thing:
See what I did there? Heh. Quick favour – if you’re enjoying my cOnTeNt, could you send this newsletter to a pal you think might like it? Trying to inflate those subscriber numbers, baby.