Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet

by Alice Robb

My feed consisted of only a few types of content: skillets of hearty pasta and aspirational loaves of bread from the New York Times Cooking account; flowers hand-painted on fancy hotel walls, from a childhood friend

Relatable

I didn’t care if dancers were obedient animals or ethereal fairies or powerful athletes: whatever they were, I wanted to be one,

my shelves were lined with ballet-themed picture books—Angelina Ballerina,

Oh my goodness! This is so me. I even had Angelina Ballerina too.

I loved that when I entered the studio, I didn’t have to worry about saying the right thing; I didn’t have to talk at all.

I idolized the older girls around me, and the women in the company were like gods.

Anyone who entered my bedroom at home would be confronted by a veritable shrine to ballet.

This reminds me of Angelina Ballerina's bedroom.

By excavating the psyche of a dancer, we can understand the contradictions and challenges of being a woman today.

My favorite part of the night was just before I went on: I would huddle with my friends in the wings, giddy with the anticipation of going onstage and the thrill of sharing the space with real company dancers.

he never got angry if a dancer fell down; it proved that she was taking risks. The only crime was to be boring.

He worked with the confidence of someone who had no fear of running out of ideas.

ballet was a refuge from the mayhem around her.

(“I think the most important part of ballet class is when the teacher corrects me”),

I loved how, at ballet, my anxiety-prone brain would shut down

In the studio, her shyness didn’t matter; she didn’t have to talk.

directors have been reluctant to cast dancers who stand out, whether in body type, height, or skin color.

“I couldn’t give up . . . If I had to work ten times harder than everyone else, then I would.”

The beauty and romanticism of ballet—and

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—the consequence of looking too long into the “yawning abyss” of possibilities.

“We are surrounded by so much stuff . . . that often it can be hard to root out what you really want or think or even know.”