I’ve been thinking alot about ballet dancers and dancers in general… Maybe its Black Swan. Maybe its the episode of House I watched where they almost had to amputate a dancers hands and feet. I never danced myself besides a few miserable ballet lessons as a child. But I understand how it feels to be a ballet dancer… And to loose your ability to dance. Because, like a dancer, I have spent many years in incredibly physically and emotionally rigorous training in my field. You completely change your body, mind, morals, limits in order to be able to withstand it. You will change anything about yourself that will stand in your way of your art. It isn’t just part of the job, it becomes who you are, how you define yourself. It doesn’t just become your whole life, it becomes who you are. You don’t have friends outside of your small little community. You don’t have other hobbies or loves or even friends. Sometimes you don’t even get married or have kids because it would fuck the image. You spent more hours than other people outside would even think it is possible to everything perfect. It isn’t even that its assumed its going to be perfect, it just is perfect or it just isn’t even going to happen. Every detail is nit picked, torn apart, and even though that is hard enough, you are your own worst critic. You eat, sleep, breath, bleed, sweat and die for this profession. Its hard for me to even put into words how much a single thing, a career, a profession, an art form, it is your everything. You life and die by it. And then its taken away. And you go through all the stages of grief, you get angry, you deny, you try to bargain but the realities is, that will never be your life again. And because it was everything, you are now nothing. I wonder if anyone who hasn’t experienced something like that, giving everything you are and know up for something and then loosing it, knows how it feels to feel like you truly are nothing without it. So you are nothing. Sure, with dancers, they could teach, choreograph, all of those things, and its the same in theatre, but… Its just not enough. It will never be the same. It scares me most of all because since I was two, well, I’ve always known I wanted to be one thing or the other. My goal was always a career, and theatre was such a perfect fit because it was the first thing I ever believed I actually had a talent in and enjoyed and could make a career in. But it was more. It was a way of defining myself. And now its lost. I physically cannot continue with the profession I want, mostly because the schooling is too physically intense for a person with severe rheumatoid arthritis. And I am stuck with… What now? Who I am now? How am I supposed to figure out what the rest of my life is without theatre? And the scarest part for me is just not knowing what to do next. I definately feel a renewed feeling that I need to focus on my own happiness, and on building a life and a sense of self outside of theatre, and maybe that will guide me into some kind of a career path. I want to be a twentysomething for a while. And I want to stop running. Even though moving to Montreal to go this great program seemed to be an amazing opportunity, I know I was just running away. I have to confront the reality that my life is not my career and it is not what is going to happen to me in the future, my life is the moments right now. I better get busy living or get busy dying.

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   It took me forever...want to say thank...follow (Idk where...

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