This article originally appeared in the April 2016 issue of SELF.
Thats OK, Alex.
Only point as much as you should probably.
My teacher, Setsuko, kindly let me off the hook.
But as grateful as I was for her lenience, I felt some mortification, too.
I might as well have asked myself the same question.
I started taking lessons when I was five at a dance school in New York Citys Greenwich Village.
At some point, though, that apparent confidence began, for me, to feel like a mask.
I worked harder to keep up, blood and pus seeping through the satin of my toe shoes.
But ballet also served another purpose.
It had become a distraction from the tumult of my home life.
By my early teens, my parents, whod had a protracted separation, finally divorced.
My mother took my brother and moved an hour away.
So I lived with my father, whod quit his finance job to study philosophy.
Still, it was exhausting to hold everything in balance, both in ballet and outside of it.
It seemed that they knew I shouldnt be there.
Why did I even bother coming?
One day, I just stopped.
When I told my parents, they were, to my relief, supportive.
But they seemed puzzled that Id been so unhappy dancing all those years.
I think I hid it from everyone, including my friends, to disguise a gnawing sense of failure.
Losing that illusion felt somehow darker than losing dance itself.
So I pushed my body in other ways.
Then, about a year ago, I noticed that a barre studio had opened in my neighborhood.
Curious, I signed up for a class.
I realized that I wanted the real deal.
Two weeks later, I walked into Setsukos adult-beginner class.
Dont expect too much is what I was really trying to say to herand perhaps, to myself.
Setsuko popped in a CD and the opening bars of a Brahms melody sounded.
Muscle memory pulled me through the barre exercises, from slowtenduesanddegagesto high-kickinggrand battements.
For a few surreal instants I felt like the 14-year-old version of myself.
Setsuko would gently tweak our bodies (but no dreaded stick!
), relaxing a shoulder, touching a tailbone.
When she called us dancers, we stood a little taller.
One day, a young substitute teacher led our class.
She instructed us to line up in the corner and ballet walk across the floor.
But dont imitate each other.
Do what feels right.
Show everyone who you are.
We all quickly exchanged looks of fear.
Orchestral music soared through the boom box speakers.
I opened my arms, curtsied, and quickly left the floor.
Now, I knew better, and I cared less about how I did, or looked in class.
When it was my turn again, I resolved to go for it.
I stood up, turned, gestured to the audience and curtsied again, to the other side.
What I felt wasnt the triumph of a ballerina at her curtain call, exactly.
But it was something like forgiveness.
