I’ve been struggling for days now to come to some sort of enlightened conclusion about the ‘reason’ for the shin splints which I’ve been suffering from. Judging by my substitution of factual Twitter updates for a more in-depth blog, it’s clear I’ve failed in this endeavor.
My legs started paining me last Friday during training, but it didn’t occur to me until Saturday that the curious soreness in the fronts and sides of my calves was shin splints. Immediately and sufficiently horrified by the prospect of this condition, I bowed out of the last half of choreography practice on Saturday, took the entire day to rest Sunday, and returned, albeit lightly, Monday to dancing. Tuesday, feeling antsy from all the immobility, I attempted to (again, lightly) dance through practice. The result was a physical and emotional breakdown – in front of all my peers and two of my instructors – that I saw coming a mile away.
Shin splints are exceptionally painful and I’ve always known them as a running injury. Although I’ve been a runner myself for the better part of my life, thanks to the grace of god and pretty decent form, I’ve never suffered from them until now. After a bit of online investigation, it turns out that shin splints are common among anyone who does prolonged weight-bearing activity, such as running, power walking, and yes, sometimes dancing. Shin splints (or medial tibial stress syndrome) is also often seen in boot camps because of all the marching the soldier do, and so it stands to reason that all that heel-toe-heel-dig business we’ve been up to working on two separate Turkish folks dances from anywhere between two to four hours a day, caused my muscles to cramp like gangbusters and my legs to quit on me.
The breakdown I had was more about frustration than pain, which seems to be the common theme for breakdowns here with us. Yes, my legs were hurting, and yes, that’s probably what pushed me over the edge (that, and our instructor goading me for leaning heavily on her arms while dancing in a line), but it wasn’t the root of my agony. Between sobs and through my own palms pressed over my face, I cried that I was upset because I couldn’t do the dance because my legs were hurting, but that I didn’t want to stop because I’d fall behind and ultimately that would mean I wouldn’t get on stage in Abu Dhabi in 10 days. This, in a nutshell, is what I’ve been trying to come to terms with since that initial meltdown.
I came to this program because I’ve always wanted to be a dancer. It’s one of the many things I tried as a child and quickly quit because I wasn’t good at it. And because failure was never an option in my mind. But when I was 17 something pushed me to try again, and for the past ten years I’ve taken small steps, one after another, to dance.
At first, every single class was a battle with my own low self-esteem. Taking corrections from instructors, stumbling, falling, missing steps and getting hopelessly lost, not being any good and yet, not walking out – all of these things tested my will to dance. And yet, I persevered. I enrolled in a year-long program in Paris to learn mime … and ballet. And I made it here, to Fire of Anatolia, to a place where I’m living my dream and feeling the closest I’ve ever felt to being a real dancer.
“It’s not like you’ve been trying for 10 years to summit Everest and now you’ve failed,” my friend, Shubhangi, told me yesterday, amidst more tears on my part. “Your success as a dancer isn’t measured by getting on stage and dancing in all four numbers in Abu Dhabi. It’s how you come out of this whole thing in the end.”
And that’s what I’ve been trying to come to terms with over the past 72 hours: measuring my “success” in ways other than a tangible performance with a looming deadline. It’s not easy for me to sit back and miss an opportunity. That’s my blessing and my curse: I want to do it all, and I want to do it well. So, every day I have to watch the others dance, watch them polish their skills and get closer to that first benchmark in this fellowship, it breaks my heart and rips at my patience not to be able to be a part of that.
I remind myself that rest now means becoming a better dancer later. I repeat: “You’ll be able to catch up. If not by Abu Dhabi, then by Belgium.” I massage my shins and ice and elevate and take Ibuprofen like it’s going out of style. And I try and try and try to embrace the knowledge that life has no deadline and gives no exams. That being here and doing what I’ve always wanted to do is already success, and doing it with such love and passion that it makes me this upset is also worth something quite big. There’s something to be learned from every setback, and if, for no other reason than to embrace the ideals the wonderful Dekeyser & Friends Foundation has put forth, I will try in earnest to find this particular lesson.
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