Groove #7: The Art of Being Found
Mood: Humbled
Tonight's Song Selection: Lemonade Mouth - Somebody
The saying goes; You don't know what you are missing until it's gone...Right?...But what if - What is missing is a part of you?
For years, I felt lost, like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean with no sign of direction. It took me years to understand how dance impacted my life. As I said in the beginning, I only started to miss and understand my need for it when I stopped dancing.
I would be the one kid who didn't want to change into my dance clothes, and half-ass the conditioning sessions. But without the structure of dancing, I fell off my rocker.
In high school, I had allowed the people around me to influence my love for dance and that's where it all went wrong in the beginning.
I didn't like competing and I still don't. With games, sports etc., I don't like competing against people in that aggressive manner. In prep school, Luna, my mother if you all remember, had removed both my sister and me from the contemporary dance troupe that we were members of, because the instructor mainly focused on competitions, and she felt it was a slightly toxic environment.
Going to high school, there was a dance team. The school mandated that students had to be in a club or society, so you can understand why the obvious choice would have been for me to join the dance team.
(Now a reminder, I left prep school as a contemporary and ballet dancer.)
Was it the right decision for me? At that moment, I would say yes. The first three years, I felt like I was improving my skills. I was a reasonably strong member of the team and because of my prior knowledge in contemporary and ballet, our instructor allowed me to train with the senior members in that art style and I was the centre in most of the junior team performances.
With all of that being said, you would believe I was totally happy. But that would not exactly be true. Because joining that team meant I then had to start competing again. I didn't hate it as much, because I had looked up to the seniors who had been the ones in charge. And especially because I trained with them, I was treated as a young sibling.
But that feeling of a family, the stage acting as our home, left when they graduated. Many of the people that made being on that team enjoyable were seniors or left the team after the seniors graduated. I stayed. By that time, I had stopped ballet because the ballet school was closed and my instructor's other location was further away than I could travel to.
So, the next school semester, I would have been an upperclassman, still on the team but without all my friends and stuck competing. I had a hundred per cent dislike for this. I had also started extra classes at another location far away from my school and dance club, so I couldn't stay behind to practice as I was accustomed to doing. I remember being yelled at for forgetting moves; for not being able to come to extra practises; and there was really no one who understood. The obvious choice to most would be to tell me to leave because I was unhappy by then right?
The evening before my final competition for my dance club, the dance moves were changed but I couldn't attend that rehearsal. I was expected to learn the moves mere hours before the performance. Jumping past the tears and yelling, I messed up on stage. From then on, I told them, I am done competing and through being yelled at by them.
Thus began my downward spiral. I avoided the dance team, the stage, even my love for music was affected. It only got worse when my beloved ballet teacher from the early years passed on. That life event set the boat sailing. It was as though someone turned off the lights. The next four years, I was lost at sea. Just existing. It took a lot of introspection to find north and to bring myself to shore. To rediscover my love for dancing and the reason I loved music.
I believe I was a few miles out from shore when I started writing my book. When I started writing, the words and the characters spoke to me. Coincidentally, my main character is someone who is fighting with their love for dance and by writing her story, I have finally found my way back to shore. The light that had been dimmed (or possibly extinguished) - for all those years - has been rekindled. I felt as though I was finally being me.
Dance had taught me how to be a storyteller and when I left it behind, I thought I lost the ability to tell stories. I now know, I don't have to dance or act in order to tell stories or let my voice be heard. I can tell stories through writing, and I can be great at doing that.
Without these experiences, I wouldn't be who I am today and I still have a lot to learn and still have a lot to tell the world.
I wrote this to say... I could have stayed my old self, believing everything would remain black and hopeless. Even when I thought the light was on and I was living in bright white and would have been happy, I wasn't. Thus, I now firmly believe in living amongst the grey areas of life. Not every bad experience leads to a bad life and not every good experience is necessarily a happy one.
We as humans have to take the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, to live a fulfilling life.
I hope you're vibing and grooving,
With all my love,
Greylan Wolf.
Tonight's Song Selection: Lemonade Mouth - Somebody
The saying goes; You don't know what you are missing until it's gone...Right?...But what if - What is missing is a part of you?
For years, I felt lost, like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean with no sign of direction. It took me years to understand how dance impacted my life. As I said in the beginning, I only started to miss and understand my need for it when I stopped dancing.
I would be the one kid who didn't want to change into my dance clothes, and half-ass the conditioning sessions. But without the structure of dancing, I fell off my rocker.
In high school, I had allowed the people around me to influence my love for dance and that's where it all went wrong in the beginning.
I didn't like competing and I still don't. With games, sports etc., I don't like competing against people in that aggressive manner. In prep school, Luna, my mother if you all remember, had removed both my sister and me from the contemporary dance troupe that we were members of, because the instructor mainly focused on competitions, and she felt it was a slightly toxic environment.
Going to high school, there was a dance team. The school mandated that students had to be in a club or society, so you can understand why the obvious choice would have been for me to join the dance team.
(Now a reminder, I left prep school as a contemporary and ballet dancer.)
Was it the right decision for me? At that moment, I would say yes. The first three years, I felt like I was improving my skills. I was a reasonably strong member of the team and because of my prior knowledge in contemporary and ballet, our instructor allowed me to train with the senior members in that art style and I was the centre in most of the junior team performances.
With all of that being said, you would believe I was totally happy. But that would not exactly be true. Because joining that team meant I then had to start competing again. I didn't hate it as much, because I had looked up to the seniors who had been the ones in charge. And especially because I trained with them, I was treated as a young sibling.
But that feeling of a family, the stage acting as our home, left when they graduated. Many of the people that made being on that team enjoyable were seniors or left the team after the seniors graduated. I stayed. By that time, I had stopped ballet because the ballet school was closed and my instructor's other location was further away than I could travel to.
So, the next school semester, I would have been an upperclassman, still on the team but without all my friends and stuck competing. I had a hundred per cent dislike for this. I had also started extra classes at another location far away from my school and dance club, so I couldn't stay behind to practice as I was accustomed to doing. I remember being yelled at for forgetting moves; for not being able to come to extra practises; and there was really no one who understood. The obvious choice to most would be to tell me to leave because I was unhappy by then right?
The evening before my final competition for my dance club, the dance moves were changed but I couldn't attend that rehearsal. I was expected to learn the moves mere hours before the performance. Jumping past the tears and yelling, I messed up on stage. From then on, I told them, I am done competing and through being yelled at by them.
Thus began my downward spiral. I avoided the dance team, the stage, even my love for music was affected. It only got worse when my beloved ballet teacher from the early years passed on. That life event set the boat sailing. It was as though someone turned off the lights. The next four years, I was lost at sea. Just existing. It took a lot of introspection to find north and to bring myself to shore. To rediscover my love for dancing and the reason I loved music.
I believe I was a few miles out from shore when I started writing my book. When I started writing, the words and the characters spoke to me. Coincidentally, my main character is someone who is fighting with their love for dance and by writing her story, I have finally found my way back to shore. The light that had been dimmed (or possibly extinguished) - for all those years - has been rekindled. I felt as though I was finally being me.
Dance had taught me how to be a storyteller and when I left it behind, I thought I lost the ability to tell stories. I now know, I don't have to dance or act in order to tell stories or let my voice be heard. I can tell stories through writing, and I can be great at doing that.
Without these experiences, I wouldn't be who I am today and I still have a lot to learn and still have a lot to tell the world.
I wrote this to say... I could have stayed my old self, believing everything would remain black and hopeless. Even when I thought the light was on and I was living in bright white and would have been happy, I wasn't. Thus, I now firmly believe in living amongst the grey areas of life. Not every bad experience leads to a bad life and not every good experience is necessarily a happy one.
We as humans have to take the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, to live a fulfilling life.
I hope you're vibing and grooving,
With all my love,
Greylan Wolf.
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