After the Looking Glass, Not Through It
Lauren Shoemaker
Dr. Lothian
ENGL 985
2 November 2013
After the Looking Glass, Not Through It
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 I’ve never written about this except in journals, and I’m still not sure that divulging such personal experience is a good idea in this setting. I know that what made Bechdel’s, Hartman’s, Cvetkovich’s, and Sedgwick’s critical memoirs so accessible and likeable was how vulnerable they were willing to be. I had nodded my head in class in appreciation with everyone else, but given the same task, I don’t know how willing I am to share an experience and its repercussions that are so central to who I am for fear of how my peers will then view me. Then again, is this not exactly the fear of these authors and academics? Alison Bechdel-style (though without artwork because stick figures just don’t have the same effect) I insert some retrospective commentary throughout the narrative.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 I grew up dancing. I don’t mean that I took ballet lessons a few days a week; I mean that I spent between three and five hours at a studio every night after school and all day Saturday. My parents started me in a ballet class at four years old because I was painfully shy, and the pediatrician recommended a club or activity to build confidence. This seems incredibly ironic now, as this was the same doctor who refused to sign my waiver for a physical to get my driver’s permit twelve years later, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I loved ballet. It was my whole life, and I was good at it. I was Clara twice in The Nutcracker. I auditioned for the company that shared the space of the school and was hired as an apprentice at 15. I spent my summers at a five to eight week program in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is still one of the best schools in the country. I was on the wait list for the School of American Ballet in New York. I was a big fish in a medium-sized pond, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I would get to be a professional dancer.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 I’m not sure why I feel like I need to defend it, but ballet is good for a few things for young people. I know that I wouldn’t be nearly as organized and self-disciplined as I am without this background. I manage my time well because I’ve always had to. My parents never threatened me to keep my grades up because I had much higher standards than they did. All dancing also makes you superbly aware of your body in space, and it has made me a good restaurant server because I know what space I can squeeze through between tables, and I can carry an awkwardly balanced tray pretty far. I also think that I have a high tolerance for pain because my feet were bloody and blistered every day. (Perhaps that’s a bad example of an unhealthy ignorance of pain.) I would like to say that ballet made me a perfectionist, but it didn’t. Dancing might turn people with normal drive and motivation into perfectionists, but if you already are one, ballet will make you lose your mind. Surrounded by mirrors for the majority of the day, you’re always working to make your image match what your mind thinks should be reflected there. For the most part, adjustments are easily made and turned into muscle memory, an internal knowledge of technique and feeling.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 By now you know where this is going. Ballet can be a beautiful art and a liberating practice when you have a healthy mind. I keep trying to think back to the moment when I stopped having a healthy relationship with the barre, the mirror, and myself, but maybe I never had that to begin with. My “spot” at the barre was as secluded from others as you can get in whatever studio I was in. I didn’t like to see myself straight on; I liked the side view no matter which way I faced. I don’t think any teacher is responsible for dispensing this mantra I had, but I was a firm believer that the mirror doesn’t lie, and only you can change what you see there. Practicing steps and combinations in front of the mirror was one thing, but at some point I fixated on specific places of my body that weren’t perfect. If I put heavy things on my left foot while stretching it, could I make the arch match the right one perfectly? The right one is perfect. Sometimes I got to classes or rehearsals early just to go through this careful scrutiny and monitor progress. If I just eat the dinner mom is going to make me eat when I get home, maybe by tomorrow my thighs won’t touch anymore. I had convinced myself that all dancers did this, and if I was serious about this I had to get used to this sort of discipline.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 When I got home from Carlisle when I was sixteen, I weighed eighty-two pounds. My mom looked upset but said nothing to me. On the first day of classes back in Erie my friends and teachers tiptoed around me, but no one said a word. We were starting rehearsals for a version of Dracula choreographed by members of the Alabama Ballet, and they watched a few company classes before posting the cast list. I was a corps member, as expected, but I was not one of the apprentices chosen to understudy a lead. I was disappointed and getting more upset by the minute. I was so sick that I punished myself for this by eating nothing during school and rehearsals. Between the end-of-August heat and my self-inflicted fasting, I blacked out and woke up to half a dozen faces over me. The next day one of my favorite ballet teachers must have heard what happened and had me stay after class to talk. She said she was worried that I had taken things too far with my weight and I was sacrificing strength. Instead of seeing this as good advice to stop starving myself, I took it as a challenge to prove that I was every bit as strong as I was without gaining back a pound.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Dracula came and went, and at school all of my friends were getting their driver’s licenses while I had not even bothered to get my learner’s permit. My mom put her foot down and said I had to perform some normal rites of passage in high school since I had still not been to a football game. Pennsylvania requires a physical exam by a doctor before administering the permit test. The pediatrician who had suggested ballet in the first place refused to sign my waiver until I agreed to see a therapist and put on some weight. He wanted to see me again in three weeks. The raging tantrum I threw was much worse than the sobs from the toddler in the room next to me getting shots. I cussed at him and told him he had no idea what was normal for a dancer. I told him and my mom that I would rather never drive than give up what I had worked so hard to get. It felt like they had conspired to sabotage me. My mom made an appointment with a therapist who my doctor recommended, and so it began.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Before I even entered his office, I had decided that I didn’t like him, this wasn’t going to change my mind, and I was going to blame my mother for everything because at the time it felt like she had changed sides. She had always been my biggest cheerleader, the best stage mom in the world, and overnight she had switched to the enemy camp. At home she cooked my favorite meals to try to entice me back to eating normally, but it made me all the more upset with her. In therapy I said things like, “I don’t know. How would you feel about everyone encouraging you down a path for your entire life then getting upset when you’re just about to succeed?” I was a melodramatic teenage brat hoping he would miraculously come around to see things my way. Eating disorders are the norm among dancers! I read to him the passage from Gelsey Kirkland’s book to show him that while she was injured she only ate an apple with two tablespoons of peanut butter every day until she could dance again. Why can’t you all understand that this is normal! I should have known then that I was meant to cite literature to make an argument.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 Meanwhile, at the barre the only thing I could focus on was my appearance in the mirror. I stopped looking for technique or correct lines. I was only scrutinizing my body, looking for new imperfections to purge. I had a dream around this time that I had a knife and sliced off the top of my shoulders because I thought they were too broad. There was no blood. I just sliced while looking in a mirror, and then they were perfect. The dream was strangely comforting, yet it disturbed me just enough to tell my mom about it. I even told the therapist about it because being angry and spiteful all the time had turned out to be exhausting. I couldn’t keep being angry with people who genuinely cared about me and wanted to help. I hadn’t even heard of Lacan yet, but I knew this dream was significant, and it wasn’t an accident that I saw myself only through a mirror in it.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 One day I came to company class after a session with the therapist and I stayed after to talk to our director. I didn’t know where the words came from, but I told her that I didn’t enjoy dancing anymore. Mirrors had made me sick, I explained, and I needed to be away from them if I wanted to get better. She was very understanding, and she let me (and my mom) out of my contract that night.
¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 I kept seeing the therapist for a few more months, and my doctor finally agreed to sign my physical waiver when I was closer to a normal weight. Obviously I recovered, and I had a few teachers at school who helped me think about a backup plan since when I quit dancing it was the middle of my junior year. I hadn’t even thought about college or a career other than dancing, and all of a sudden I needed to take the SAT and do other usual college prep rituals. Without ballet I didn’t know what to do with myself outside of school. I cheered because I figured it would be easy for me, but I had a reputation of always having a deadpan face the whole time, which is not a good thing for a cheerleader. I started reading a lot more, especially because it helped me escape what felt like a lot of clueless wandering around. Even through my freshman year at Slippery Rock I was kind of lost. After taking the freshman research writing course, I changed my major to English secondary education. I’m not a creative writer, but I get research. My dad had insisted I stick with secondary education “so that I could have a job after four years.” Being kind of lost had put me on the path to the service learning course that ultimately led me here. Being kind of lost had also led me to take jobs in restaurants where everyone is a misfit of some sort.
¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 1 I enjoyed teaching middle school, but something was missing. Sometimes I thought it was dancing, and other times I thought I wanted to pursue English the way I had pursued ballet. There’s something about creating an argument and crafting support that seems a lot like an artistic variation that can be accomplished when one has mastered the technique. I’m only a novice at this technique even now. When I first got to Indiana, I hadn’t realized how much catching up I had to do to be on par with my peers. I panicked when I saw the candidacy exam lists; everyone else had been dedicating their lives to this discipline and had read a lot of it. I knew that I had to do more reading and studying than most of my cohort just to squeak by. Just watch me exercise this manic self-discipline! Are academia and ballet so different? Did I just exchange one profession of masochism for another?
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 I have a few friends that are members of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and The Pennsylvania Ballet whose pictures I “like” so often on Facebook that they’ve asked if I’d like to come backstage when I come to see a performance. I haven’t yet taken them up on this offer in part because I’m so jealous that they have not just the ideal bodies for their profession, but the ideal minds as well. They can keep it together while my mind only wants to go in extremes. I also can’t take them up on this offer because I’m afraid of my own reaction. I can’t guarantee that I won’t breakdown and start weeping. How embarrassing would that be? The first time I communicate with someone outside of social networking in ten years and I turn on the waterworks. They’ve been supportive of where I’ve been, wishing me well on applications and exams. We certainly all commiserate living on a shoestring; however, I think our worlds have to remain separate for my own well-being.
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 1 Bechdel concludes her memoir stating that her mother may have passed on to her a lack, but at least she gave her creativity, the pretend games they would play as a crippled child, a way out. My mother was able to recognize when I had become my own worst enemy, and she gave me my way out too: only enough space to let my intuition identify the real enemy. When I graduated from high school, she gave me a collection of poems she had written since I came back from Carlisle that summer. I didn’t know until then that my mother even wrote poetry. She had struggled with how to deal with me the whole time, looking everywhere for help and guidance. She saw the mirror dream as a miracle, something that intervened when she was nearly desperate. I know that academia comes with its own pressures and risk of depression, but I feel safer here. And no, I still don’t own a full-length mirror.
¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 1
¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Works Cited
¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Bechdel, Alison. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.
For someone who struggled with vulnerability and this assignment, you managed it superbly. I also spent some time anxious about some of the personal vulnerabilities that I put in my essay, but I think the point is well made that the vulnerability is what makes it so powerful… it is just so hard when we’re trying it ourselves.
I admit I’m not much familiar with dancing culture and its requirements, but you explain very well the trap of perfectionism and extreme discipline and, well, extremes and obsession. That eating disorders are normal for dancers, that a book would tout eating so little (when injured!) as a viable and natural choice… I wonder how much of what you later call your ‘inability to keep yourself together’, which you seem to refer to as weakness, is something that is just there in the culture, in the expectations a dancer must place on their body. anyone can hold up against extreme conditions for a while, how long and to what degree depends on the person… but I’m not sure if holding out longer is necessarily the best thing, or if it just means more time to be damaged before calling for help (and that kinda wasn’t about you or how your friends may or may not be coping, your friends as much as it was a reflection on some of my own self-destructive habits and tendencies. my stubbornness has occasionally worked against me).
I really see what you mean about the academic’s similarity to dance. the call for self discipline, and that that discipline can sometimes manifest in ways that seem… unnatural to me, or maybe I mean destructive (like analyzing what we read… instead of liking it. Or reading in ways that Sedgewick called paranoid, without a way out. Or the strange juxtaposition of originality and the need to work within a canon of terms and scholarly discourse.)
I don’t know if, ultimately, academia is safer or better than dance. I think there might be more ways in, and more ways out, because the mental gymnastics it has to accommodate have enough variety to be more flexible than the physical. Maybe it matters that we find a place that fits, more than intrinsic ‘better-ness’, a better fit is less likely to send us diving for the extremes? In any case, feeling safer here seems like a good thing.