Status Updates From What You Become in Flight

“I used to think just naming my fear was courageous. But I realized that trying to heal was even braver. It was never the feat that defined me. It was my resolve to face it that showed who I am. Phobias and their treatment are a series of building up and breaking down defenses, of trying and failing and trying again. The same could be said of love.”

“Using my voice feels like assertion, activism, consent in the stories in which I participated. Using my voice liberates me, and when there isn’t a place for the story I wanted to tell, I write it down instead.”

“The silence of victims of violence is the silence of women who have been told their stories aren’t believable. When I was nineteen, I refused my own voice, thinking it was too quiet, but as an adult, I feel fully charged.”

“Every woman who survives will have to keep surviving for the rest of her life, holding her own story so it’s not dismissed, erased, written over by someone with a louder voice. Every woman who tells her story of survival will be telling a story of victory.”

“Maybe being human means depending on someone for some form of safety, the precarious state in which we all find ourselves. It might mean there can never be such thing as safety from the very forces that threaten us, although there are so many ways we pretend we are, and so many times we put ourselves in each other’s hands and still survive.”

“Because writing gave me the voice I felt robbed of in ballet, I wrote things down as soon as they happened, no longer forced to cobble together my memories to find meaning. My voice, after all, gave me recourse. I could name the distinct power of saying ‘no.’ And ‘enough.’”

“And by now I was getting it, that the silence of victims of violence leaves too much room for the voices of others. To fill the space, I had to practice using my voice and telling the truth.”

“My life, perhaps like the lives of all or most women, has been punctuated by the violence of girl- and womanhood, which once paralyzed me into a sort of stunned silence. But knowing my silence was expected made me want to use my voice more—I’d spent so much time trying to forget the quiet, acquiescent ballerina id wanted to be.”

“Decisions I make since the shooting near my work are based on instinct, the fear of violence stored in my bones as surely as the pain in my spine. I think about the bounty of life as often as I remember its fragility. If life were not fragile, we would not protect it so.”

“Every day I am here I can reinvent my own responses to violence. I can recognize we are all beholden to fear and risk and blame, and just as beholden to the tenderness and healing we try to force so soon after tragedy. Those feelings, too, are as inevitable as nightfall.”

“Perhaps I was not the only child to see a parallel between my own beginnings and the beginnings of my culture. My genesis, like Eve’s, began with a fall. From overhead, from grace, from safety, slipping from one identity to the next, finally crashing to the ground. What splintered, of course, was more than just a spine. It was an identity. Both are salvageable, but take constant stitching to hold in place.”

“It made me wonder if the assault, not the end of my ballet career, had in fact been my first death, or whether some women can survive three or four deaths during our lives if we’re very lucky. My body became a memorial of these deaths—from ballet and from violence—long after I wanted to forget them.”

“The trauma I held was the memory of that sunny afternoon during college, and the pain I felt leaping away from that snake, with fractures in my spine, two ruptured discs leaking fluid, and a dislocated pelvis, made me feel as though, perhaps, I had died, had transcended my own body after all.”

“Writing was a way to heal how I’d failed in ballet, or where ballet had failed me, to inscribe my life with permanence when I know my body is as fleeting as dancing. Writing them down, like living them, let’s me change the focus of the story, as well as its ending.”

“Ballet taught me to confront the limitations in my body—my back’s breaking point, the height of my leg, the reality of my structure. I learned, eventually, that I must work with the body I have. Rather than focus on the physical barriers of my genes, I’d like to learn from ballet, and focus on the potential and possibility born from patience, pain, endurance, and joy.”

“All of life is seeing what is missing and using our own bodies to invent what isn’t there.”

“And I hope to pass on the knowledge that we have to mother ourselves. Women learn to perform, to edit, to minister long before they learn to love themselves. One of the hardest lessons of womanhood is to treat ourselves the way we would treat others.”

“If I have a daughter, there are lessons that I want her to learn sooner than I did. I want her to learn how to be friends with her body, how she be on the same side, how to tell it every day you love it, to thank it for what it does to move you through life.”

“It is easy to tell the stories of a life; what is difficult is telling stories of bodies: how they come together and break apart, what they house inside them, the automatic ways they know to carry out their days on earth. Bodies in this room do what seems impossible to minds: they die, they continue living.”

“It is part of the journey of dying. Death does not come all at once, and it’s difficult to spot unless we watch the rise and fall of each shallow breath, fearful it will be her last, fearful it will not.”

“And then ‘do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?’ But we don’t, not even when we sit in the room with the dead, not even when we face it, when our body faces its own mortality by waiting for the death of another. Somehow, this cognitive dissonance is a luxury that allows us all to survive.”

“I had taken the risk and taught myself something in the process about my own ability to survive, away from my mother and home and friends and job. I could build a new life and step into it, but I could also leave it behind when I outgrew it, confident that someday soon, I’d stand at my kitchen sink in a new home, waiting for the kettle to boil, and think I have everything I need right now.”

“I stretched and starved my own young body until it broke, and when it broke, I pretended it hadn’t, and only then was I rewarded. Ballet taught me that. By denying what I felt, I could reach and reach until I almost touched another person’s love.”

“Ballet class taught me the value of keeping stories secret. If we were injured, we knew to hide it. If we were hungry, we knew to ignore it. If we were not praised in rehearsal, we knew it was because there were so many of us, and there was nothing to be done except try harder, make fewer excuses, jump higher, turn faster, stretch longer.”

“When I saw the turkeys in the yard, alone or in pairs, unable or take flight, I knew I was learning something about myself from them. I was learning to be fully self-reliant at the same time that I learned to be reliant on another person. I have never liked the idea of self-reliance, but I could not find my flock so far from home.”

“That was what had made me come back home, only home wasn’t California or a person. It was a dance studio, which, like a church, looks roughly the same everywhere you go. I found myself inside.”

“Since there are layers to each story we tell, each time we tell one we decide which layers to peel away, and which to let remain closed over the tight bud inside.”

“Fear still limited the freedom of my movement, keeping me on the well-worn paths rather than letting me go wild. I wasn’t yet dancing perfectly—not with all of myself, and not as truthfully as I could have.”

“When I walked into that dance studio with a broken heart, I already knew the ways dancing couldn’t save me. I knew that I could not yet escape from my phobia, but I had already escaped from the belief patterns of my childhood. This time, escape wasn’t what I was looking for. I was looking for all the girls I’d been, and all the ways I’d outgrown them. But so many of them were still in me…”

“The version of myself that lived in a dance studio had long ago vanished, but the version I found was older and less wounded. This version could use my body to take me new places and do new things simply by leaving ballet, and all it represented, behind me.”