I once had a near-meltdown because my favorite coffee mug was broken. Worse, it was broken outside of my range of control by someone else. I haven’t had enough therapy in my life to quite unpack why this event was so triggering for me. But I do think that in some way this desire to control my life, and every aspect in it, is connected to why ballet training was so compelling to me for so many years: It allowed me to believe that I was in total control. Not just of my own body and its output, the technical and aesthetic standards for which were exceedingly clear. But of my life.
When I was training to be a professional ballet dancer, I believed that a certain level of achievement in ballet would lead to placement in the ballet company that reflected precisely that level of achievement. In my world, New York City Ballet was at the pinnacle of success – that no higher goal could be dreamed of or achieved. Just slightly below that was American Ballet Theatre. American Ballet Theatre II or the Joffrey Ballet. Then Pennsylvania and Boston Ballet (in part because they could accommodate neoclassical ballet training). My worldview was narrow and East-Coast centric since that was the world I knew.
There was no room for a life outside of this tier system. Quitting ballet meant excommunication from the entire meritocracy as I saw it. It meant not only inability to fit in but a kind of failure. A deep failure rooted in my demonstrated inability to adequately manage and supervise my own life. It was a failure of character, and as such a moral failure. Truly, how could I be expected to go on after failing in this way?
After my injury and emotional breakdown that resulted in my quitting ballet, upon realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to succeed at any acceptable ballet company (one of the best according to my own ranking system), I switched to another tier system for external achievement. My ego was saved, and my sense that no acceptable life could exist for me outside of some external stamp of approval and success, by my acceptance to Columbia University for college.
Ah – what a relief it was to find myself back in a tier system that showed that I was NOT a failure, HAD achieved success, WAS worthy of approval and esteem! I believed that Columbia was the Joffrey of the Ivy League tier system, with Harvard the New York City Ballet and Yale the American Ballet Theatre. (Princeton was too preppy for me to take seriously at that time due to other biases that I grew up with.)
Looking back on this now, I think my clinging to these sorts of external markers of approval was an indicator not of any true moral character but instead a symptom of anxiety, fear, and a sort of spiritual immaturity that it has taken many years for me to grow out of. It was also, perhaps, rooted in the feeling of lack of control and norms for “make it or break it” that New York City instills in you. In my favorite D.H. Lawrence story, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a young boy’s house whispers, “There must be more money. There must be more money.” New York City, similarly, whispered to me, “You must be successful. You must be successful.” Indeed, the feeling was that without enough success (and money) you couldn’t even obtain a reasonably safe apartment in which to live. Worse, you wouldn’t fit within the city’s social caste system and might as well go live in New Jersey.
So, what’s the difference now other than somehow making peace with my B or B+ life in terms of external markers of success? I wish I could say that I have entirely overcome this idea of rating myself, rating my life, by external markers. When I try to explain to people (especially from New York) that part of my newfound stillness of spirit, less anxiety and fear of homelessness, and less self-flagellation, is due to an embracing of NOT being special or exceptional all they can hear is that I’ve given up and settled in some negative way. What are the words for settling in a good way – of taking oneself out of not just a race but of all competitive races? Perhaps it’s something like The Middle Way of Buddhism. “Middle” sounds like “middling,” though, and mediocre. Words I grew up trained to abhor.
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