Being a performer, being me, and looking forward.

I’ve spent the day with a best friend of mine. We met through dancing classes about 15 years ago and our friendship has grown alongside our love of dance. 

We took class together at a London studio this afternoon and then watched an incredible peformance of Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man. (Seriously, it blew me away… GO WATCH IT!) okay, now I’m sidetracked… Where was I?

Right. Dancing. Lots and lots of dancing. So today was awesome. And watching shows always fills me with new inspiration and acts as a reminder of how much I utterly adore what I do. Being a performer is precious, and maybe that’s why lots of people are kinda clueless about it! 

As I’m typing this I feel full of positivity and my mind is thinking over plans of how I can work on myself over summer. I want this to be the summer for which I have no regrets. A summer where I enjoy myself and keep pushing to improve. I want to be stronger, fitter and better when this holiday is over. 

Does stronger mean sicker? No. Does fitter mean more tired from calorie restriction? No. Does better mean better at having OCD or an Eating disorder? No. 

Basically what I’m saying is that being me doesn’t have to mean being ill. I can be a person without all of that. I’m not entirely sure who that person is yet, but I know a few things about her:

The normal part of me likes clothing with animals on, likes playing with my hair, loves animals. The normal me likes chocolate. The normal me loves to read. 

That’s all for now. I am too lazy to proof read this, so enjoy the typos I inevitably made! 😂 xx

Passion.

Today began ordinarily: I woke up feeling tired, trudged to college, dragged myself through warm up. And then my day just kept getting better.
My whole day I had good classes and just felt inspired in each one of them. The day flew by because I felt so lucky to be spending my day loving what I’m doing.
If you’re reading, do something you enjoy today 🙂 it made the depression voices leave me be for a while.

The waiting isn’t over.

If I were to give anybody one piece of advice about applying to performing arts colleges, it would be this:

expect to wait forever until you know where you are going to go.

It is scary, There is so much competition, so little funding, and so much waiting. You apply, you wait for an audition, you audition, you wait for a reply, you wait for all your replies, you look for funding, you wait some more, and then eventually the wait is over.

Sadly, I’m not there just yet.

I have done all my auditions except one now and have 2 offers so far. So, I’m either staying where I’m currently doing a foundation year or going to the college I’ve yet to audition at. If it’s the latter, then I can get a student loan and it’s happy days. If I’m staying here then I can’t get one… (hello writing funding letters to charities and scholarship schemes..)

It’s confusing, because I want to be over the moon about the option of staying here, but that isn’t certain yet. I know I am going to continue my training which is obviously the most important thing, but not knowing where is pretty unsettling. Months of uncertainty has been stressful and so the day I know which college I’m going to can’t come soon enough!!

That’s that little vent over.

Everything else has been trudging along as normal. My ed is no more or less strong than it always has been, I still have regular moments of intense emotion (be it anger, desperation, panic) as a result of ed stress, and I still have panic attacks. As it isn’t any different to what is “normal” for me I don’t resent it at the moment. It is what it is.

I’m starting to realise that nothing else in my life can make me happy in a way that will make me problems disappear. They are deeply ingrained thoughts and behviours and so the only thing that will change them is outside help and an inner commitment to do so. I haven’t made that commitment to myself yet. I am always learning more about myself and making different decision as a result, but those decisions are a balance of good and bad so I end up in a similar state of mind all the time. One day I imagine myself being recovered, but I believe I will make that decision when I am supposed to which apparently isn’t right now.

I am on my way (in a very slow and roundabout fashion) and that is good enough for me. Doing some good things is better than doing no good things at all.

Random post inspired by a friend making a list.

A friend of mine has a list of 10 things she wants to have done in her lifetime, and so, as a more positive post I am going to post mine on here! (They aren’t in any particular order)

1. To complete professional dance and performance course (part way there already 😉 )
2. To have a successful performing career
3. To be a dance teacher when retiring from the one above, and do this back in my home town
4. To go to America, Italy and India. (I have just always wanted to go to those places for some reason!)
5. To be able to get through the day without food, body and weight thoughts being dominant
6. To be comfortable in my own body
7. Learn Italian
8. To make the effort to hold on to my closest friends
9. Watch my favourite ballet live (Elite Syncopations, choreographed by Kenneth Macmillan)
10. To have my own choreography performed on stage

Tomorrow is a scary day.

Tomorrow I have an assessment. I might get offered CBT. I have waited 3 months for this appointment. Why does a bit of me not want to go?

Sometimes I can imagine how awesome it would be to eat a proper diet, eat with others, enjoy food, stop suffering from anxiety and depression… but in my mental images of all of these, I am thin. 

Someone who I follow posted a link to “what a ballerina eats” and as a training dancer I was relieved and overjoyed to see that maintaining low body weight AND  good muscle mass is possible while actually eating properly! But of course, my body would take a while to get used to a maintenance amount. I am scared,,, very, very scared.

In my ideal of the upcoming months of my life, this is what would happen:
-I reach a weight that balances my wish to be small, but one that does not make my ed freak out
-I become more relaxed- both generally and around food
-I continue my training
-I go though with the CBT and the ed support group

I just don’t know if the above is possible. If it isn’t, then I don’t want to get better. I can’t be big, but I also can’t spend the rest of my life like this. As much as I find it nearly impossible to not associate my identity with my eating disorder, I do want to be able to do some of the things that I can’t do now… 

I wonder which way I will go…

I’m scared about calories :S

Before I went through a binge/ starve or purge phase, I lost lots of weight by eating way more than a lot of anorexics. I became underweight & lost my periods even when I was eating between 1200 and 1500 calories a day. I suppose that has something to do with exercise (dance training is pretty active 😉 )

Now though, I know I am back  in a restrictive phase (good bye bulimia for now!!) and I can logically tell that I am losing weight. However, I am scared that I won’t be able to lose on  the same calories anymore?!

I know that amount of food does not sound anorexic, but when you exercise for about the same number of hours as the average person sleeps in a day, then the level of restriction compared to activity is pretty high!

So yeh. Scared. What am I going to do……