Dancing Through Life

pas·sion

 [pash-uhn]  strong and barely controllable emotion.

What is my passion?  This question has been haunting me for the past week, and it's really hard for me to come up with the answer.  I can always come up with many things that I enjoy doing, but for some reason, I struggle with pinpointing the one about which I am passionate.  The one I love to do the most.  

There's a saying that if you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life.  In thinking of what I want to do with my life, this saying plays on repeat in my head.  How do I choose something I love?  What do I love?  If I choose to do that for a living, will I still love it?  I mean, I don't want to end up resenting something that I once loved.

I started taking dance classes at the age of three.  About two years later, I quit dance to take gymnastics.  Then when I was eight years old, I went to a week long day camp where I took a simplified dance class.  And I fell in love.  I started dance again that fall and continued until this May.  Even now, I would give anything to be in a studio again.

For the longest time, I thought this was my passion.  I loved it with every fiber of my being, but after awhile I got burnt out on dancing.  I hated it for the better part of a year.  And it was scary.  For about five years, I was convinced that I would dance on Broadway or backup for Britney Spears while I was still young and then own a studio and help other young girls find themselves in the music and movement.  And then one day, I just couldn't stand it anymore.  And I'm afraid that if I pursue this as a career, it will happen again.  That's something that I really just couldn't stand to happen again.

Still, it is a passion of mine.  It is a driving force.  When I'm dancing in a studio, it's just me, the floor, the music, and the mirror.  The rest of the world fades away, and I'm left to dance out my anger, my fear, my joy, my sorrow, my ecstasy.  I've yet to find something so cleansing, so freeing.  When I'm dancing on a stage underneath the lights, I'm in a sanctuary.  Nothing can harm me there because I have a show to perform and an audience to experience it.  It's the one place where I feel completely at home, and even if I mess up, it's okay because I'm still bringing magic to the audience; they're still entranced by the story being portrayed.  

Looking back on that year of dance-spite, I think that maybe my problem was that I honestly didn't know why I danced.  But now I know.  I dance because it's the closest to magic I've ever gotten.  The sounds of taps striking the floor, the cutesy sass of musical theatre, the indescribable elegance of a jete en pointe, the attitude of hip hop, all of it, every minute aspect is magic to me.  The ability to relay an entire story with nothing more than movement to express emotions that words and voices can't seem to support is pure magic - straight fairy dust.

It never ceases to amaze me how intense and powerful it can be.  Even without music, the choreography would still be there, creating and flowing and living for a few fleeting moments.  And honestly, that's the most important reason of all.  In the end, I dance to create, to share magic, to love, to breathe, to believe.  I dance to live.