On Quitting

Dance can be soooo discouraging. Edgar Degas, "Waiting," pastel on paper, 1882 Collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, jointly with the Norton Simon Museum. Photo: Getty website Sometimes, as a grown up person, I feel this incredibly strong urge just to walk away from something that I love, something I’ve put years of my time and megatons of my energy into. It isn’t the occasional reversal that makes me want to quit, or even a big conflict or blow up (rare as these are); rather, it’s when I feel as if whatever it is I am doing matters only to me. I want the things I do to have a little more reach than that, I guess. Usually, for practical reasons, I don’t get to quit whatever it is when I want to. I guess that’s a good thing, but sometimes quitting, despite its negative connotations, can produce very positive life change. I think quitting might be an undervalued impulse in our lives. This was so NOT my mom's identity! I quit ballet when I was a teenager, and it was a huge thing. I had spent the last two or three years, at least, going every day after school, and on Saturdays. For years before that, I had gone less often, but still, a lot, and this had been going on since I was six; one year, when they were restructuring the primary program at Cornish, my mother drove me out to Bellevue several afternoons a week to study with a teacher there. And she was not a stay-at-home mom – she worked 3/4 time for the school district. In addition to their time, my parents had spent unthinkable sums they could ill afford on my tuition, my shoes, my uniforms and everything else. I had mostly been friends with one or two other girls who were also ballet kids. So, it was a major, life-altering decision to quit. Looking back, though I remember the details only hazily, I think it was the first really adult decision I had to make. I had been having knee trouble, and ankle trouble, and the orthopedist who saw me was concerned that I had gone on pointe too early and damaged some of the bones in my feet. This was pretty serious, but he thought that six months of physical therapy would put it right, and there was no real imperative that I quit entirely. So why did I? That would be me, on the left. It had been building for a long time, I suppose. The year before our class had taken our first RAD exams (the levels had different names then, but I suppose this was the equivalent of today's intermediate foundation vocational grade), and I had passed, but not with any kind of distinction. I was very discouraged about that, and then when I did not get into the Junior Company but was instead chosen to dance a character role (Marya, the Snow Maiden's "mother") for The Snow Maiden, I was even more downcast. Then my best (and basically only) friend at Cornish suddenly quit, and my friend at PNB convinced me to audition for their school. I was accepted, but not into the level I was in at Cornish. Recounting this, I think – wow, I did pretty well… I got a pass, and not just a provisional pass, on an RAD exam, had a role that while not very glamorous involved a ton of acting, partner work, and lots of time on stage, and was accepted into the professional school of a major ballet company. I was fifteen, for heaven’s sake! At the time, however, these all felt like massive failures to me. I was miserable. I thought that Mrs. Barker hated me, and that every other girl in my class was better than I was.  My parents and I talked it over. I’m sure they were somewhat relieved, honestly. They were hoping I would go to college and so forth and ballet, at least the way I was going about it, is a brutal career that nobody would really wish on their daughter. My dad, however, had always been quite firm on one point: if you quit something, it is your job to explain to the people whom you are letting down why you are doing it. I did not really think Mrs. Barker would be very let down by my quitting. But still, it was really awful to go into her office that day and tell her I would not be coming back. I was so sad about it, on the one hand, and so sure that it was the right choice, on the other. Some tears were shed, and not by Mrs. B. Thirty years later, or thereabouts, do I still feel so sure? Pretty much. I loved to dance, and I was reasonably good at it, and if I had been at a different kind of dance school, and had I been a different, more imaginative kind of kid, maybe I would have found a path that continued to include ballet through the rest of high school and college. Maybe I would, like one of my classmates in college, have gone on to be a dance teacher, or to dance professionally in New York, or work as a choreographer, who knows? Instead, I discovered other things and they led me to where I am now… feeling a bit like quitting, but reminded, simply by the act of remembering the time I did quit the thing I cared about most, that failures and frustrations can look very different in the moment than they will at a distance. Holding on to one’s belief that one will get to that distant place and be able to look back and say, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad, actually,” that’s the trick. Grownups enjoying ballet for the heck of it. I am glad in a way that I quit ballet when I did. It took me years to get it out of my head that quitting the professional-preparation track I had been on meant I could not dance. In my early twenties, I took it back up for a year or two, along with modern, and it was tempting to think I could just maybe get my form back and do something with it, but I was starting my MA program and that soon drew my attention away. Picking it up again at forty seemed a little kooky, but I don’t think that if I had danced right through my teens and twenties I would be able to enjoy it as simply and as purely as I do now; there would still be the burden (self imposed) of the career expectation and the constant worry about comparing myself to others and competing for the attention of teachers. Plus, my feet would be wrecked.