My Eating Disorder Story

You can read a little about my journey to body acceptance in the September issue of Dance Spirit magazine! Obviously, my recovery process was much more lengthy and complex than I could discuss in a short piece, but I hope it gives you a little insight into the dangers, pain and destructiveness of disordered eating. Pick up the issue at newsstands or read the full article online.

Life Right Now

So, here we are, two months after my last post and I can't come up with any good reason why I haven't posted. Here's my best shot:
I really want this blog to be a place where I can blog about dance and the arts, but I'm suffering from "It's All Been Done Before" syndrome. I'm struggling to believe that I have anything unique to say about the dance world at this stage in my life and career. Maybe I just need to try harder. We'll see. :)

Meanwhile I thought I'd give you a little update on my post-college life.

1. We have a car now which means I'm able to get to Rochester and Buffalo for ballet class. Currently the vehicle is out of service so it looks like this will be a week of giving myself barre and conditioning in the campus gym. I'm trying to find some open modern classes in the area as well because my rolling-around-on-the-floor skills, as always, need some fine tuning.

2. I danced in a promo for a new TV show that (hopefully) will premiere later this year. I'm looking forward to possible joining the regular cast and I'll keep you updated as I get more news!

3. I performed in my student's little studio show in June and had a wonderful time. It was fun to perform but even more rewarding to watch the dancers I coached enjoy their moment in the spotlight. I'm excited to be teaching even more in the Fall, both privately and at another studio near Rochester.

4. I've been writing, writing, writing like a maniac (everywhere but this blog, it seems) trying to keep up with my work load and my more creative projects. When it comes to writing fiction, I find I really can't take even a day or two off. Much like dancing requires physical muscle, telling stories calls for a very specific kind of mental muscle. The more frequently I exercise it, the stronger my stories.

5. Graham and I formed a Summer reading group with some friends and our meetings for tea and discussion are usually the highlight of my week. We're working our way through Crime and Punishment, which Graham (our resident Dostoevsky enthusiast) taking over the discussion those weeks. Every other week we give our minds and souls a little break to read and discuss a children's or young adult novel. It's lovely to revisit well-loved books from childhood and discover I'm not the only adult whose never quite put aside that part of my literary life. Even outside of reading group, I'm reading tons -- everything from historical fiction to modern psychological thrillers to memoir. Every now and then I post reviews on Goodreads.

There. That's what my summer looks like. I hope you're enjoying the season as much as I am.

I promise to be back with more dance writing very soon!

The Mighty Pirouette: Talking Dance With "Normies"

Attention World: These are called "pointe shoes."  

That Awkward Moment

 You're at a church social or a dinner party or a family reunion. Your second cousin three times removed or that lady with the pasta  salad or your friend's dad finds out you're a dancer. You answer the obligatory "what kind of dance?" and "what did you think of Black Swan?" questions. You try to change the subject or make your way to the fruit salad but this person just wants to talk to you about dance. 

They offer their commentary on "So You Think You Can Dance" and talk about how they took ballet when they were five and actually had a lot of talent but stopped for whatever reason. If you are talking to the creepy old man type, he'll probably make an awkward comment about dancers and flexibility and leotards. 

Your conversation partner obviously knows nothing about dance and you don't want to seem rude by correcting him or her when he or she uses phrases like "toe shoes", "spins" and "high kicks". Usually, you just smile politely and feel awkward until you get the chance to escape. 

Dance On the Radar

With the prominence of dance in pop culture lately thanks to dance based reality shows and last year's infamous Natalie Portman movie, regular people are becoming more aware of--and interested in--dance. I think this is a great thing. Ballet and modern dance especially have been on pedestals for far too long. I firmly believe that art can be valuable, ethereal and meaningful without being an out-of-reach commodity reserved for echelons of mink-wearing patrons with fat wallets.

Kate Ward's recently wrote a piece for Entertainment Weekly designed to help the average person understand what judges look for on So You Think You Can Dance. I'm less than enthusiastic about the show overall and enjoyed her subtle snark on the show--like her observations about typical, revealing SYTYCD attire*. I also liked Ward's atempt to help "normies" (non-dancers) distinguish solid technique from tricks. 

The Mighty Pirouette

A few components of this article got me thinking about how difficult it can be to explain the nuances of dance technique, dance culture and different dance styles to people totally unfamiliar with the world. Ward placed double pirouettes in the same category as back flips--"tricks." She followed up by explaining that pirouettes are "easier than they look." My first reaction was annoyance. Pirouettes are a dancer's bread and butter. Intermediate and advanced dancers should be able to land a clean double pirouette to both sides. I wouldn't classify it as a "trick" for dancers the same way a back handspring is. 

That said, pirouettes--like everything in ballet--are actually more complicated than they look. First there's the preparation. Is your weight distributed just right? Are you sitting too long in the plié--or worse, barely taking a plié at all? Now we go up to relevé. Are you pushing off of your back foot at the right moment. Hitting the passé position as quickly as possible. Is your supporting leg pulled up and turned out? Is your passé leg in the right place, high on your supporting leg, equally turned out and finished in a supporting foot? We haven't even started to turn yet, or discussed what your arms should be doing. It's one of the most difficult things to teach beginning dancers simply because of all the little components that have to be in place for your turn to work. Many of these things happen automatically after five or ten or twenty years of pirouetting, but every dancer is a work in progress. You're never finished learning how to pirouette.

Instead of being impressed by multiple pirouettes, Ward says, audiences should look for dancers who can raise their legs high over their heads. Strong extensions require solid technique and training, for sure, but plenty of poor dancers can kick their face or developpe their leg to their ear "effortlessly" and do it poorly. I guess what's getting lost here in this piece is that it's not what a dancer does but how they do it that sets them apart. That's what's difficult to explain to a non-dancer and that's what rubbed me the wrong way about the execution of this piece, as much as I appreciated the objective 

Have you ever had a frustrating dance discussion with a non-dancer? What are your thoughts on SYTYCD and dance in pop culture?

*My bitterness about barelegged flimsy top trend probably has a lot to do with the fact that I'm unbearably self-conscious about my thighs. Some of us still prefer wearing tights on stage, thanks.

Book Giveaway Winner!

Julia is the winner of the Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder book giveaway!

Julia, please contact me at graham.sarah.badger at gmail.com to so I can ship you your book. 

Thanks to all who shared this giveaway, commented and sent emails with their thoughts and stories. I really appreciate it.

Forced Creativity, part 1

A response to Reasons Why I Disklike BEDA by Kayley Hyde (owlssayhooot)

It’s become something of a tradition over the last few years for nerdfighter* bloggers  to participate in twice yearly months of daily blogging, called BEDA for Blog Every Day August and Blog Every Day April. Last year I took the solemn oath of a BEDA blogger and put fingers to keys 29 days out of the month. In 2008, I also attempted to write 50,000 words of a manuscript during National Novel Writing Month and failed spectacularly*.

Fellow nerdfighter, friend, and all-around awesome blogger/vlogger Kayley recently blogged about how she’s not sure these kinds of organized month-long attempts at scheduled creativity really do us much good as writers or readers.  In summary, Kayley concluded that BEDA and NaNoWriMo glorify quantity over quality, encourage mediocrity, and push people to create subpar blogs/stories just for the sake of making content.  My friend Hayley (YouTuber, blogger, and consumer of burritos) also posted some worthwhile thoughts on the subject that you can read here. My knee-jerk reaction was to agree wholeheartedly with Kayley’s hypothesis, but when I stopped to think about what BEDA and NaNoWriMo ask of us, I realized that we’re placing two vastly different projects into one umbrella category.

BEDA and NaNoWriMo are similar, I think, only conceptually. Writing a 200-500 word blog every day with no boundaries or rules about content is vastly different from trying to write 50,000 words worth of a novel in 30 days. Both can be good exercises, if used correctly, or complete wastes of time.

BEDA forces writers to think of a new blogging topic to cover every day.  Bloggers cheat themselves if they keep blogging about having nothing to say and, as Kayley observed, if you’re just going to cheat your way through BEDA, why bother? Free writing about having nothing to write is a fine exercise to get your fingers moving and words flowing, but it doesn’t often need to be posted on the internet. However, if you really challenge yourself to write a quality paragraph or two each day, you’ll start to find inspiration everywhere, start to see things in new ways. The ability to flex your creative mind like this is invaluable.

NaNoWriMo is a different monster. It exists to help people get ideas on paper, ideas that probably won’t ever venture further than their author’s word processor or perhaps the inbox of a trustworthy friend. I know several people who adore the NaNoWriMo process and use it as the opportunity to crank out a draft. The serious writers among them go back edit and heavily revise this draft before passing it along to a friend or writing buddy for feedback. I honestly think NaNoWriMo works for some people and not for others. If you’re the kind who needs to be motivated by a kind of game (if you write 50,000 words by the end of NaNo you “win”) or likes the challenge, awesome. But unlike BEDA, the art of novel writing requires planning, plot, character, and, story arc not to mention the ability to, like, move characters through situations and stories with strong, active sentence-level writing. The way NaNo is like, “Yeah! You can write a novel easy peasy in 30 days, even if you don’t know how to write!” is kind of silly. Some people can write strong novels in a month, I’m sure, but for most of us, our finished product is like to be a very long short story. In the case of NaNo, when you’re not actually writing material for anyone to read immediately, that’s fine. If it gets you writing, go for it. But just like you need the discipline to finish NaNoWriMo, you need the discipline to come back to your work, rewrite, and edit like crazy.

Which brings me to part 2.

*If you don’t know what a nerdfighter is, start here and here and also here.

**In my defense, I was taking 18 credit hours at school, working 30 hours per week, dancing 15 hours per week and planning a wedding. Also my story concept sucked.

Forced Creativity, part 2

This is the second part of my unnecessarily long response to Kayely’s blog post about why she dislikes projects like Blog Every Day April/August and National Novel Writing Month.  Read part 1 first.

Discipline is a more important component of creativity than most of us realize. The way I see it, people who wait until they feel inspired to create art will never reach their full potential as artists. Further, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to work professionally in a creative field if you’re used to the luxury of waiting for inspiration.

 Right now, most of my income comes from writing. Granted, it’s not the most creative kind writing, but it’s using combinations of words to communicate ideas. As I’ve been blessed to progress further in the field of freelancing, I've become a more disciplined writer by necessity. If your ability to pay rent depends on how much publishable content you can produce each week, you’re probably going to overcome that writer’s block really fast. If you have a book contract and a deadline, you don’t get to put your work on hold until you have a really good idea for that next chapter. You just have to do it. Dancerand choreographers face similar situations. You don’t get to put a show or gig on hold until you know you have the inspiration to do your best. You have to do your best possible work within the time frame you’re given. It’s not optional. It's your job.

I have never struggled much with discipline as a dancer, but writing discipline is a different story. I’ve already seen a dramatic improvement in my ability to sit down and pound out articles and stories without succumbing to Chronic Self-Editing Syndrome (CSES).

CSES  inhibits me from writing a sentence without erasing it and rewriting it with slightly different word choice a minimum of twelve times. With CSES, an hour or two of hard work will pass before I can even get a paragraph to stick to the page. It primarily strikes when I’m working on creative pieces like short stories and personal essay and makes me so sick of whatever I’m working on that I invariably give up or put the project on hold after just a few days of trying to write the same sentences over and over again.  In order to overcome CSES entirely, I’m going to take a leaf out of NaNoWriMo’s book and challenge myself to finish 25,000 words of an in-progress manuscript during the month of May.  We’ll call it Make Manuscript Progress May or MaMaProMay*.

In conclusion, BEDA and NaNoWriMo and other such projects are beneficial if you allow them to be and I really hope NaMaMaProMay helps me cultivate more discipline. Lord knows I could use it.

*How many awkward acronyms and abbreviations can I put in this post? 

Book Giveaway: Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder

I'm giving away a book! Scroll down to find out how to enter. 

While working on a story about my eating disorder journey for a dance magazine (I'll link to it here when it's published in the fall), I had the wonderful pleasure of getting some advice and tips from Johanna S. Kandel, executive director of the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness and author of Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder: Reclaim Yourself, Regain Your Health, and Recover For Good. She was gracious enough to send me a copy of her book. At this stage in my life, I am wary of reading books that discuss eating disorders because I'm worried they might trigger old habits or cause me to dwell. In fact, one of the greatest things I ever did during the midway stages of my recovery was to purge all eating disorder-related literature from my life. As I began reading, however, I quickly realized that this was not your typical eating disorder book.

Kandel, a former ballet dancer, provides positive, gentle encouragement and advice for women and men in all stages of eating disorder recovery. In my experience, most eating disorder books fall into one of two categories: memoirs of the illness (like Wasted by Marya Hornbacher) or clinical guides to recovery, usually written by people who have never had an eating disorder themselves. Kandel's book resists these categories. Instead, she infuses practical advice for recovery with recollections from her personal journey. Unlike most memoirs or personal anorexia and bulimia stories, she avoids descriptions of harmful habits and thoughts that might trigger eating disorder sufferers. As Kandel mentions in the book, the problem with most movies and books about eating disorders is that they give people who are already at risk for eating disorders a step by step guide for how to do it "really well." Kandel's voice is honest but hopeful, encouraging but realistic.

I wish I had had this book while I was in the early stages of my recovery, but I am learning from it even now. She includes metaphors to help recovery anorexics, bulimics, binge eaters and everyone in between, visualize their mental processes and alter their negative thinking. The book, encourages the reader to take things moment by moment and to be okay with being okay. All of these mind habits are essential for perfectionists and those of us who tend to obsess about what we didn't do or what we plan to do but forget to be present for life.

Life Beyond Your Eating Disorder is nearly essential for anyone battling disordered eating. I can't recommend it highly enough and to prove it, I will be be giving away one copy of Kandel's book! To enter, you must be a follower of Dancin' Words on Google Friend Connect and leave a comment on this post. If you win, you'll get your choice of a paperback or Kindle copy. Leave a separate comment for each of these optional extra entries.:

1) Link to this giveaway on your  Facebook page or Twitter account (one entry for each link).

2) Link to this giveaway on your blog (three extra entries).

3) Buy a copy of the book for a friend in paperback or for their Kindle (five extra entries).


Remember you must first follow my blog on Google Friend Connect to qualify!

This giveaway will close on May 1 so tell your friends and help spread the word about eating disorder recovery!