scoliosis + dance

I’ve been dancing for ten years—that is two thirds of my lifetime that I have spent in a dance studio. I started dance the first time when I was three. All I can remember from it is silently getting frustrated at the other girls when they sickled their feet. I stopped for two years and tried a few other sports. 

But, it wasn’t long before I knew I preferred dance over skiing, gymnastics, soccer, swimming, ice skating, cheerleading, and tennis. When I finally got back into it, I went to a studio called Dance Premier. I did classes for a few years and managed to sneak my way up a few levels, and on my sixth year of dancing, I finally worked up the nerve to try out for Prodigy (the name for the competition team at my studio) and made the team. However, the whole time I danced at Dance Premier, I didn’t feel like I was trying as hard as I could have been.

A year later, I moved from Issaquah, Washington to Park City, Utah, and had to start all over. One week before school started, I flew down and stayed with friends to attend the final week of summer dance camp at my new studio, Dance Tech Studios, so that my new teachers could elaborate my dancing and see which team they would place me on. Sitting in the studio for the first time, I decided that I didn’t want my experience at Dance Tech to be repeating what I did at Dance Premier. I wanted to be the dancer in the front, instead of being shy and hiding in the back—that plan didn’t exactly fully carry out until recently, but I worked my way up to the front somehow and over the years, my confidence improved.

However, there was a bit of a bump in the road. Right before I turned thirteen, I was officially diagnosed with scoliosis. For those who don’t know, scoliosis is when there is abnormal curvature in the spine. My spine started to curve when I was six, but it was so minor that we couldn’t do anything about it. But, while I was growing, my spine just grew twisted, until there wasn’t much we could do about it.

simple diagram of what scoliosis can look like

They threw me in physical therapy and got me fitted for a brace, which I would have to wear for the next year and a half (or until I was technically done growing). Everyone told me I would be fine, that we’d caught it before I needed surgery, that I can keep doing normal things in my daily life as long as it wasn’t causing me any pain—all of this was reassuring, but kind of led me to false hope.

Eventually, I had to stop all dance (besides hip hop). Ballet, jazz, and contemporary were too difficult to continue. I couldn’t properly balance on releve, I was physically not flexible enough on one side of my body, everything was unbalanced and chaotic and it was hard to improve or even maintain my technique without being in pain and not being able to do things I've been training my whole life to do make me constantly feel like a failure and made me burst into tears on a daily basis. So, since I’ve focused more on hip hop the past two years, I’ve improved a ton, but I’ve lost a lot of my ballet, jazz, and contemporary skills.

It was kind of heartbreaking to me. Growing up, all I ever wanted to do was be a dancer. I constantly watched dance videos. I wanted to spend all of my teenage years in the studio. I wanted to improve, I wanted to be the best. I wanted dance to be the center of my life, and once I was diagnosed, that dream kind of faded away. I’ve been in too much pain to think about dance.

So there is technically no reason for this post, I just felt the need to rant a tiny bit, because I'm feeling a little bit upset about it right now. But, I think that might be what this blog was created for.