on creative redemption

the only way out is through.

Originally posted on Out of Office, 6 January 2023.

“You don’t look like you’re having fun up there,” multiple people have told me over the last month or so.

Fact check: true.

Tonight is the opening performance of what should have been my debut aerial solo, a longtime goal/dream of mine. I could go into all the reasons why it didn’t come together, but I’m not big on excuses. Suffice it to say: it’s not happening, it was my decision, and I’ve been an absolute wreck about it all week.

It’s not that I don’t love this practice— it is, and probably will remain until my body gives out on me, one of my favorite activities. But as showtime drew near, I felt my best Black Swan impression beginning to burst forth, and obviously that is not something that should be allowed to escalate.

Backstage during a rehearsal for my group piece the next day, I was busy being broody on the perimeter of a conversation between my classmates about why they love aerial dance so much. “It gets me out of my head and into my body,” was the general consensus. For them, it was a source of relief from the burdens and anxieties of the day.

I couldn’t help but notice that for me, it was the burden/anxiety of the day.

I picked up other mindset discrepancies as well: my instructors routinely give feedback to all the dancers about their connection (or lack thereof) to both the audience and to each other on stage. In group pieces, the latter is obviously important, but I take some issue with the former.

Why do I have to connect to the audience?

What am I trying to express to them?

Why must I be specific?

To those who know me well, it should come as no surprise that my mode of creative expression is more Roarkian than kumbaya. I picked a song that moves me to literal tears— isn’t that expressive enough? I made a collage of movement that is beautiful and complements the music. Isn’t that a sufficient reason to dance?

It’s up to the audience to be moved by what I leave out there on stage. I should not have to sell my work to earn approval and be happy with it. I will be the first to agree that there is therapeutic value in articulating with words what is already manifesting in other mediums: in my case, why my song speaks to me so deeply. But, when it comes to art and artistic expression, I believe that intentional design and thoughtful beauty are worthy ends unto themselves. (An aside: who knew that the path to the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy would be such a steep, treacherous climb?)

Art is by its nature both concrete and ephemeral, somewhere at the intersection of craft, skill, and creativity. Not all art speaks to all people; when it does, especially by design, I find it cheap and camp. I do believe that art must contain meaning, but that meaning must be naturally manifest, not manufactured. Granted, that line is fine, but it exists nonetheless. That’s what the artistic eye should be trained to identify and distinguish.

I’m proud of what I put together even if I could not execute it well enough to perform this week. I am deeply disappointed that it didn’t work out, and I am aware that my overconfidence cost someone else an opportunity to perform.

More than anything though, I am disappointed in myself for behaving the way I did in the face of failure. My ego reared its ugly head, and I know I was far from pleasant to be around this week. I pinned my personal redemption on doing this solo and doing it well— redemption from not having better grades, getting into a better university, being farther along in various life milestones, being a better daughter, better coworker, better contributor, better friend. Redemption from whatever it is that keeps me from being worthy of the things that I want in this life but have not earned yet.

What does my song mean to me, everyone asked? It means that I was lost and found. I came back from my death-by-a-thousand-cuts of cumulative missteps, I was ready to turn it around, ready to be superwoman.

Failing to accomplish even this was meta in the extreme. Even so, I should’ve accepted it with more maturity, humility, and grace.

I don’t know if I’ll be offered another opportunity to solo; I don’t think I’ve earned the right to ask for another shot any time soon. On the bright side, I now know in earnest what the piece looks like.

I’ll keep working on it.

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Author’s Thoughts, 31 January 2025.

For the first third of my life, I was someone whose high, high hopes forewarned of deep, deep disappointments.

“Getting ahead of my skis” is what my family would call it. Another idiom— “biting off more than I can chew.”

After I bowed out of the solo in self-induced shame, I took a break from silks. I played only a few times at various open studios, almost never at my home studio, which is still my favorite. I was too embarrassed. And then life happened.

In the fall of 2023, I took up teaching silks as a way to continue the hobby and at least not have to pay for access to a studio. That chapter of my career was very short, as I landed my godsend of a job about two months into it. In an odd twist, my company (in all their startup eccentricity, which I adore) let me put up an aerial rig right behind my desk. So now, I mostly train after work.

And yet.

I still haven’t really performed. I did a improvised little lollipop duet at Burning Man. I’ve been offered spots in other showcases and even a New Year’s Eve show. But I haven’t pulled the trigger on any of it.

Part of the reason is that I’m having too much fun lately in diversifying my aerial practice, so I’m not going deep into any one discipline right now to make a great piece. In addition to silks, I’m deepening my lyra practice, picking up aerial sling, pole, and lyra pole. I also dabbled in acro yoga for a brief period, which was really fun and made me want to get into partner dancing (swing or lindyhop, most likely). And of course, fire spinning and ice skating are still on my list.

The good news is that I can pick up all of these new skills with relative ease. The bad news is that I hit the same plateau in each one.

Flexibility.

Fun fact— I still can’t do a split. I have achieved it maybe once in my life and didn’t maintain it. A few years ago, I realized that you actually have to stretch not only your hamstrings but also your quads and hip flexors when doing splits training. For over a decade, I was only stretching my hamstrings, so to say I have been imbalanced would be an understatement.

The implications of this for aerial dance are and have been clear: in order to do most of the tricks that keep catching my eye, I have to increase my flexibility. Splits will help, but also shoulders, hips, back, wrists. So, I’ve been focusing for the last two months or so on following online stretching routines to both strengthen and lengthen my muscles. But it’s not enough.

It’s also about relaxing— something I am genetically predisposed to suck at (:

Looking back, I can tell that I have adopted a tense, protective posture for myself for about the past twenty years. I was doing anything I could to find acceptance and avoid rejection of those around me, and while that can (and did) look like “trying on a lot of personalities,” there was also a defensive and vigilant element to it. I shrunk into myself and reined in a lot of what was exceptional about me as a child. Examples: opting in to being clumsy because it made people laugh (a habit that needed to be broken later) or dialing down my competitive side because my classmates thought it was “too much.”

Consequently, when I fell short of goals, athletic or otherwise, that I knew I was capable of hitting, I’d be devastated. The dissonance between my expectations (based on my potential) and the reality of how I was performing (downstream of my undernourished capabilities) was putting me on an emotional rollercoaster of aiming comically high and missing the mark.

It was a failure feedback loop— I was trying to do the thing and simultaneously avoiding the actual work required to get there. My desperate drive for social acceptance through admiration kept me performing instead of being, constricting myself to both gain acceptance and avoid being a target (and of course, prey-like behavior attracts predators very effectively). And each time failure struck, I doubled down on the shortcut-and-posture strategy even more for quick fixes of something that vaguely looked like success.

This question also haunted me: what would it mean if I did my actual best and still failed?

I really didn’t want to know the answer to that.

What, you may be asking, does any of this have to do with flexibility?

Pretty much everything.

As I closed out 2024, I was in Costa Rica with my best friend. Although we’ve been friends for about 15 years, this was our first real girls trip together for a few days where we weren’t just visiting each other in our home cities.

She and I have watched each other profoundly evolve over the years. We’ve both evolved away from the people that we were in high school when we met, as apples not too far from the trees from which we grew. We’ve both begun growing our own roots into the ground, albeit at different paces and in different ways, both of our lives taking unforeseen shapes.

She has grown in the direction of structure, commitment, organization, negotiation, and independent reasoning.

I have grown in the direction of risk tolerance, pursuit of curiosity, play, self-discovery and personal expression.

In many ways, she is closer than I am to who I was when we met 15 years ago. Likewise, I am closer than she is to who she was back then.

And while we were in the car on the way out from San Jose to La Fortuna, bopping to one of many DJ sets that I was trying to sell her on, we talked about how we miss feeling like we could be our big, full, whole selves like we used to when we were younger.

Laughing big and being weird and spontaneous and taking photos and dancing and playing cards and watching movies and enjoying this grand experience we have of being human.

So we made a commitment— we were going to be BIG that weekend. We were going to be exactly ourselves.

And we were.

That’s the energy I’ve brought into 2025, and into what I’m calling the second third of my life.

I still have plenty of work to do. For aerial, my task is to continue working with my body consistently so that I can relax and open, allowing it to make shapes it has never made before. For work, that means continuing to engage in my wide-ranging self-led studies, investing energy into my ever-shifting role at Ender, and designing the rest of life and routines around all of the above.

For life though, I think that as I get better at:

1. listening to myself when intuition speaks

2. strengthening my boundary-setting and -maintaining muscles

3. reminding myself that I am safe and supported in my own skin

I will be more and more able to bring my big self out into the world and do big things. To relax and approach that asymptotic line of being ever more authentic in a way that allows for evolution and integration of feedback. To continue to breathe and be and grow.

And the beautiful thing is that the more I do this, the more it will bring aligned and evolved people into my life to share it with me.

This is the play that I’ve been making for about a year. I’m doubling down on it in 2025.

And if anyone was curious— this is the song. I will dance to it one day.