Ballet Lessons

Photo: Corbis via Getty Images My first fantasies of ballet began in the strip-mall studio I attended as a diminutive, pigeon-breasted 8-year-old with a Dorothy Hamill wedge haircut. Staring into the mirrors each class, comparing myself endlessly to my more talented classmates, to my teachers, a pair of beautiful, long-legged twin sisters who transfixed us all. Standing alongside these longer, more graceful and beguiling forms, I wondered how I would ever become that.

But it’s only very recently, upon revisiting the memoir, that I realized the part to which I connected the most, the part that rang painfully true: Kirkland’s relentless perfectionism. As a straight-laced, straight-A student, the kind who would collapse over a disappointing test grade, and would eventually achieve the cursed “Most Likely to Succeed” honorific, I may have failed at dance, but I understood everything about drive.

In a recent piece, Chloe Angyal explored the connection between ballet and perfectionism, an “entirely necessary trait in a hypercompetitive field that demands near-impossible feats of the human body.” As the celebrated dancer Wendy Whelan has said, “Being a ballerina, you don’t ever want to show yourself less than perfect, ever. That’s what your goal is: 24/7 perfection.

I’m embarrassed to admit I lost countless hours during lockdown to my own compulsive habits, endlessly revising a single sentence, a passage of dialogue that I couldn’t get just right. I became fixed on my word count, my step count, my exercise routine. Had I performed well on that Zoom? Did any of this writing make sense? I had no distractions from myself, my own elusive standards. And those standards never felt more pointless.

meganeabbott So brilliant and so true. One of my favorite observations: “eventually achieve the cursed most likely to succeed honorific. “Cannot wait to pirouette into The Turnout.

meganeabbott Brilliant article.

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