Undergraduate / "Ballet: A Lifestyle Choice" - my common app essay options [3]

Prompt: Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.

Ballet: A Lifestyle Choice

My mom opened the car door for me and I ran up the green steps that seemed to go on for miles while she followed quietly behind me. After the second flight of stairs I couldn't keep my pace any longer, but even after my legs slowed down my heart and mind kept racing. I was four years old and I was about to take my very first ballet class. I walked in to the large, mirrored studio and joined the circle of little boys and girls sitting on the floor around Miss Myers. I didn't realize that this would be my life; from that day on much of my identity was defined by dance. Every year in school we have to introduce ourselves to a new group of students and teachers and we are often asked to give our names and tell something about ourselves. My response has become second nature "Hi, I'm Shannan and I do ballet."

My fourth grade teacher asked us to say our second home on the first day of school. I said Proctor's theater where I preformed the Nutcracker each year. Ballet was my life so of course the stage was my home. When I began dancing I was one of the more talented girls which allowed me to be accepted in prestigious dance programs. For two summers in middle school I went to New York City and did a summer dance intensive. It wasn't until my second year there that I realized how odd the world I had whole-heartedly thrust myself into truly was. I finally understood why my non-dancer friends were so amazed by the fact I was going to New York for a month to live with other ballerinas from around the world and spend every day in the studio. All of this began to hit me about an hour after a conversation with my best friend in the program. Her name was Tess and she was a year older than me. We had just finished a Pointe class and we had an hour and a half lunch break before Pilates. Tess and I had developed a routine for our lunch breaks during our first year there. We walked down to FACE Stockholm and then into some of the wildly expensive boutiques near the studio before heading to the little pizza place across the street. It was only our fourth day there, but I had noticed Tess acting strange during our lunch hour traditions. When we sat down in the shiny, red booth of the pizzeria she immediately looked uncomfortable. I asked her what was wrong, but she kept brushing it off with "Nothing Shan," I kept pushing. Finally, I broke her. She let out an annoyed sigh then said "I'm just trying to cut calories and you keep choosing this place." She was rail thin already.

As I was lying on the floor during Pilates I kept coming back to this conversation. I realized she hadn't really been eating during any of the meals we had shared so far that summer. In fact I couldn't remember her taking more than a single bite. It clicked in my brain; she had an eating disorder. No big deal. I knew several girls my age with eating disorders. I began to wonder should I start watching my weight? I was not yet ninety pounds. I thought of all the best dancers I knew and all the famous ballerinas I admired and I realized many of them wrestled with eating disorders. So I lay there on the gray marley, sweating in the summer heat trying to decide whether to stop eating or not. I wasn't aware of how strange it was for a thirteen year old girl to be thinking this over as if it were a conscious and mundane choice. I decided that it was too difficult to be anorexic and I didn't go through with it. I wasn't fazed by the pro and con list way I had just decided not to suffer through the very serious illness of an eating disorder.

That was the summer I began to grasp the abnormalities ballet had brought to my childhood. I defined myself as a dancer even past the point when I was good enough to really do so because that had always been who I was. It was the only way I could think of myself. The ballet world is not necessarily a healthy one, but it was what made me unique or so I thought. Dance is competitive and it can be a bit of a self-esteem killer, but without being a dancer I don't know who I would be. It is the world I have known for thirteen years and it had taught me many lessons and given me many gifts. I can attribute several of my best qualities to being a dancer. I credit dance for my determination, dedication, my passion and my work ethic. I have had different experiences from many of my classmates, and even though ballet has brought a fair number of tears throughout the years, dance is beautiful and I am thankful for all of the joyful and painful experiences it has presented me with through my life because there is no doubt in my mind ballet has shaped who I have become and lead me down my current path. I did not realize as I ran up those green steps for the first time that it would be a defining day for me, nor did I think about how ballet is responsible for an unalterable part of me the thousandth time I walked those steps. I know now that I am many other things, however even if I never tie the ribbons on my Pointe shoes again I am forever a dancer.