Wow. March is done and April is already here. I’ve already been working at the hospital for 4 months. I’ve been back in school for 7 months. I’ve been working on being okay in the uncertain times for… well .. forever. We are all in that struggle as of lately. Whether you are a huge planner and want to know what your next year is going to look and feel like or you simply take life day by day, we all see this cloud of “are things going to get better?” ruminating over our heads. This pandemic has proven hard on so many people’s mental health for so many reasons- a big root cause being a loss of autonomy and control for many people in their daily decisions. Whether you lost your job because of circumstances out of anyone’s control or you’ve been chugging away at school/ work feeling very lonely in your environment, we all desire control over how we feel everyday and where our thoughts fly to throughout the day.
I’ve been on so many zoom calls and meetings where everyone just talks about how much is unknown in our world today, tomorrow, and definitely for the foreseeable future. It has only led me to ask when we have ever really had predictability of what’s next that feels different than this? When I look at the whole situation, of course we don’t know how several life-altering choices/ opportunities are going to come up, but when have we ever been able to know the future anyways? Of course you can look at the tiny details of many working parts to your life and conclude that ____ and _____ are bound to happen, but you don’t know that for certain. As much as it pains me, I’ve reminded myself daily that I should look forward, but try not to worry about the bridges I haven’t even come to yet. I’ve been known to lay out “perfect plans” for myself regarding school, relationships, housing, career, etc. and I’ve learned that life happens when you least expect it.
You fall in love with a boy who is graduating and figuring out his mark on the world. You put an extra item on his and yours balancing scale that neither of you were expecting, and it was a good thing, even if it didn’t turn out to last very long.
You lose a best friend through a really difficult falling out and don’t really get to have closure on it all. You don’t look back on the memories you shared with hostility, you just wonder how it got so bad and then it was all just over.
You lose a close friend who passed away shortly after getting better in her cancer battle. There’s no explanation that makes the situation feel real, but you lean on your friends for support and stories and somehow times makes you better.
You lose connection with your hometown because your family disintegrated and planted new roots while you were doing the same at college.
You lose your first full time job a month after you get it because… 2020 was a rough year for business. You come back to that job and realize where you are really at mentally and where you want to be and how the two don’t align as well as they once did anymore. You make big moves to change that direction, even though you’re scared beyond belief you can’t accomplish your goals. You hold onto hope that better things are ahead, even though you really can’t see them at this moment.
I’m at a chapter of my life where I feel like I worry about everything! I worry when I don’t get a good start on my day, when I don’t accomplish everything I wanted to do, and especially when big decisions are out of my control after some point. I worried myself mad about hearing back from my nursing school application because I juggled all the thoughts of “what’s happens next if I get in” and “what happens next if I don’t get in”? I am wigging out as of this week because I’m worried about finding the “perfect” housing for myself in moving across Michigan. I think I found a place I like, but they only accept 2 weeks of holding an apartment and I’m preparing myself to lose the place before the whole scenario even shakes out. Curse whatever book or advice I got that told me about Murphy’s Law because I’m the type of person who would be better off not preparing for every situation as if anything can and will go wrong. I do surprisingly well adapting quickly to new situations and the wheel spinning on different outcomes of the same scenario rarely prepares me adequately for what is going to happen. About the only time I think rehearsal is helpful is in performances and in challenging but necessary conversations. I love a good dance rehearsal for muscle memory, but I don’t need muscle memory for the 150 billion + ways my life will play out.
This brings me to another existential thought I’ve been processing lately. I participated in CHAARG’s Self Love Club this past month and enjoyed some great journal prompts, took some pauses, and started scheduling daily moments of self care. A journal prompt that still has me thinking went: “What is a choice that if you had made differently it would have changed the course of your life as it is now? Looking back, how do you feel about that choice? What did you learn from that choice?” I like that it doesn’t talk about a past decision in the frame of regret and wishing for a different outcome. It simply invites you to think about something that would have changed your current position (neither good or bad).
The moment that came to me that I know would have changed my life drastically is if I had pursued dance as a major in college. Confession moment; I was seriously considering transferring (to the other school-haha) after my freshman year because I felt like I wasn’t satisfied with what I was getting out of my education at State. At that point, I had chosen kinesiology after exploring biosystems engineering and feeling it wasn’t the career path I wanted. When I settled into kinesiology, I just craved more dance education, choreography, expression, and performances that I was convinced had to be fulfilled academically. I came back sophomore year and tried some dance minor classes and decided it wasn’t what I wanted either so I joined a different dance group that year to try out something else. We had our fun, but the real growth that happened for me that year was in starting to teach dance at Premier. In the early months of teaching there, I took good ole bus 23 and bus 22 out and back from campus regularly. I would arrive hours early, start playing around with choreography and music splicing in my free time, and head into the studio just to dance because no one was around. It was in that practice of improvisation that I truly started to reconnect with dance and find my groove as well as find myself again. For 3 years, PDC was a safe haven for me to come to and drown out the rest of the world. All throughout dancing in my childhood, I had been able to do this at the door of the studio I was at, but I felt like I had missed the nonjudgmental goofy playful daredevil I was in the dance studio for years! And I was missing. Towards the last few years of high school, dance was rarely a release as much as it was a regimen, a routine I was so accustomed to that I lost a bit of myself when I quit the team shortly into the year. There was a lot of healing I had to do through dance and I wasn’t ready to be in a position again of being judged on my dancing. So improvisation came in and I held onto anything that made me feel that free and powerful. Allowing myself to just dance around, shake it out, and sing in my free time outside of instructing made me feel like I had that piece of me back. If I had gone into a different college’s dance program and hadn’t gone through my struggles of redefining what role I wanted dance to have in my life, I certainly wouldn’t have the love I have for it now. I’ve learned to forgive my teachers who were not really supportive of me or actively made the dance environment negative for me and others. I’ve learned to accept my decision to pursue other things as careers and leave dance as a passion that I can visit anytime. I’ve learned to not have jealousy towards others who made their dance dreams come true because their success doesn’t discredit my own dance journey. There are so many ways I could have landed if my college major had been different than kinesiology and instead had been dance related. BUT, in this life we only get to play out the one reality and I’m still really happy I let this one play out and lead me all the way here.
Gosh, I remember being sooooo torn up my junior year about college decisions and dance and majors and ACT and AP classes and braces (yikes) and friendships and my parents. I remember my mom and I had this running joke that I was switching wigs and going to my second life at the dance studio because I simply felt like my two worlds never fit together and I was two different people between them. We called it my Marie Tennessee life. It was a total play on Hannah Montana and I loved our little secret but I hated feeling divided and unaccepted/ not celebrated for who I really was. I wish I could go back to that girl and tell her to calm down and have fun because everything works out. BECAUSE IT DID!! Everything worked out and I made it into a great college, did well in school, had fun most of the time, cried when I needed to (which was often now that I think about it hah), joined a hundred clubs (seriously, 100+), made some amazing friends that I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to know sometimes, learned a ton about kinesiology but learned even more about myself. 16 year old Marie just didn’t know what was in store- she didn’t need to worry about what was ahead. And here is 23 year old Marie writing this telling myself the same thing is still true. I don’t need to worry about what’s ahead because worrying doesn’t help. A few quotes that resonate with me about disabling worry’s hold on you are these:
“Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”-Leo F. Buscaglia
“Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow.”-Swedish Proverb
“Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere” -Erma Bombeck
So, even though I can’t snap my fingers and melt my worries I built up like a tower I reside in, I can calm my mind. I look back at times I’ve been through similar uncertainties and peeled myself through sticky points. If you’ve done it before girl, you most certainly are capable of doing it again. It also helps to remember that I can only influence what is in my control. There are many factors that I wish were in my control but simply are not and I have to let those things go. Truly, I’ve said it 500 times to my mom and step dad this past week, but “letting go” is sometimes the only thing left you can do and that is okay. It is okay to let go of your worry and let the universe work as it will.
I have a few highlights I want to share as of lately:
I’ve been enjoying new music from so many of my favorite artists and always want to give shoutouts to my fav bands. Aly and AJ, Quinn XCII, Taylor Swift, and Maggie Rogers are rocking right now.
I finished a fiction book recently called “When You Read This” by Mary Adkins that clicked with me very well. It was all about the intertwining of different people in Iris Massey’s life and a secret blog she wrote before passing away from cancer in her 30s. The leftover blog was left for her boss to publish and lead him to meeting Iris’s sister and they process some of their mutual grief together. I saw myself in Iris’s blog posts so frequently and reminded myself that even though I sort of write my blog posts for me to process thoughts out loud, others do read and see me just like she experienced. I am seen even when I don’t know it. That excites me and terrifies me. It excites me because feeling seen and acknowledged is the result of being bold and putting myself out there. It terrifies me because writing is a vulnerable act, but it’s so helpful and I see that outweighing the fear.
I wish to leave you with this quote that a yoga instructor shared recently with my CHAARG small group:
‘“Finding yourself” is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried uner cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. “Finding yourself” is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.’
-Emily McDowell
Here are some gems of dance sessions that I’ve uncovered from the vault and my Youtube archives. Most of them are unlisted so yes, this is the way I want you to uncover them like it’s a present you have to read to uncover the magic of. Each of these sessions of dance spans from 2017 to 2020 and holds a special memory for me depending on the place it was done, what was going on for me in my life at the time, the song and artist, and my intention in turning on the camera to see what I came up with. This is kinda like opening up a page in my personal diary through showing you these videos, but I also feel so exhilirated when I do this because I want people to know this side of my life too. I never hit the dance floor anymore trying to be perfect and these are proof of that self love work through the years. I hope to keep showing up like that and developing my dance skills and dive more into letting myself shine and heal through dance.
As always… Much Love, MC
MCLARKmakesherMARK 