Julia

            The ability to dance is one of the greatest gifts you’ll ever know.  Through your dancing, you learn discipline, grace, and how to healthily enjoy competition.  But, you don’t know that right now.  Right now, all you know is that you have shin splints and blisters, and you never get to hang out with your friends from school.  “I can’t – I have dance.”  In high school, this was my answer to (almost) everything.  Friday night classes that were an hour and a half away and all-day sessions on Saturdays left me feeling deprived of the typical high school experience.  For this reason, I fell out of love with dance.  I wanted to drink cheap vodka and smoke pot with my friends, not sweat my ass off with a bunch of 10 year olds.

            But enjoy that feeling of deprivation while you have it.  Enjoy the feeling of leaving the studio knowing that you became a better version of yourself today.  Enjoy that feeling on top of the podium, the feeling that tells you that your sacrifices are worthwhile.  Enjoy the feeling of your teacher telling you that you danced your best, even when the judges don’t agree with her that day.  Someday, after a torn ACL and the freshman fifteen have broken the camel’s back and sent you into retirement, you’ll miss those feelings.  That feeling of deprivation will be replaced by feelings of emptiness and regret.  You’ll be bound to the sidelines, left only to teach the next generation and wish you had listened to your teacher better and pushed yourself further.

            Don’t take your talent for granted.  Irish dance is hard, I know.  But the best things in life are never easy.  Don’t end your dance career knowing that you could have been so much better than you were when you retired.  That’s how my career ended.  I could have practiced harder my freshman year of college.  I could have been more careful at class that fateful night in June and not torn my ACL a second time.  But I made shitty choices, and now I’m retired, and all I have to show for my 10 years of dancing is one national medal and never recalling at the Oireachtas.  Don’t make shitty choices.  You will never be as young, fit, or motivated as you are right now.

            Go stretch.  Go do 100 sit-ups.  Go dance your full hornpipe or jig three times through.  Respect your teachers, even the retired college students that don’t have their TCRGs.  They want to help you.  They want you to be better dancers than they ever were.  Don’t take it personally when they single you out in class.  Appreciate that they’re paying attention to you and want to make you better.  Your teachers yell at you because they know you have the potential to be great, and you haven’t tapped that potential yet.  Don’t be afraid to tap that potential and go the extra mile.  That extra mile could be the difference between not recalling, and literally standing on top of the world.

Now, get off the Internet and go practice.

Sincerely,

me: