Plant Ace

If you start ballet at 16, you are too old to ever expect to be able to do it seriously. If you start at 12 you’re too old. If you want to do ballet as a serious thing, as a career, you need to start at like eight years old or even younger, because your bones and joints need to be trained while they’re still flexible in order for you to be able to perform many of the required motions and stances of ballet. In particular, you need to be able to perform turnout of the hips, but all of your joints in your legs and feet will be affected, and this irreversibly changes your body.

And yet! Nobody talks about this as a negative thing! Little girls say they want to be ballet dancers, and if their parents have enough money, that’s what they get to be! Does it cause problems in later life? Yeah, sometimes! Often, even! But nobody talks about that because it’s a thing for cis people to do and so naturally it’s all fine!

By the time I was done dancing at age 18, I had been through physical therapy for 3 separate issues caused by ballet. The worst one was because of how my hips and muscles developed and it cause discomfort in my knees so bad that I couldn’t walk very far without pain, much less climb stairs. One time at a pt session, a neighboring patient, who was elderly, said I was “too young to be here”. I was in middle school so I rolled my eyes. It was/is funny to me.

I am 23 now, and I still get stiff in some places, and I’m sure it is related to dancing as a kid. I snap, crackle, and pop like Rice Krispies.

I have no regrets because ballet and was a big part of my life. I just know that it will have long term effects on my body and there is nothing I can do to change it.

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Beat someone to death with your bare hands in the dead of night

Grapple with what you've done as lights flash in the distance

Dig a shallow grave

As you lay the last shovel-full of dirt, catch the glint of metal in the corner of your eye

Rush toward the gun, eyes wild and shovel forgotten

Grapple less figuratively, fighting to get the upper hand, clawing with teeth and dirt-covered bloody nails

Kill a second person with your bare hands

Looks inside

I want to go to this exact point and run around it saying “I’m in Sweden!” I’m in Finland!” “I’m in Norway!” until I get tired

They even made a circle there which tells you in which country you are