For a very long time I assumed that ballet wasn’t for me. Like a lot of little girls, I wanted to be a dancer, but before I’d so much as tried on a tutu I’d already got it into my head that it wasn’t meant to be. I was too tall, not skinny enough, generally wrong. So I decided to be a Pauline instead of a Posy and shoved my desire for toe shoes and tinkly piano music to the back of my mind, where it stayed until I moved to London aged 22.
I was a receptionist by day, living off Diet Coke, wine, cigarettes and four hours of sleep a night. Unsurprisingly, given that I was living like a bargain basement Kate Moss, I was constantly wired and my mental health was in shreds and getting worse day by day.
One afternoon when I should have been filing, I searched the internet for a workout class near my office, determined to shift the (imaginary) excess flesh around my navel. I thought I had found a Barre style fitness class. But when I walked through the door of the ballet school I realised that I’d found something completely different and infinitely more magical – a dance school where actual real-life ballerinas train. The changing rooms are strewn with tutus and toe shoes, the lockers have peeling name labels and hearts scratched into them.
I knew that I would love prancing around to piano music and wearing pink tights. What I didn’t realise is that taking up ballet aged 22 and three quarters would also be the salvation of my mental health. It quickly became my saving grace. Every Tuesday evening I would walk up the spiral stairs, pull on my shoes and tie up my skirt and feel all of the screaming voices at the back of my mind go quiet.
I stopped going to ballet class regularly around the time that my career picked up and I met my husband. I was genuinely busy, my work was no longer around the corner from the studio and there always seemed to be other things to do. I would make noises about going back, but it never seemed to happen.
Earlier this year I had a miscarriage, started a new job and moved house within a space of a few weeks and once again my brain went into open revolt. So, I found myself back in that studio, hands on the bar, eyes on the mirror, tracing the same shapes with the same shoes. It was like coming home.
Your twenties are a terrifyingly change-riddled decade. Since I moved to London six years ago I’ve lived at six different addresses, had five different jobs and several friendship break-ups. Very little of the places that I used to visit are still there. But the ballet studio is, and it’s exactly the same as it ever was. Same grumpy receptionist, same cracked paint, same glorious feeling of coming home.
In the studio I think about nothing but my feet and my spine and my arms and why my fingers didn’t look as dainty as the girl next to me, and suddenly I look up and it has been 90 minutes. The combination of mindfulness and endorphins is the best therapy I’ve ever had.
Ballet isn’t a super-cure. There are times when it doesn’t do much, because mental health isn’t easy, and it doesn’t respond to the same thing every time you try it. There have been times where I’ve tipped up at the studio feeling like I’m going mad and assuming it’ll be a balm, only to realise that afterwards I only feel fractionally better. But I never feel worse.
I was right to think that being a professional ballerina was off the cards for me. But I was wrong to treat that as a reason not to do it anyway. Because where did we get the idea that we should only work hard at something if we can turn it into a career? Having an activity you love that makes you happy and soothes your mind is magical, even if you’re not particularly good at it.