Powerful
By: Alexandra Zannis, RSW.
I used to dance 7 days a week.
Cracked feet, trembling knees, alarms I begged my parents to let me snooze through, a second home that was the studio. Like any athlete, you become more or less obsessed with the task at hand, whether it is improving your running time or being able to do a triple pirouette flawlessly. Your world is sometimes narrow and all-consuming, fixated on the given milestone you are set to achieve.
For me, my story begins at Friday ballet class. One day every week that felt like a blessing – a 90-minute class after school, followed by freedom until Saturday afternoon. Friday night was my only time off all week, as I was up on Sunday morning for 7 straight hours of rehearsal. Friday ballet was forgiving after a week of relentless training. Friday ballet was a reprieve.
It was also where I learned about the deeply rooted disordered eating that is rampant in the dance community. It was a time where we could be more open with one another, where we felt honest and strong and whole. This class was an hour and a half of ballet that was always more about how we felt after a long week, than how we looked.
I didn’t know I had disordered eating at the time. Like everyone I knew, I believed that the way I thought about and consumed food was normal. The conversations surrounding weight loss were almost constant and the hours spent analyzing every move your body makes in a mirror were, more often than not, excruciating. Some days it took everything I had just to put on my bodysuit and tights and walk out into that unforgiving studio. I’d look in the mirror and feel powerless to those aching feelings of imperfection. I didn’t “like” myself, or maybe more accurately, I didn’t like my reflection in the mirror.
Fast forward 10 years and I am now a Social Worker living in Ottawa. I have what I often consider to be a breathtaking life. And when I moved to Ottawa, running became my saving grace.
I stopped dancing after high school from an injured body and couldn’t really forgive myself until I found my groove with running. Running, coupled with a more holistic health routine. As a social worker, my days are spent analyzing the worst-case scenario. The single mother with a sick child who can’t afford rent, the man wrongly accused and sentenced to prison, the child searching for a place to call home. I became entranced with the human psyche. I needed to know, to whatever extent possible, why humans acted the way they did. Running became a refuge, a time alone to process my experiences and the weight of it all. My life transformed, even more, when I started to appreciate my body for what it could do rather than loathe myself for what it couldn’t.
When I started my Social Work education, I was enlightened to the fact that no Social Worker on the planet is allowed to go through the process of analyzing someone else without first analyzing themselves. To do my work, I had to perform an agonizing but necessary deep dive into the darkest parts of myself. What I would later refer to as an inquiry into my social conventions. I reflected on questions that would reshape the way I view myself and the world around me - How and why did I act and react to my surroundings the way I did?
A lot of my re-learning came from that Friday ballet class. Looking back years later that specific class felt like home for many, a quasi-sanctuary from the structured weekly classes that would beg more from us than we could ever produce. Friday ballet allowed us to just be, with the music gently flowing through our aching bodies.
There was a culture in ballet that we couldn’t talk about openly. Where there were dark shadows surrounding food and weight, and none that dared to shine a light on the relentless battle with self-worth that followed. We all wanted perfection, and spent countless hours staring at our bodies wrapped in tight clothing trying our hardest to emulate our version of it. We were told on repeat that even if we did something perfectly, there was room for improvement. You could always jump higher, turn out more, or reach farther: “Alexandra, you must watch yourself in the mirror but don’t let it look like you are watching yourself.”
I don’t look at myself in mirrors now when I exercise, I know how my body moves. It is presumably why I am so consumed by running, as yoga or exercise at the gym makes me fixate on my movements. I revel in the liberating choice of pushing my body for a feeling rather than for appearance.
I worked hard to rewrite the story I had created about my body, but the path ahead still feels cumbersome. How do you unlearn those foundational lessons that shaped how you view yourself in the world? I hated my body for what it looked like in the mirror, not for its capabilities.
On a recent run, I asked myself, “What would you say to that young dancer who scrutinized herself in the mirror? What short, one-sentence wisdom, would you impart on her if ever given the chance”? I barely finished the question in my head before I was ready to answer - I knew in my body what I would say to her and it rang through me every stride I took for the rest of the run.
I would tell her “Don’t fill your head with thoughts about being thin, instead, fill it with thoughts of being powerful.”
I finished my run, pulled my headphones out and started to cry. The built-up emotion filled me, and I could do nothing but sit in the sweat and pain and tears of remembering who I was before I was told who I ‘needed to be’.
Powerful. What might my life have looked like had I promised myself not to be smaller, but powerful?
I guess now all there is left to do is find out.
Alexandra Zannis is the Social Policy and Communications Coordinator at the Canadian Association of Social Workers in Ottawa, ON.