I Was Told That I Would Not Be Taken Seriously Because of My Weight

I had always loved the art of dance. From the graceful movements, to the impossible looking jumps and turns. So much hard work, yet it all looked so easy. It was an art form that really touched me from a young age, until I saw the darker side behind its beauty. I worked tirelessly to become the best dancer that I could possibly be. Little did I know that my hard work meant little to nothing in this industry, for a girl like myself.

How My Life Turned Upside Down

It was my first dance competition of the season. I was thirteen years of age and already competing en pointe. I had just finished my performance and had run off the stage into the dressing room. I was proceeding to take my slippers off when my ballet studio director pulled me aside to talk to me about ‘something.’ She proceeded to tell me that I had to lose weight, as I looked “huge on stage” and that nobody would ever take me seriously with the way I looked. She told me that if I did not lose any weight, I would never be allowed to perform under her studio name. She continued throughout the whole competition season saying things such as, “it is for your own benefit that you lose weight, I am doing you a favour by telling you this. People at school will ridicule you for being too big, and nobody will ever love you if you don’t lose weight.”

For many years to come, I suffered from body dysmorphic disorder. I thought that there was something very wrong with the way I looked, and that I needed to ‘fix’ myself in order to look ‘normal’. I hated everything about myself, to the point where I truly wished that I was anyone other than myself. Until I was able to step out of the dark hole that the ballet community built for a girl like myself. I realized that just because people say that you cannot do something, does not mean that they are right, no matter how qualified they are in the subject.

So I decided to go after something that I had always wanted to do.

At the age of fifteen, I decided to go to the largest ballet competition in the world, Youth American Grand Prix. It was not only my first international ballet competition, but it was also the first time that I had ever been dancing with my own choreography at a dance competition. I went to YAGP as an independent soloist (meaning I did not represent a studio, rather I was going by myself). I did this to prove to not only myself, but to everyone, That you can achieve whatever you dream of. I wanted to show people that even though I was constantly told that I could not accomplish what I wanted to, I still did. I wanted to tell the world that it does not matter who you are, where you come from, what you believe in, or what you look like; if you believe in something, as long as you work hard, anything is possible.

The Worst Part

Yet, the sad part is, I am not the only one who has gone through this pain. I constantly see young girls talking about their ‘new diets’ and how much weight they aspire to lose in order to look ‘pretty’. We are still educating our younger generations to aspire to 'look beautiful,' when we should be telling them that beauty is not an appearance. Beauty is so much more than an appearance, it is a spirit. Beauty should be determined by how we treat others, not by how we look. We need to teach our next generation to reach for the stars, not that they have a glass ceiling above them for reasons that they cannot help/control. But before we do that, we need to teach ourselves to respect each other. At the end of the day, one is no less of a human than another, we should all be treated equally and be given the same opportunities to accomplish what we define as our own success.