LifeScouts: Ballet!

Listening to Justin Timberlake TKO - not sure how I feel about it yet. I want to like it, but I'm just not sure. Plus I'm pretty sure I can hear a guinea pig in the background.
Overwhelmed with homework.
    Normally, I write these posts when I don't have anything else to write about. Today, I just felt like giving myself a prompt and going with it.
    Ballet was a huge part of my life. I danced for nine years in two different ballet studios. I quit just before auditioning for company, and part of me regrets that so much. See, my feet naturally turn out. I walk like a duck, or a penguin, or some other absurd animal. And you don't even wanna see me run. If you didn't already know I danced, you'd figure it out pretty quick, even though I'm an absolute klutz. When I was a baby, my parents worried something was wrong and took me to get my feet checked out. The doctor said, "Oh, she's fine, just put her in ballet." So in kindergarten, that's what happened.
    I did everything but hip-hop and tap, really. Ballet, jazz, pointe, modern - I would've done tap and hip-hop if given the option. I learned Thriller when I was eight, danced to Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend from Moulin Rouge and A Hard Knock Life from Annie. I got to be a fairy in two different performances (I was fairy-obsessed as a child, and still want to own anything Tinker-Bell related). I was in the Nutcracker almost every single year. I was a Christmas Tree Doll, one of Mother Ginger's Children (twice), a Little Angel (twice), a Toy Soldier, a Big Angel. I quit the year I would've been one of the Party Girls, which is the one thing I regret most.
    Before you get excited, I don't mean the current definition of party girl - I would not have been playing beer pong in a tutu. The story of the Nutcracker is that a little girl named Clara receives a nutcracker doll for Christmas, and on Christmas Eve he comes to life, battles the Rat King and his minions, and takes her to the magical land he comes from where a bunch of different countries dance for her (girls on pointe from China, a belly dancer from Arabia, Mother Ginger and her Children, The Sugar Plum Fairy). Before all this occurs, she is given the Nutcracker at a Christmas party that all of her friends and their parents attend. I would have been one of the friends. They had beautiful Victorian-style dresses, got to wear their hair down in bouncing ringlets (not buns like everyone else), and got to do a little play-acting on stage while other people danced. It was every little girl's dream, just short of getting to be Clara herself, or the Sugar Plum Fairy. Personally, I wanted to be a Party Girl, then dance in Tea (the Chinese dance), then Coffee (the Arabian dance), then the Russian dance, and lastly the Sugar Plum Fairy, so I could get a chance to do all my favorites. But I never got to do any of them, because I quit to be in colorguard, which as I've previously stated really wasn't worth it. What sucks is even if I got back into ballet, I'm so out of practice and out of shape, I'd never be good enough to do any of those parts I loved. So I've missed my narrow window of opportunity.
    But I know if I'd kept doing ballet, it would have taken over my life - we're talking practicing like twenty hours a week - and I never would have met Corey. In missing my first goal in life, I met the one I never knew I wanted, until I did. So I guess I really don't regret anything.
    Except maybe not transferring to UNCW while I still could. ha ha.

 

What's something that was once a big part of your life? Something you thought would shape your future, or maybe something that has? Tell me below!