Dancing was a part of my life since before I can even remember. I was put in tights and fake eyelashes before I could tie my shoes. It was a part of my identity for so long that once it wasn’t anymore, I was lost and I didn’t feel like me. My senior year dance recital was one of the hardest lasts of my senior year and it evoked more tears than graduation or moving out of my house. Dance is something that taught me so much in the fifteen years that I did it and saying goodbye to it may have taught me just as much.

1. After the years of honing your skills and stretching pretty much daily, giving it up seems almost impossible. You may find yourself stretching or pointing your toes while doing completely non-dance related tasks and people will look at you weird.
2. You will still do turns in the grocery store because they have the best turning floors ever and every dancer knows that and people will look at you weird…
3. The day you try to do your splits for the first time in four months and it hurts will be a very, very sad day so maybe keep up the stretching in case you want to keep your flexibility for, oh I don’t know, a party trick or something.
4. The second you find another ex-dancer you will bond over ugly feet and knee bruises and it will feel like a little piece of your heart grew back.
5. Your dance friends from back home will still call you and tell you about a bad practice and though your glad they still need you it will break your heart you weren’t getting screamed at with them
6. You will still wear your dance jacket everywhere and people will ask you if you’re a dancer and it may sting, but you say “I use to be” and move on.
7. You will hear a song with a good rhythm and instantly choreograph an entire dance to it in your head after hearing it three times.
8. When someone asks you to count off something for them you will count 5,6,7,8 and they will look at you like your crazy or stupid and you will wish another dancer was around you to understand.
9. You will want to go to every dance performance, competition and recital your studio has and you will feel like a groupie the entire time.
10. People will look at you funny when you bend down to grab something and every bone in your body pops and then you have to explain to them that dancing for fifteen years has turned your body into that of an 80-year-old woman’s.
11. The first time you watch your old teammates dance without you, you will probably cry and feel so out of place that you just cannot handle it.
12. But then, you'll go backstage and hug the girls and it is like nothing ever changed and you know that the dancers you rehearsed with for eight hours a week are more than just your teammates, but their your dance family and being in a dance family is a bond that cannot be broken.