Everyone has their passions. For some, it's volunteering and for others, it's cooking. For me it's dance.

I've danced my whole life. My mom signed me up for dance classes when I was just three years old. Now, I'm coming on my 19th year of dance. I'm majoring in dance in college. I'm literally making it my life because it is my life. Without it, I have no form of true expression or outlet when things get rough or stressful.

Thank you, dance, for being there for me. Through every bad day, every performance butterflies and every rejected audition, thank you for always being there to remind me why I continue to dance.

There's nothing quite like moving through space and getting lost in the choreography and the music. It literally takes me to another world... a world where my everyday problems dissolve into pirouettes and leaps. I wish I could dance all the time so I wouldn't feel stressed anymore. I remember when I got accepted as a dance major and I got excited because that meant I would be studying to do what I love. That doesn't mean I've been stressed with dance in my years of doing it... there have been times where I've gotten frustrated with myself because I didn't pick up on choreography fast enough or I couldn't do a certain move. But I've learned that those frustrations are the things that I need to work through and that they ultimately make me a stronger dancer in the long run.

The way I feel when I perform on stage is the best feeling in the world. I get to share my passion and my movements with the audience. There's truly nothing better. If I could perform for the rest of my life, I'd be more than content.

Sometimes I get discouraged when I don't do as well as I would've liked to in an audition or I don't get cast in a performance but I have to keep reminding myself that this is a learning experience and that my setbacks are what's going to push me forward in the long run. It makes me want to try harder and do better the next time. Everything is a learning experience and from every failure, I have only gotten stronger.

Thank you for all the blood, sweat, tears, bruises and used makeup wipes. Thank you for all my friends that I made in between the pirouettes and plies. Thank you for fueling my obsession with glitter and all things sparkly and introducing me to emotions that I didn't know I could feel. Thank you for all my dance teachers and professors through the years and all of the weeks of summer given to intensives instead of being on the beach. Thank you for my muscles and teaching me to love the body that I'm in. Thank you for all the adventures that you have taken me... from Harrisonburg to London, everything I do is to be a better dancer.

I love you always.