Riley+K’s+Final+AmEx+2015+Speech


 * Eating disorders (more specifically within the ballet community) **

As some, if not most, of you are aware, I am a ballet dancer, and have been dancing for 11-12 years. Seven of those years have been spent at the studio that I’m currently at, and I’ve performed in roughly 20 performances, including small in-studio shows. Out of those 20, I have been in 10 different ballets, and have learned choreography from many others throughout the years.

Out of all of these ballets, my favorite has always been Nutcracker. I could listen to Snow music in July, and if you were to play something from it right now I would probably be able to do at least one version of that dance. Besides that, there was a magic to Nutcracker. Everyone would bundle against the Ventura chill for warm-up, Christmas spirit radiated off of everyone backstage, and I got a little miracle every year that would boost my ego. There are no unitards, and my costumes would suddenly become a couple of inches larger on me.

I don’t know if this was just because of me stretching it out after a while, my sweat making it expand, little fairies messing with it or me becoming more and more used to not needing to breathe, but whatever it was, I felt great. I would merrily skip down to the green room, where some of the moms would immediately groan because now they have to adjust my costume to not be loose on me.

Indeed, Nutcracker was magical. Until this last year.

For some reason, a costume that fit perfectly one day burst at the seams the next. Whenever someone tried to hook my costume, I would start to think “Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten anything earlier…” then I would immediately dismiss the thought, because I was terrified of what it would lead to. After a while though, the thought became more and more frequent. I would cut down on how much I ate, but that didn’t work. I would think after each rehearsal about how much I needed to lose weight.

The final straw was on the day of one of the performances, during a quick change. Usually you will have a quick changer, someone who helps you change your costume.

For whatever reason, my quick changer wasn’t where my next costume was, so I did as much as I could by myself. You can’t really hook a bodice on the back by yourself, so I was looking for someone to hook me really quick. One mom, who was herding small children, had seen me looking really desperate and came behind me to help. She’d probably never even touched a bodice before (because her daughter is too young to wear one right now), but I was appreciative of the effort. However, she was having a lot of trouble. I was starting to pull away and find someone else when one of the teachers came up and asked if we needed help. I’d thought “Yay! She’s worn bodices before, this isn’t her first time backstage, perfect!” Instead of getting behind me and hooking the costume herself, she reached around my waist and squeezed.

I stood there, one woman trying to get the hooks and bars together while the other one was literally trying to squeeze me into my costume. She’d looked up at me and said “This probably doesn’t make you feel human, does it?” I’d probably looked like I was about to burst into tears and tell her that no, I didn’t feel human. I felt like a sausage being squeezed into it’s casing.

Instead I just laughed it off and tried to forget the experience as quickly as possible.

I’d cut down on meals, I’d counted calories, I tried to make it work. I wanted to keep that special Nutcracker magic, but it became a lost cause.

While eating disorders are a huge problem among young women, they are even more so within the ballet community.

When you take a ballet class, you only wear a leotard, tights, and ballet shoes. There is absolutely nothing you can hide. You can’t really help but compare yourself to your friends, and create an almost impossible ideal for yourself. Of course I’m not going to have the legs of my friend who’s 6 feet tall, but that’s not going to stop me from looking at her legs, then mine, and thinking about how stumpy my legs are.

The ballet mentality can be vicious and unforgiving. You’re supposed to be critical of yourself and how you’re dancing so that you can improve, but it’s all too easy to turn being critical of how high you can get your leg up to how much stomach fat you see in the mirror.

There was a study a couple of years ago from the University of Pittsburgh that “suggests that eating disorders are still a significant issue for serious dance students. The study recruited 29 women with an average age of 19 years, and then compared them with samples of women with eating disorders and with healthy comparison women. Twenty-two of the dancers were from a college-based dance conservatory, five were in a professional dance company, and two were in an apprenticeship school that prepares students for professional dance careers. Eighty-three percent of the dancers met lifetime criteria for an eating disorder: 6.9% for anorexia nervosa (AN); 10.3% for bulimia nervosa, 10.3% for AN+BN, and 55.0% for eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS).”

I used to always wonder why eating disorders were so common amongst ballet dancers. I mean, if you’re dancing long hours then you need food to keep you going, right?

Having an eating disorder is much more complicated than ‘eating vs. not eating.’ When I’d Googled the definition of ‘eating disorder’ it said “any of a range of psychological disorders characterized by abnormal or disturbed eating habits.” An eating disorder isn’t solely based on how much food you eat or how you dispose of it, it’s also how your brain is affecting how you look at food.

I’d finally understood the phrase “dancers don’t eat, we look at pictures of food and we cry” when preparing for our most recent performance Snow White.

One of my parts was skunk soloist, whose costume is a black unitard with a fuzzy black and white stripe the goes down your back and is attached to your arm.

It should be noted that my biggest fear, next to spiders, is the satan-like unitard.

I hated how even though I loved the sass and flair the dance itself had to offer, I couldn’t look at it with more than a luke-warm fondness because of the costume that I would have to wear.

In preparation for this, I decided that I would try the liquid diet. Nothing too crazy, just replacing breakfast and lunch with smoothies. This was the fastest, safest way I could think of to get close to the results I’d wanted. But, I couldn’t see anything change. Somewhere along the line the liquid diet became the occasional smoothie, but other than that nothing else. Every time I started to feel hungry, I would immediately think of that skunk unitard, which would kill my appetite completely.

The occasional smoothie became just not eating. I just had some water for breakfast, “forgot” to pack a lunch, and made some half-assed excuse to my parents as to why I didn’t want dinner.

Fortunately, this lasted for all of a week.

While I was lucky enough to pull myself out of this, the same can’t be said for a frighteningly large number of dancers.

I want to make something clear: While what I went through sucked, and yeah I still have some issues with how I look at myself, it’s not that bad compared to what so many dancers go through. It’s terrifying to think that there are so many young dancers starving themselves months at a time, telling themselves it’ll make them dance better, or clinging to a white porcelain bowl because they think that that’s the only way they have a shot at being pretty.

Food should not be the enemy.

I want to grow old in an America where slightly pudgier ballet dancers DON’T hate themselves because they don’t have the ideal “dancer body,” which in reality very few people actually have.

Really, I want to grow old in an America where dancers with eating disorders is no longer the norm, and see the numbers of people with eating disorders go down.

To conclude my speech, I would like to symbolically give eating disorders the middle finger. *bites cookie* There is nothing wrong with food, and I’m going to keep telling myself this until one day I can actually believe it.

http://www.recoveryranch.com/articles/eating-disorders/ballet-dancers-at-risk-for-eating-disorders/
 * Sources: **

Personal experience