How sad.
I hated that look. I hated being treated like a charity case, like fragility was the most interesting thing about me.
Ballet was the first thing that ever gave me my body back.
The first time I stepped onto a stage, the world narrowed to movement and breath. When I pulled on pointe shoes, something inside me unlocked. My pain did not disappear, but it transformed. It became something I could channel, something I could command.
On stage, my body stopped being a cage and became a vessel.
I could travel from one end of the floor to the other, leap, spin, extend myself fully into space. For those moments, my blood behaved, my joints listened, my body followed my will instead of fighting it. Dance gave me a freedom I had never known, and I chased it relentlessly.
I trained harder than anyone. I had to. Because every moment I could move felt borrowed, and I refused to waste it.
I was good. Better than good. I could have gone further if the world had been more forgiving. But not many elite institutionswere willing to take a chance on a dancer with grave health issues. Performance was life in those spaces, and if you could not guarantee performance, you were expendable.
So I adjusted.
I went to college. Dance became a minor instead of a destiny. It felt like grief at first, like another door closing. But illness has a way of reshaping you, whether you want it to or not. Through my own struggle, I learned how deeply intertwined the body and mind truly are. How trauma lives in muscle memory. How movement can heal what words cannot reach.
That is how I found dance movement therapy.
People often laugh when I tell them what I do. They think I am joking. I am not.
I am a licensed therapist who specializes in the psychotherapeutic use of movement to further emotional, cognitive, and physical integration. Based on the principle that the body, mind, and spirit are interconnected, movement can change thoughts and feelings.
I am the on-staff therapist at the Winston Hills Dance Academy. I work with dancers whose bodies have betrayed them through injury, illness, or trauma. I teach clinics. I consult with other institutions. I sit with dancers who are grieving the bodies they used to have and help them learn how to love the ones they still live in.
In helping them, I help myself.
The nurse checks my vitals, adjusts the drip, and gives me a gentle smile. The medication dulls the edges of the pain, but it never fully leaves. It never does.
This is the cost of forgetting.
No matter how far I dance, no matter how free I feel when music fills the room, my body always calls me back. And I have learned to live in that tension, between captivity and release,pain and purpose, the girl in the hospital bed and the woman who refuses to stop moving.
Ballet did not cure me.
But it saved me.
And even now, lying here with pain humming through my veins, I close my eyes and picture a stage, wide and open, waiting for me to cross it once again.
The pain meds have softened the edges by the time the door opens again. The room is dim, curtains half drawn, machines humming softly around me. I am exhausted in a way that feels cellular, like my bones have run a marathon without me.
I know she’s there before I open my eyes.
Zaria has a presence that gently fills space with her warmth. When I finally look over and see her standing at the foot of the bed. I notice her hair is pulled back hastily and her jacket still on like she forgot to take it off. Her chest rises and falls too fast. She dropped everything. I can see it in her face.
“Hey,” she says softly while crossing the room in three quick steps. Her hand finds mine. The warmth of her touch reminds me that she’s my safe space.
“I’m here.”
My throat tightens. “Amiyah called you?”
She nods. “I didn’t even finish my shift.” Her thumb brushes over my knuckles with a familiar intimacy. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Before I can answer, the door opens again.
My sister, Ajaih steps in first. Her eyes already scanning the room like she’s preparing for battle. Maverick follows closebehind her. His face is tense with worry. Knox brings up the rear. He’s quiet but alert and holding a bag I know is filled with food because that’s how he loves on us all. They all try to look calm for my sake but fear has a way of leaking through the cracks.
