Gone, Gone, Gone

So winter arrived at our door on Monday night. Well the cold has been here but the snow finally decided to get serious. I’m supposed to have a crew that clears my driveway but this storm was in the historic range so I guess they were a little behind and didn’t show up on Tuesday so I had to cancel my coaching lesson. Decided I couldn’t wait around for them so I started shoveling early Wednesday in the cold and four hours later, they still hadn’t shown up but the driveway was clear. Now I’m just sore everywhere and hating unreliable snow removal services.

I’m not built to handle long stretches of cold weather. It starts to grind me down. That along with the shoveling meant I was a little brain dead on my lesson last night. And maybe the combination of all those things just put me in a mood where I just felt like I couldn’t do anything right. Not to be super dramatic but one of those lessons where you kind of feel like hanging up the dancing shoes and walking away. Or maybe I’m the only one who ever has those.

I’ve had moments in my dance life when my ego ran ahead of my skills and I’ve been slapped back to reality many times. But I’ve also been able to get to points where the ego was in check but I had a level of confidence in my abilities. Maybe even a little bit of swagger as well. When Kid T and I were clicking, it just worked. I was sort of getting back to that point with JoNY when the pandemic hit and my dance life ground to a halt.

Now, I’m trying to get it back but it is complicated by the fact that, for some reason, my confidence has taken a serious hit. It is possible I’m spending too much time looking back and not giving myself enough credit but it is hard to not feel like I’ve taken a couple of steps backward. Which brings up the question of whether I really want to go through the whole grind and “fake it till you make it” to get back there. And, even if I did want to do this, is it reasonable to expect to be there by June when we have Showcase. I’ll be honest – Showcase will be no fun at all if I’m just inside my head thinking about how bad everything feels.

At that’s what the thing on Saturday was supposed to do for me. Yes, things went just fine but it didn’t feel like a “win”. I had someone talk about how good I looked on Saturday. I said a simple “thank you” while inside I was just feeling like a total fraud. I wanted to launch into all the things that didn’t go well and the critiques I got on things I should be doing better.

I know it was OwnerGuy’s plan to just get me back on the floor in some kind of event so we didn’t drill deeply into the technique behind the steps. Even though I’m the amateur part of the pro/am, I’m supposed to be leading and I want to feel like I’m leading. Not like I’m just there as decoration while she does the steps by herself because she knows her part and doesn’t need me.

And I kind of feel like I’m being pressured into taking more lessons which is something I haven’t felt before. Of course, I used to spend more nights at the studio so maybe this is the difference. As students, we all know that a studio needs to sell lessons and make money to survive. It is just that I don’t really want it to be so obvious.

We talked about Medal Ball and I guess that is the next thing to work towards. Here’s where my higher standards come in. I know I could do a little refreshing on the Silver III steps and do a close enough approximation to check out. I mean the studio doesn’t really have a vested interest in holding students back so I know I would be able to do it. But it doesn’t mean anything to me unless I feel like I deserve it. Trouble is translating that into an action plan. Kind of like I’ll know it when I feel it but that’s hard to work with. So, can I get excited about Medal Ball? Not so much.

I think at the beginning, I was just so happy to be back to dancing because it was a glimpse into the pre-COVID world. Now, I’m wonder if I just left too much behind during the layoff. Or it could have just been a bad day because of the cold and the snow and because I was tired. Guess we’ll see next week.