Core Strength

Let me put it this way, the edges of the paper are the hardest to fill. There are a few reasons for this, first, there’s actually a lot more surface there than you might suspect. The center is small, as you travel out, the sheer square footage multiplies. This is most apparent when you create a repeating pattern: you fill the center first, then chop your work in half, and then in half again. You marry east to west and north to south, and now it’s your corners that are filled, and the large plus sign that is your new center is blank. What seemed like 80% was really only 50%.

Second, an edge is a sort of boundary, and some artists have boundary problems. Jackson Pollock had a problem with edges, with which I always related strongly. When you start a work it is all possibility, but then at a certain point you must decide if you are staying within that artificial boundary that is the arbitrary edge of your paper or canvas, or break through it. The sculptural component of the work, the object-ness of the piece needs reckoned with. The easiest way to make something look like a slice of something larger is to make something larger and slice it.

Let me put it another way, the technology we have yet to master to get us to Mars is the psychology of the astronauts on board the vessel. How do you keep yourself healthy in an artificial environment? Eventually, everyone, and that means everyone, caves. We were not meant to be trapped, confined. We are not robots, we internalize a lack of control, and it corrupts us.

Let me put it yet another way. I thought of myself as a beetle. Not literally, of course, this is a metaphor, our third for this post, I know. I am also keeping track. Stay with me.

I struggled for so long to bear up under a force that I perceived to be cracking my shell. I was setting myself up to be, or at least feel, smashed. Because I am not a beetle. I do not have an exoskeleton, which is a blessing, and is also why I feel everything that pokes at, that rubs against, that warms to the point of drying and chafing my tender, sensitive, mushy flesh, and yet in truth I am a human and able to bear such things precisely because that flesh can take the damage and heal itself. My strength does not reside in my shell, but in my spine, in the muscles that surround and protect it, that hold me up, that give me grace and form. My structure, my strength, lies in my core.

This past fall I turned 31 and I was silently, lowkey panicked. I had come out of a series of perceived failures frustrated and feeling like I didn't really learn anything actionable from any of it. I felt trapped. I had goals, but they were more akin to dreams in that I wasn’t sure if I was working toward them, or just thinking about them while I worked. I knew I needed to break the cycle somehow, but didn’t know where the breaks on this thing were.

I reached out and snatched at a lifeline, instinctively. As a child I had taken dance classes and liked them, and I knew I needed to move, but I didn't know how. I knew I needed to be shown. So I started taking Barre classes.

Barre takes place in a ballet studio, which is a lovely, feminine environment, and the movement is very controlled, and I wanted to feel in control. It is a routine that resembles the warm up training for a dancer, and is something like Pilates, but is also something like physical therapy, all of which was exactly what I needed. I forgot what it was like to feel new at something, to allow myself to be bad at something, to not feel I needed to justify my expertise to exist in a place. I had forgotten the joy, the freedom, of being a student.

In the intervening months I have learned so much about movement, I have gained an understanding of it that can only be achieved through doing. A deep, intuitive knowledge of my body in space, activated through routine in the memory of my muscles. I am building strengths, many varieties of strength that work together, a sort of braided line of strength, an integrated mind/body core. Strength in my torso first and foremost, that lends strength to each of my limbs. Strength in listening, in adapting auditory instructions and integrating them with my evolving knowledge of what my body can and should do. And a psychological strength that comes from pushing myself, over and over, realizing my capacity as it expands. Learning to trust myself, and my experience of the world.

The repeated action of this is how I get better. It is work. It is repetitive, but it has an immediate application, and so it is rewarding to me. A fellow student once asked me before class what my favorite part of Barre was, and I said, “I feel I move through space better, not just in class, but in the world now, every day.”

Slowly I’ve been shedding things I've carried for too long, pain that I wouldn't let heal, shame about things that went so terribly wrong, so completely the opposite of what I had intended that it made my head spin. I picked through the smoldering rubble, letting it burn my hands, trying to save the pieces, thinking I could make something out of those pieces. Thinking there were clues in the pieces that would help prevent it all from happening again. I had thought I could get stronger by hiding in a corner, waiting to be recognized. I had thought the world was a giant game and someone was keeping track of who’s turn it was, that they would come tap me on the shoulder and tell me when I could go.

Worrying is work, hard work, with no reward. Barre has taught me (reminded me?) to seek out projects where the work is it's own reward, so that I am guaranteed one. Everything else does eventually fall away; if you stop clapping for it, it will learn to survive on its own, or it will die. The life I choose to support is my own.