There will come a day that even the girl with the highest hopes will have the sudden urge to sit down in the middle of rehearsals, cry and wait for her mommy to come get her to take her home, wrap her up in a snuggie and make her soup.
I am having that day.
In Rockette-land we call it going to the "dark place". It is really easy to find, take a bunch of really hard work, unachievable levels of expected perfection, exhaustion, 10, 390 different marks and depths on a stage, an impossible track in the longest number known to dance and mix it with a girl who is a perfectionist, is a slightly above average dancer dancing beside wickedly above average dancers, and is very unsure of anything related to how she got and kept this job anyway...
While I find my way out of today's dark place with a hot shower and mug of tea I am thinking about just how powerful our minds are. I feel about this topic the way I feel when I see things of discovery channel about their being a bunch of other milky ways out there in space. I feel like...WELL, That just can't be right. But it is. The mind is our single most powerful weapon. I could feel it today as the "dark" started trickling in to my mind, the self-doubt and the feeling like I would never be able to do anything correctly, by the end of the day had turned my body into a machine that believed my mind. I was a mess and dancing inside the worst version of myself.
I am the queen of determination. When I put my mind to something. I make it happen. I think the trick to is realize that this works both ways. You can will yourself to being strong, fearless and powerful. At the same time, if you are not careful the ugly beasts of self-doubt and fear jump in and take over. I think from now on I need to focus on spending some time warming up my soul each morning at rehearsal in addition to my body.
I said to an old friend of mine who encountered a year of massive mess-up's that it is always a new day for it to be day one. The beauty in the sunrise is that each morning we get to wake up and get a fresh start. The only person who can decide what your day will be like is you. Sometimes, life sucks. It can be hard, heartbreaking and frustrating. We have the choice within ourselves to choose how we meet those challenges. We can go to the "dark place" or we can choose to stay positive. I don't always make the right choice, but lucky for me tomorrow is day one.
