A letter from me

Dear Dancer,

I don’t really know where to start. I wish I’d had the opportunity to write to you before I was in the position I’m in now. The person who could relate to you the most was the one 10 years ago, struggling in the studio. The person who could probably give you the best advice was the one six years ago, before I started working with so many dancers in clinic.

There’s a strange confusion as I write because I automatically want to write to so many of you individually. I know so many stories inside out now. From what the injury was, to the correction in class that frustrates you the most, the rehab exercise you secretly hate, how annoyed you are at a life event, how frustrated you are with a person… and, in some cases, even what your favourite food is.

It’s hard not to write what I know at least one of you needs to hear, when the version of me five years ago would simply have written to my younger self. The start of all my work came from writing to that younger version of me. All of my Instagram posts are aimed at what 16-year-old me needed to hear. There’s something really therapeutic about that process. It feels like leaving footprints behind, little pieces of information and advice, as I continue to learn and grow throughout my career.

Every now and then, someone walks through the clinic door and I see parts of myself in them. I feel some of their experiences so deeply that it's hard to stay completely in my lane as a physio... and, if I'm honest, sometimes I don't. That's why this project exists. It exists because I can't just hand out exercises and move on because I know how complicated the relationship between your body and dance can be. Recovery isn't just about tissues healing or getting stronger. It's about identity, confidence, fear, grief, hope and trying to make sense of all of those things while the rest of the world seems to carry on as normal.

Because life does keep moving. You go through an injury or a major setback and suddenly realise that everything else carries on. Classes continue. Your friends keep training. Your year group graduates. People get contracts. Shows happen without you. No one really stops. No one quite understands. Or at least that's what it feels like.

The biggest lesson I've learnt is that you've got to stay in your own lane and understand that everyone else is in theirs. But at the same time, it's important to know that there are people out there who have walked this road before you.

So much of what we feel during injury is shared. Maybe there's no one in your year or your friendship group who understands, but I promise someone has felt those huge emotions before. Someone has been that frustrated. Someone has questioned whether they'd ever dance again. Someone has hit rock bottom while still trying to juggle family, friends, training and everything else life throws at them.

And now you're probably thinking,

"That doesn't make it any easier right now."

I know.

But every single one of those people kept going. They struggled. They stumbled. They found ways forward, even when they couldn't yet see where they were heading. And, eventually, they had a story to tell.

Their story.

This is part of yours. If you're reading these letters, it's probably a significant chapter too.

When I talk about staying in your own lane, I think what I really mean is owning this part of your story. All of it. Especially the difficult parts. When we acknowledge how hard something is, we give ourselves permission to actually feel it. To be sad. To be angry. To be frustrated. Then we can start asking ourselves what comes next. Can I ask for help? Can I keep showing up to rehab, even when I don't feel motivated? Can I let myself rest without feeling guilty? Can I be kind to myself while I'm figuring this out? One of the biggest parts of my own story was that I never really owned how hard it was. If I’m honest, I still find it difficult to acknowledge just how much I was dealing with. I've always felt like someone else had it worse, or that I was overreacting. But the truth is, my journey through dance school wasn't easy.

Alongside chronic pain and injury, I experienced seizures every other day for about a year during my second year of training. I didn't really process any of that until about three years later. I just kept going. I put on a brave face because I thought that was what I was supposed to do but our bodies have a way of asking us to listen. And if we don't, eventually they stop asking.

For me, that looked like years of overwhelming fatigue when I finally did do some processing and acknowledging later on. I'd drag myself to a one-hour lecture at uni, come home and sleep for hours, wake up to teach in the evening, then go straight back to bed again. Looking back now, I don't wish I'd been tougher, I actually wish I'd been kinder to myself. I wish I'd understood that resting wasn't giving up and that asking for help wasn't weakness. Acknowledging how hard things felt didn't make me any less resilient or any less hardworking.

So if there's one thing I hope you take from this letter, it's this:

Please don't measure your recovery against someone else's highlight reel. Your job right now isn't to catch up. It isn't to prove how tough you are. It isn't to pretend everything is okay. Your job is simply to take the next step. Then the one after that. Then the next one after that. Trust that the version of you reading this letter today won't be the same version of you reading it a year from now.

And maybe, one day, you'll be the one writing,

Dear Dancer...