It was January 2024, in France Fontainebleau, in the depths of winter. I was in my bathroom, my feet on the cold tiles, pants down, freezing my ass off, mindlessly scrolling on my phone, like a degenerate. Winter in Europe is depressing, but that’s ok, Because I was waiting for an email. An all important email, that will alter my life, mine and John’s life.
Just a month ago, I had just finished rehearsal and I was standing at the train station platform in Chaville waiting for the train to start my 2 hour journey back to Fontainebleau. Similarly, I was also doom scrolling on my phone when I received an email from London City Ballet. It was an invitation to their auditions. I was not expecting this, because I was going to give it all up. I was struggling to keep dancing, to keep my motivations up. Having also received multiple rejections from other companies as well as struggling to find a common location that I could dance and John could find a job. I accepted that my time with dance was finally up. It was difficult having to fight against life and I was tired. But this email brought back hope, hope that I could keep dancing in a professional company, hope that I was good enough to dance in Europe, in London.
Therefore, as the email notification drops in my phone, I can feel my heart rate increasing. And even though I promised John that we will open the email together, I am too excited to wait so I click on it.
So, I went for the audition and after a somewhat rocky audition class was even called back for the second day. Soon after, John also received good news being invited for an interview for a consulting job in London. Things were falling into place, everything made sense. All the uncertainty we have faced, leaving our jobs in Singapore to come to Europe, all the suffering, living on a budget, the handwork we had done was coming to fruition. We could start our lives in London, live our consulting and dancing dreams. I could speak English there, not having to struggle with my French anymore. My brother was in London, we will be close to family. It’s like I hacked the code of life.
And so there I am in my bathroom, in the cold with my pants down, in my vulnerable state, receiving news that will throw me into till date the most vulnerable period of my life. It is this moment which I realised, that nothing in life happens as expected, no matter how the dots connected or how all the pieces of the puzzle seem to fit. Life has a mind of it’s own and there is no way of controlling it.
And this is also the moment when my life in transition began.
That was the story of the moment which I finally let go of dance in my life
Having spent almost my whole life dancing, I have officially retired from the dance world in 2024. I still have very mixed feelings about it. I miss it so much sometimes till the point I feel a heavy lump of sadness and regret in my heart, but other times, I feel gratitude and happiness now that I have moved on from it and am living and experiencing other things in life, finally feeling freedom. But lastly also anger. Out of all the emotions that I expected to have from retirement, anger is not one of them. I was angry at how linear my life had became.
Linearity
It was like a dream come true. Since I was a teen, I worked hard, slowly hitting milestones, to achieve my long term goal of joining a dance company. And when that happened, I continued grinding to climb the ranks in the company. It does not seem too long ago when I performed my first classical solo in school or when I performed professionally for the first time on stage at the Esplanade.
I grew up in the dance world. I was 16 when I left home to train in New Zealand, and 19 when I joined the company back in Singapore. My values, morals, world view was shaped in this industry. I had to grow up fast, because of this trajectory of my life, it taught me to really focus on things that I want at a young age. By making a choice or a decision, I had to have clarity in what I wanted to do. I had to understand myself, what were my strengths, what I really enjoyed and was passionate about, in order to make a major decision. Which also meant giving up certain things and other paths, in order to focus on my goal.
What I learned from my days dancing is that hard work is vital. The competition is tough in this industry, there are so many talented people, in fact having talent a prerequisite to enter. After a while, your love for dance and your natural talents can only carry you so far. When the realities of the craft hits you. It really is discipline and your tenacity that is going to see you through. The long hours in the theater, the grueling rehearsal, is mentally and physically draining, working everyday on seemingly the smallest detail is incredibly tedious and frustrating. But when you do eventually improve, accomplish something and do the show on stage, it is one of the greatest feelings ever. It’s like all the good things come together at a singular point in time during the performance – the adrenaline, the music, the intensity – these moments are indescribable And I understood from my career, that so many hours and hard work goes into that one moment.
Fear
And just going off tangent a little, I realized one important quality that was crucial in my journey was fearlessness. It is really interesting that when I was younger, I didn’t fully grasp the concept of fear. I made big decisions early on—like giving up a traditional education, and moving countries alone. I was so driven by the “want”, that it eradicated all fear and doubt in my mind. I miss that carefree attitude now that I’m older. I’m less spontaneous, more calculative, I also over think a lot more and and certain experiences from the past pull me away from experiencing new things – something I am still working on to try and change. To not judge too quickly and to keep an open mind. Also maybe it was simply just that my prefrontal cortex as a teenager was not fully developed and I was less risk adverse, which really made me speculate and think whether I made the right choices.
Double Edged Sword
And so nowadays I think more on how clarity and linearity is a double edged sword. Striving and working till you’ve achieved your dream. Achieving “success” at a young age and go on living it. There’s a romanticized image to this scenario. What I overlooked and have come to realized is the narrowness of this path and how eventually stifling it can become, almost like because of my conviction towards a goal, I pushed myself into a corner, where, now that I have left dancing, I find it hard to see what options I have. This linearity sheltered me from the real workings of the world and just about left me unequipped to adapt to change. I had no experience in how to navigate this dilemma.I had such a clear and direct journey, but now I am having to go through that delayed stage of confusion and exploration to figure out what I want in life almost akin to puberty. This period left me questioning difficult and uncomfortable questions in life “What is my purpose in life now, my purpose in the world even.” “Should I even have a purpose?” To even take a step forward, I also struggled answering simple questions like, “What do I like to do outside of dance? What other things was I good at? Should I go back to school? Should I just do something to occupy the time?” It felt like having to create something on a blank canvas with no goals or guidelines.
And during this period of uncertainty and confusion, it forced me to rethink my values and worldview. The act of peeling back so many layers of myself, to come to terms with how I was feeling, was humbling and exposing.
And now the fear that was non existent when I was young, is coming at me at full force. I have never felt this variety of fear. It’s the fear that is paralyzing, not knowing what I should do, what CAN I do. Losing my earning power, my control of my life, my confidence and identity and I feeling like I had nothing left without dance made me start to resent my decision on how I spent my life only doing 1 thing, only having 1 skill set, limiting my options of what I could do next. And I mostly hated that I was so afraid. The fear was paralyzing and crippling and I hated that I felt so small and worthless.
Change
“This is why the profoundest changes tend to happen not willed but spawned by fertile despair — the surrender at the rock bottom of suffering, where the old way of being has become just too painfully untenable and a new way must be found.” – Maria Popova
After a year, I still often struggle with this internally. However, one thing is that I have accepted is that I am work in progress. And maybe I will never have clear answers to these larger questions and that is ok because it is actually the process of change. The result of transformation is always unknown, a surprise, on the other side and that is inherently what I desire out of this. Maria Popova summarizes very well in her article, The paradoxes and possibilities of transformation, that “we are simply incapable of imagining ourselves on the other side of a profound change, because the present self doing the imagining is the very self that needs to have died in order for the future self being imagined to emerge.”
As human beings, we are uncomfortable sitting in the unknown. I grew up with the mentality that one should have a vague vision or goal, and keep working towards it. So I’ve always had that fear of aimlessness and losing direction in my life, therefore losing control of my life. In this period of change and transformation, this mindset gave me a lot of anxiety.
However in the book, Finding meaning in the Second Half of Life, James Hollins brilliantly discusses the relationship between anxiety and depression. To move to unfamiliar territory and embrace change, anxiety will always be with us. To not consciously make a choice and to stay in your past is depressive and regressive.
“The struggle for growth is not for us alone; it is not self indulgent. It is our duty, and service, to those around us as well. For through such departures from the comfortable we bring a larger gift to them.” – James Hollis
Overtime, I start to relish this experience with a tinge of masochism. To accept the growing pains of learning to embrace this new season in life…and most importantly to be ok to be with this uncomfortable feeling of growth. Which is really easier said than done. Many times the assurances of moments of clarity will be clouded by emerging doubts and uncertainty along the way. But that is the nature of change and is an ongoing challenge.
Embracing openness and a beginner’s mindset has been something to strive for in this new season. As described by Rick Rubin in The Creative Act, “Our minds seek rules and limits”,“We develop beliefs that give us a coherent framework, reduce options, and a false sense of security.” Learning to be open, having a “beginner’s mindset” and not being held back by our limited beliefs, helps stretch our point of view and explore more perspectives, which may in turn help uncover something new about ourselves.
Therefore, going back to my statement, of this linearity as a double edge sword, maybe it is not so much a double edge sword but rather I just wasn’t prepared for this new shift in my life. So although my conscious decisions brought on this change, I did not expect the largeness of it.
And so as put across by Adam Phillips in On Wanting Change –
“There is no description for life without and account of the changes that are possible within it”
In Transit 
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