Feature Articles

The Dance
Contributed by Kristen Trichler

In a ballet I remember from my childhood, the story begins when the protagonist, a young girl, puts on a beautiful pair of slippers and begins to dance. Her exquisite movements are deliberate and graceful. She has waited her entire childhood in fervent expectation of this opportunity to dance, and her ballet reflects her delight. When the young girl finishes her ballet, she bends to unlace her slippers.

Yet the ballet slippers are magical slippers. They cannot be unlaced. A powerful charm binds the young girl to her new dancing shoes. The slippers possess her feet and force them to continue dancing. Only death can break the unforgiving spell.

The young girl's dance is no longer deliberate and graceful as she realizes her fate. Desperation fills her eyes as she battles for control over her own feet. She spins wildly across the town square. She bounds into fountains and twirls into stone walls. The slippers' relentless drive to dance deprives the young girl of her ability to sleep or eat. She has lost all control.

Eventually, however, the dancer realizes the one thing that she can control. She dances to a train station and onto the tracks. There … she twirls her final dance.

Kristen running in a collegiate competition.

Far too often, our athletic passions can become obsessions, which cause destruction. This seems to happen frequently to female athletes, in particular, and in many areas of physical exercise.

Indeed, sometimes our initial joy in athletics can turn into something dangerous, even deadly. Running was my dance through life. Passion gained momentum and became obsession. Obsession spun out of control and spiraled into destruction. In high school, I identified myself as a runner. In college, I was an NCAA bulimic runner. Either way, I was a runner, and only death would part me from that title.

And it nearly ended that way, when I attempted to take my own life.

In a sense, near-death stripped me of my runner identity; my runner soul died even though an overdose did not kill my flesh. After my suicide attempt, I wanted so badly to lace up my running shoes once again and flee from my life. Yet running could not save me. I wondered what the girl with the ballet slippers would do if she had survived from the train. Would she have still pursued dance as she had dreamed for in her childhood? Or would dance now hold overwhelming repulsion?

My life's passion now became my personal battlefield. Any run I started inevitably led back to my house in a matter of minutes. Running no longer provided me refuge from my pain…

I now realize that joy and health rests somewhere between extreme track star and total couch potato–the balance is key. It takes time and gentle self-nurturing to once again enjoy my body, to understand that moderation in exercise is healthy and fun. This knowledge has made me the most fit that I have ever been in my life, emotionally and physically. And so the dance, the struggle to live a full yet balanced life, goes on.