This Is What One Body Went Through In Just 8 Years of Running My Company And Trying To Stay Alive On Planet Earth [Please Read And Let It Matter]

I didn’t Google how to spell half these surgeries

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Looking back to not look back

I want you to read this. Please.

I write about health a lot lately, after years of trying to pour myself into my passion and push it as far away into a tidy digital compartment as I could.

I’ve been writing about it more because I’ve been suffering more, so it might not seem like I ever once hid it… could keep it farther… but, all great pain deserves catharsis.

Now that I’m on pause from my company (slowly beginning this summer and then: sky + limit. Just kidding. “Perfectly balanced” is more like the goal), and I’m still not out of any woods as a person, I started to think about all the catharsis I survived through pain, and quantify what a human can do for love. And I want you to read this.

No, I NEED you to read this.

Desperately. Because after years of pushing it adjacent- not in the last couple of years with my degenerating spine, but before, when I was not as vocal with my dance friends (something I think was a demise of sorts, not a pathway), here is what I realized:

We started the company in 2017 and purely since then (not counting anything before), this is what I did with my body for love.

I want to be clear: This was not “I just need to take Zumba for me”.

This was: “I want to believe that dance can be bigger than us”.

And maybe it was? I write about my body winning, and how poorly I became this winter, rather candidly right now… but I FINALLY want to let myself look at what I put a singular human body through too for… Belief. For hope.

Why?

Maybe I need to believe in something bigger again. Maybe I need to show myself that bodies can go through hell for what we hope is love. The love we hope for back.

I understand if you don’t want to read all of this- slip past like a puddle on tile. Maybe it makes you feel uncomfortable? It does, me. But I hope it makes you just… feel.. and then, whatever that feeling is, please consider sharing with that word or even just sharing the word below.

Because I believe in Call To Actions in writing? No. I think it ages things poorly. What will these words look like one day when the dusty diary in my attic - sepia and soft- is littered with callbacks and shout outs?

Yet… I want this hell to have mattered, I think. Don’t we all? Or maybe I want someone who has a hope for something bigger - even if it fails or is imperfect or so are you and your body - to see that the blueprint can be your own. One hurdle doesn’t have to be it. One hit doesn’t have to be all the wind from your lungs. It can, if that’s the case…

But if you believe and need to see that ‘insanity’ is okay… and catharsis can be life saving for awhile… and that hell IS here on earth (but that it shouldn’t matter when flesh and bone takes one tiny, scathing step inside on purpose and finds a stage instead)…

I want this to matter?

In the hallowed echoing halls… I long for a rewind button.

Even if we think our body can’t endure another thing, sometimes we find that not only can it… but we’d do it again if given the chance.

None of us know what we are doing, especially (often?) in business and in the arts, slamming our skulls against glass ceilings.

I wish I was perfectly trained for what once was (though I feel I’m much better for it for what’s now ahead), but so few of us have experience on the first round, get the starter-attempt just right, even if it’s not business or the arts.

The world of both, and the world in general, is lacking in mentors, investors, safety nets. If you know a woman who’s trying to make a nest where one does not yet reside: help however you can. It’s lonely out here, out there. I luckily found some giving birds along the way- a friend or two here, a confidant there- but once the leaves and twigs fall away… the bird, the tree, how lonely we be.

So did it matter? Was it worth it?

I didn’t share as much of this back then (in the beginning) in this quantifiable way because I thought it made me unprofessional. Everything was vague, as often now. Prose along the branches. Details drifted in broken egg shells and feathers. A surgical name dropped here, a date or timeline there. I regret sharing as I did at the end. I regret sharing… But here we are, counting broken shells anyways.

Hell still burns a lot of us, so I thought- incase someone needed to see what a body can do for a birdhouse they love- Here is what YOU can do if the cause is right, and the people are kind, and the hope is big enough.

I’d rewrite, I failed and failed; I regret, I wronged. I wish someone would say “You did okay kid. You really did okay.” I wish I could look in the mirror and tell it to myself. That time has not come… yet.

But I did one thing, for better or worse, and so maybe so can you also, should you want to:

I kept going as long as I could.

This Is What One Body Went Through In Just 8 Years of Running My Company And Trying To Stay Alive On Planet Earth [Please Read And Let It Matter]