Essentials tonight.   Lovely, easy class: port de bras and épaulement hung together all through barre, full splits again, grand battement mostly sans barre, back to doing single-leg relevés on both sides.   I was able to do our sous-sous-échappe exercise (also sans barre, because there’s really no excuse for using the barre for that at this point).

No jumps tonight, which is for the best.   The calf is definitely just a touch sore, so jumps probably would’ve been a bridge too far.  Little jumps and Sissones next week, I think (and whatever on the left leg).   Temps levee, on the other hand, is at least two weeks out (on the right leg).

Across the floor we just did glissade-pas de bourree.  Super easy, so I made an effort to make it look pretty (and succeeded, if I do say so myself).

Today was one of those interesting days on which I felt okay about my body  throughout class. I’m still wrestling with being okay with my body.   That’s going to be a long process for me.

Still, it does help when your turnout works, and your extensions are high, and your arms work, and you don’t dance like a squid on too much Ritalin.  Then you can at least say to yourself, “Okay, so I can be grateful that my body is capable.”

For a long time I really struggled with that idea, because I thought that recognizing that was supposed to magically make the bad feelings go away, and when it didn’t it hurry and I resented it.   (I also resented the heck out of the idea that people wanted to tell me how I should feel: and while I’m sure some of them actually did, a lot of people who have said, “… But it’s great that your body Works!” probably really didn’t intend that.)

It turns out that I’m not stuck forcing myself to only feel one or the other.

Instead, the dysphoric hurtiness and the gratitude can kind of coexist, like siblings in the back of the car, elbowing each-other now and then but also not killing each-other, which really kind of feels like a big deal, to be honest.

So the difficulty, the dysphoria that may or may not every go away, that’s still there, but I’ve reached a point at which I somehow simultaneously manage to be grateful for some stuff about my body (and not just my feet).

It doesn’t make the dysphoria not hurt, but it makes it less cognitively dissonant to sit with the dysphoria in the face of an emerging appreciation for what is rather an immense array of capability.  I don’t know if I’m making any sense, here, because it’s such a weird, new idea for me (I’m sure that folks who are better-versed in dialectical behavior therapy are all like “Well, duuuh!” ;))

Okay.   That’s enough trying-to-asplain for now.

Anyway, I plan to go home and RICE my leg and rest it well tomorrow.   This coming week I have a bazillion things to do, including a doctor’s appointment to discuss meds.  I will try to also get caught up on comment replies (which I’ve been handling kind of willy-nilly) and reading all the awesome blogs that you guys have shared with me and, I guess, also shared me with 😀

No Wednesday class this week.

G’night, everybody.