Gentle Readers, a picture from today:

It’s a screenshot of a screenshot bc I’m too lazy at the moment to go get my phone and upload the original screenshot.

Anyway. I snagged this from a video I recorded of a class I took this afternoon.

There were a few nice moments in that video, as well as some that would’ve been nice if I wasn’t doing one or more small, incorrect things.

To my eye, this pic falls in the latter category. Or, well … Maybe it would be more fair to say that it falls in the grey area between the two categories?

So I posted it to Insta because I think it’s kind of funny—I’m clearly committed to this exercise that I’m doing, but also clearly (to my own eye) trying not to crash into the furniture (big mover + small space = potential disaster).

It turns out that maybe not everyone sees this shot the same way I do.

Here’s what I see immediately:

• Not quite on my leg (if you draw a plumb line from my hip socket, in fact, I’m quite a bit behind the ball of my foot)
• Back arm too high
• That stupid thumb again
• Neck retracted
• Supporting leg could be a bit more turned out
• My back leg might not be straight back? (The lighting makes it hard to tell. Rationally, I think it might actually be placed correctly, but my brain keeps quibbling about it anyway.)
• Same quibble about whether my hips are square (with the same caveat)
• At least my back is lifted and my leg is straight, high, and turned out?

What several other people see immediately:

• A nice arabesque.

So … As a dancer, you do have to learn to critique your own technique. If you want to master ballet vocabulary, it’s necessary.

But I think sometimes we get so caught up in criticism that we need to be shaken out of it.

Yes, it’s important to see what we’re doing wrong. But it’s just as important to see what we’re doing right.

Ballet attracts … okay, all kinds of people, really. It retains people who have an taste for focusing on details and working like crazy to overcome faults. It retains people who aren’t too proud of themselves—and maybe, too often, people who aren’t proud enough of themselves.

No, this arabesque isn’t perfect. But there’s a lot there to be proud of (not in the “I’m better than you” sense—just in the quiet way one feels when one works hard and improves on things).

A lot of work goes into getting that back leg high without compromising the placement of the hip. Same for keeping the back that high, working the gensture leg against its opposite shoulder to make a strong, turned-out position.

Yesterday, after a class in which I (still working off my two-week-long sinus-infection nap) felt hella weak, a teacher who I respect quite a lot told me she can tell I’m a very well-trained dancer.

That meant a great deal to me, as I still tend to think of myself almost entirely in terms of my faults. But I have, in fact, come a long way, even in the past year, while dancing under some very unusual conditions.

Sometimes we meet people who only see their own strengths, and it’s easy to regard them as delusional (I mean, not that we’re not all at least a little delusional! But That’s Another Post™). Like, seriously, everyone’s got faults.

But it’s just as delusional to see only faults.

We have to learn to walk in the middle and see both.

By which I mean, really, that I have to.

So I’m going to work on that.

Like: yeah, there’s some faults there, totally. That’s fine. I’m human.

But also, seriously? That is a nice arabesque.