Bodies of Christmas Past

I love Christmas. I truly, unironically love it. Medieval carols, candles, deep jewel tones nestled in fragrant evergreen, hosts of tiny winter woodland creatures, herb-infused spiced wine, a whole vaguely medieval vibe if you will. (And yes, I maintain that aesthetic even for Christmases in Hawaii, but with the obvious addition of beach.) But there’s something big missing from that list. Glaringly big. Having been a ballet dancer for most of my life, Christmas has been dominated by one thing: Nutcracker!

Now, a lot of professional ballet dancers HATE Nutcracker. It’s a chore—a chore that subsidizes the rest of the company’s season, but a chore nonetheless. This is obviously valid. Same choreography, often the same casting, year after year after year. Besides getting boring, it can bring focus to feelings of stagnation and jealousy if you are not moving up the casting ladder the way you would like. As someone who never made it to the upper echelons of the Nutcracker ladder, I can relate to all this. But still? I love Nutcracker! And eight years retired, I miss it terribly every Christmas.

I could wax romantic about the whys and wherefores of my Nutcracker love for pages and pages, but let’s just get to the crux of the matter, shall we? I’ll never do Nutcracker again. I simply, physically, can’t.

Like many dancers, I spent years dancing through pain and injuries, and right around 30, when they had finally had enough, those injuries banded together and came for me. What ultimately got me was an annular tear at L5-S1 (a torn disc in my lower spine) likely caused by compensation around a labral tear in my left hip. Annular tears often heal; labral tears don’t. By the time all that was properly sorted out and diagnosed—about two years after I had been somewhat unceremoniously dumped out of the ballet world—I was in constant pain, had trouble putting my shoes on, and had to lay down for about half an hour every time I cleaned the litter box. Oh, how far I had fallen. I was deep in the hole, and it was not pretty.

To understand the full extent of what the loss of my body meant to me, I’ll need to give you some backstory: It’s a minor miracle I had even the modest professional ballet career I had. You see, I broke my neck as a kid. A tree branch fell square on my head and knocked me to the ground, breaking my C7 in the process. (The C7 is easy to find, it’s the bony bump along the spine right where the neck meets the shoulders. Lots of muscles attach there. Feel it? Yeah, I snapped it clean off!) I had what’s called a “clay-shoveler fracture,” and I’m exceedingly lucky that my neck broke in such a stable way, as opposed to say, a compression fracture. While I do have some long-term effects, I absolutely got off easy, and even as a kid I understood that. So once the bone fully healed, about a year later, I latched onto ballet as a way to fulfill the physical potential I came so close to losing.

Recently, I learned of another (probable) lingering effect of that tree incident: I suffer from bilateral Meniere’s disease, and have since my early teens. For the uninitiated, Meniere’s is a rare disease of the inner ear that causes hearing loss and vertigo. Luckily, I never had a full blown vertigo attack until my mid-thirties, but I had always gotten dizzy very easily and balance does not come naturally. I also lose the hearing in one ear if I get dehydrated, so, about halfway through every ballet class, and often on stage as well. (I, ummm, just thought this was normal?) Obviously, this is not the most promising constellation of traits for an aspiring ballerina, but it…. explained a lot.

I was never a good turner. ONCE I did a quintuple inside pirouette while just messing around in the studio, and I literally interrupted rehearsal with an exclamation of utter surprise and squeaked “did anybody see that?!” For context, getting consistent double pirouettes had been a major victory for me. I also couldn’t use my neck with the same expressive freedom as other dancers. One of my most constant corrections was “Move your head, Marisa! You look like a paper doll!” I beat myself up about this a lot at the time thinking it betrayed a fundamental lack of artistry; now I know I was just doing what I had to do to remain vertical.

All in all, it made no sense for me to pursue ballet professionally. The deck was stacked against me in some pretty serious ways. So after years of work, the fact that I could dance, and dance well, that against all the odds I had turned my body into my instrument, my voice, reaffirmed to me every day that I was a survivor. I wasn’t just someone to whom things happened. For years, my considerable physical abilities were the bedrock on which my trust in myself rested. I could move, and therefore I was a creature with agency.

And then I lost it, with very little warning, in a way that was completely out of my control. Things had happened to me, once again. My last performance of Nutcracker was as a guest artist at Chattanooga Ballet in Tennessee, at the age of 27. I was doing lead Marzipan and Arabian. And as these things often go, I had no idea that over the following two years, my body would slowly collapse, and I would be done dancing for good.

And so every Christmas, as Tchaikovsky plays in supermarkets and YouTube ads, I think, “Maybe I should go see Nutcracker.” But it never quite happens. I think I’m afraid it will hurt too much. I’m afraid it will plunge me into the dark place where I remember what I used to be able to do, compare it to all that I can’t do now, what I’ll never do again. The place where I look bitterly at the very beautiful clothes consigned to the back of my closet, because it turns out you really do need to be dancing 40 hours a week to look like that.

Sometimes I can hardly bear to remember the quiet places in my heart and nervous system that can only be accessed with music and movement, the ritual of putting on stage makeup, sewing your pointe shoe ribbons in place, or my own personal ritual, leaning down to touch the floor in a gesture of friendship just before my first entrance of the night. All gone, all not coming back.

This is my own personal ghost of Christmas past, or at least one of them. A version of me that was incredibly physically able, beautiful, tough as nails, and capable of creating profound beauty. A version of me who successfully said “I want that” and worked until I had it, broken necks and Meniere’s be damned. I am not exactly that sparkling woman anymore, and even though I have grown in important ways not just since losing her, but because I lost her, I miss her terribly. Especially at Christmas, when Waltz of the Flowers haunts my steps.

I try to remember that I have been here before. I have two memories of the first day I could carry a backpack again after not being able to carry one for a long time. The first was the first day of sixth grade, after my stronger twin sister had carried my backpack for a whole year while my neck healed, something she did loyally without complaining, not even once. The second was when I was 31 and starting my fourth year at Middle Tennessee State University. I had been going to all my classes carrying my books in my arms, clutched to my chest. Not at all ideal, but when even a light backpack made it feel like my SI joint was tearing itself apart with every step, it was the far superior option.

On both occasions, I remember feeling a sense of quiet victory as I entered the classroom with an honest to goodness backpack, packed with everything I needed, on my very own back. Behold! I am Marisa, and I have conquered things. And beneath that, crucially, secretly, I do not need help. I’m still working on my attachment to the deluded idea that not needing help is proof that I’m at my best. But unlike my ballerina self, I can once again celebrate mundane physical victories, like carrying backpacks. Sure, carrying a backpack is no quintuple pirouette, but it’s just as hard won, not to mention a hell of a lot more useful.

After many years of physical therapy, my pain and level of function are much improved. But even as my body heals, a harder truth becomes ever more clear: We are all people to whom things happen, and often, the things cannot simply be fixed. I do still need physical help sometimes, often even, and I will in the future, especially as my Meniere’s disease continues to evolve. If I am so lucky as to live long enough, I will need help many more times. All of this is okay. Not everything can be overcome. Sometimes, the changes are permanent, and transformation is the only alternative to a life of bitterness. But the sadness can remain; this too is okay.

We are incredibly fragile creatures by virtue of being embodied, and it doesn’t take much for our worlds to be reordered in previously unimaginable ways. I have a lot of thoughts on this, which I will save for another post, but for now I will share my big sister’s wisdom, which I try to remember whenever I get bitter about the body I have lost. My big sister is no longer with us, and over about five years, she lost her body in some of the most profound ways possible. Yet once, when she was very sick, and in terrible pain, she was asked if she ever got angry about her sickness, if she ever thought why me. She responded simply, with a humility I can barely comprehend, “Why not me?”

The photo accompanying this blog post is of me performing lead Marzipan with Chattanooga Ballet, taken by Jane Hundley. I was 26, and this was to be my second to last Nutcracker.