Hello, Again...Old Friend

Hello Webaverse,

It’s me, your resident Long Island belly dancer, Kirah. Remember me?  Maybe not and that is alright. It has been a long time since I have posted a blog, at least a year. Why so long? 

I could give you a list of valid excuses: I started grad school, life has been stressful, I have been busy etc. etc. But the truth is that I start plenty of blogs but never finish them. Blogging became a chore. I love reading other dancer’s blogs but never felt it was for me. I didn’t feel that I could write about my experiences or what I wanted to say.  I felt phony and inauthentic with my blogs. Those feelings of: oh you can’t say that publicly, my idea has already been written by someone better or just that I my words don’t have worth and that each blog is supposed to sell something or tie into SEO.

So I took a long break.  This year marks my ten year anniversary as a belly dance addict…I mean student. I was so excited for my ideas to return to my blog about the changes from year one to year ten and all of the cool things I discovered but then I got seriously hurt…again…and with it a tidal wave of stuff that I had been hiding from myself came crashing down (disillusionment, resentment, exhaustion, extreme self- doubt and apathy to name a few).
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I remember as a baby belly dancer meeting and speaking to dancers that had classic burnout symptoms. I noticed it most commonly in dancers who had been who had been dancing 10-15 years on the professional and semi-professional tracks.  I couldn’t understand how they could be so apathetic and miserable…after all this is BELLY DANCE we were talking about.  All I knew at the time was that it wasn’t going to happen to me. I lovvvvvved belly dance, how could I possibly ever hate it?

And yet, here we are, 10 years on, in the midst of burnout aka belly dance mid-life dance crisis #1. And I call it crisis #1 because I am going to hypothesize it probably happens every ten years or so (long time dancers please chime in!).  I noticed over the years that there are generally two outcomes to the 10 year crisis: people either quit and move on with their lives or they re-fall in love with the dance.  As I watch my own personal compass slide back and forth between these options, I came to a decision.

I was going to blog again. However, with a key difference, I want to keep it real and (mostly) unfiltered this time. What does that mean? I want to explore topics I care about (and maybe even some with science!), discuss dancer burnout, share my experiences (both positive and negative) and maybe even some opinions.  Will this be PC? Probably not. May it offend people? Probably. Will it be honest and real to my perspective and experience? Most definitely.

So here is your semi-short and friendly hello there again. And here is to my hope that I actually follow through with posting more and maybe I will luck out and it will help someone else out there. Happy dance journeys.

<3 Kirah