Through your dance career, your feelings, commitments, and skills will grow and change with you. At different times, dance will be your happy place, your escape, and your sport. There will be days when long practices are a breeze and days when they are painstaking effort. You will go through phases of quick progress and long, hard work. These phases of passion and progress are normal and valuable parts of growing as a dancer.
The Love Phase
Typically a dancer’s love for the sport is like nothing else, and like any great love it will have its fireworks and its challenges. Sometimes, you will question if you want to keep dancing every day. Sometimes, you will say you love dance more than anything else. And both of these are valid as nothing stays consistent. That’s what is so cool about being human! You get to ride these waves of feelings. So, know that one or two days of questioning, if you want to keep dancing, does not mean you don’t love the sport at all anymore.
The Injury Phase
Being a dancer means putting your body through weird movements, stretches, and positions. This provides many opportunities for injuries and muscle strains. That means that being injury-free throughout your entire dance career is not very likely. Being injured is unfortunate, but it is a phase that almost every dancer will go through. So if you are in that phase or have been, don’t worry, you will bounce back stronger than ever soon enough!
The Growth Phase
Different styles of dance, tricks, and choreography have their challenges, and you will find some are harder for you than others. But having a harder time getting down a new turn sequence doesn’t mean all your progress until this point is gone. It simply means you have a challenge ahead of you. Put your dance skills to work, and you will overcome it.
Going through these phases is completely normal! Your dance journey is never going to be a straight line. It might have many curves, dips, and bumps, but that is what makes it so interesting. You get to experience so much from doing the sport that you love.
