Professional Ambitions: Take care of yourself!

Your body's gotta be ready for whatever you ask it to do! Photo by Lee Corkett Photography.
Your body’s gotta be ready for whatever you ask it to do! Photo by Lee Corkett Photography.

Welcome to the latest edition of Professional Ambitions, my multi-part series on the journey to becoming a professional fusion belly dancer. Please note that this is less of a how-to guide, and more of a “learn alongside me” experience. I don’t claim to be an expert, and there is no one true path to a dance career.

This month, I’d like to talk about self-care. As dancers, we need both our physical and mental/emotional health to allow us to perform. At an amateur level you can get away with dropping out of a performance because you have the flu — although if your health causes you to make too many last-minute cancellations, people will be hesitant to invite you to perform — but as a professional, missing shows not only costs you money, it damages your reputation. Not to mention, once you hit the big time and are teaching workshops on a national or international level, you have to be able to power through.

It’s important to take care of ourselves, to avoid illness and injury as much as possible, and to develop good habits that will ensure the longevity of our dance career.

First and foremost, supplement your dance practice with some cross-training. Cardio, yoga, weight lifting, whatever you can fit in to improve the general fitness of your body. Just be careful not to push yourself so hard that you get sidelined by an injury. When I started out, I was doing CrossFit and belly dance, and well, let’s just say that if I had continued that, I’d have to invest in lots of Dermablend to cover all my training-induced bruises.

Of nearly equal importance is fueling your body. Now, I am not a health nut and I am not going to say that you have to be on a specific diet. I am going to say that you need to make sure you’re getting enough calories and nutrients, that you’re eating fruits and veggies and healthy protein, and above all that you are staying hydrated. But beyond that, if you want to have tacos and margaritas and cookies, well, I’ll be right there alongside you. It’s especially important to remember to eat well during a training intensive, so you can keep up your energy!

I’ll repeat it again: stay hydrated! It’s especially important if you’re in a dry climate like I am. It’s not just good for your health, it also helps your skin look nice when you’re on stage.

That’s a good segue into taking care of your skin. Hydrate inside and out. Drink water, and use a good moisturizer. Always remove your makeup after a show. Use a cleanser that your skin likes. Exfoliate as needed, but don’t over do it. Wear sunscreen and a hat and carry a parasol. If some of your makeup makes you break out or irritate your skin, get rid of it and find something that doesn’t cause a reaction. Healthy skin helps you look young and vibrant, and unfortunately dancers are often judged on our image, so we need all the help we can get.

As your budget allows, indulge in self-care. If you dance a lot, a good massage is a life saver for your physical and mental well-being (unless you don’t like being touched, in which case, maybe a good soak in a hot tub instead?). Personally, I also go in for pedicures once a month. It’s more of a mental health pampering treat, but it also ensures I have nicely shaped toe nails that won’t catch on anything and that my feet look nice if I’m dancing barefoot.

Don’t forget your mental and emotional health. You need to be able to really pour yourself out on stage, to give it your all physically and emotionally, and that’s easier to do if you’re not emotionally exhausted. Be aware of what you need. As an introvert, I need down time at home. I can’t be in dance class every day, and if I’m at a week-long intensive and sharing a room with someone, I need to have some time to myself to read or journal or just think. If you’re an extrovert and your dance practice mainly happens at home, or in classes where you don’t have a chance for chit-chat before or after, you probably need to make sure to build some social time into your schedule.

Beyond that, if you have a mental illness or are currently going through a rough time emotionally, do what you need to do to take care of yourself, whether it’s therapy or medication or self-soothing techniques, or a hiatus from dance while you focus on your health.

So what if the unthinkable happens and despite how well you’ve been taking care of yourself, you still break your arm or catch the flu or get diagnosed with a chronic illness? The important thing is to listen to your doctor, physical therapist, and any other professionals you may be working with. Follow their instructions and take the time you need to get better. If you force yourself back into dance too soon, you may risk an injury improperly healing, or your illness lingering for too long. In the case of injury, surgery, or a really long absence from dance due to illness, you may want to schedule some private lessons with your teacher or mentor to assess your skills and come up with a plan to get back in the game.

Take care of yourself, friends. Remember, we only get one body, so let’s treat it right.

professional ambitions , exercise, health, hydration, professional ambitions, self care Leave a comment

Why I’m loving the mirror in 2015

Why I love the mirror -- Photo by Jade Beall.
Why I love the mirror — Photo by Jade Beall.

Late last month I had the opportunity to be part of an awesome photo shoot for the #lovethemirror initiative (I don’t know if they’re calling it an initiative, but I like that word so I’m using it!). The idea was that in 2015, you should resolve to learn to love the mirror, and love what you see in your reflection. I love this message, for so many reasons. Let me see if I can put them all into words…

1. If you read The Militant Baker’s blog post about the photo shoot and the initiative, you’ll see that she’s tired of people being told that they’re so smart, or talented, or funny, but never being told that their bodies are awesome too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great to be acknowledged for your intelligence and your great personality, but I think everyone wants the chance to also feel like they are hot stuff. We deserve to feel beautiful or handsome.

2. I’ve written before about how tired I am of the word “narcissism” getting tossed around anytime anybody (but especially a woman) dares to think that she looks good, and enjoys her appearance. Enough of that. I am here to say that yes, I love the mirror, and yes, there are times when I put on a super bootie skirt like I’m wearing in this picture and check myself out in my dance mirror. Or I’ll take my hair out of its braid in the morning, brush it out, and then turn profile to check out how long and wavy and red it is. We need to learn not to be ashamed of occasionally stopping in front of the mirror and thinking “Damn, I am looking fiiiiiiine today.”

3. As stated in my quote on the picture above, the mirror is such an important tool for dancers. It lets you double check your posture and your form. In group situations, it lets you keep an eye on your fellow dancers so you can all learn to be on the same timing with your arms or other movements. You can also use your own reflection to practice maintaining eye contact. How can you do any of these things if you’re uncomfortable with looking at yourself in the mirror?

4. The mirror is also necessary for doing my makeup before a performance. Look, it’s hard enough to get the wings of my liner even with a mirror. I’d be a hot mess without one. When you look in the mirror to put your face on, you can’t get bogged down in your imperfections, you have to love the face you have and decide how best to make it up to emphasize your favorite features and make sure the audience can read your emotions.

Of course, even as someone who loves the mirror, I have my days where I don’t want to look at myself. If I’m in a new dance class and I have no idea what I’m doing, sometimes I can’t bring myself to watch my own flailing. And I have moments where I’m trying to do my lipstick and I fall into a weird spiral of thinking how strange the shape of my lips are and how weird I look when I smile. Body love is a journey, and sometimes I step off the road and I dunno, hang out in some sort of seedy diner? That analogy didn’t quite work out. But I want to make sure that everyone knows that we all fall off the self-love wagon, and the important thing is to recognize when you’re thinking bad thoughts about yourself, and to change your train of thought. You can do it! I think everyone can learn to love themselves.

Anyway, it was really awesome to be part of the photoshoot. I always enjoy working with Jes (true fact: she gives THE BEST hugs), and it was a treat to work with Jade Beall, too. It was cool to see a really wide variety of races, sizes, abilities and walks of life take their turn in front of the camera. I even got my Dad to come along (he’s the one in the kilt). And when I went to the launch party and got a preview of all the images and all the quotes, well, let’s just say that I inadvertently got to test whether my mascara was waterproof. There’s so many great reasons to learn to love the body you see in the mirror, and really, not one single good reason to hate it.

And also, I love this picture to pieces. Thank you, Jade Beall!
And also, I love this picture to pieces. Thank you, Jade Beall!

I’ve joined BDAS!

Love this site!
Love this site!

I’m pleased to announce that I am now a regular contributor at Belly Dance at Any Size! After participating in the 90 days challenge, I said I might want to write more in the future, and when I pitched a new article idea to Andalee she asked me to come on board. I’ll be writing for them approximately 4x a year. My first article is about how belly dance taught me to love my smile.

I really like BDAS because it combines two things I feel strongly about: dancing (obviously) and body positivity. In addition to covering issues of size, they talk about the experience of dancers of different races and ages. There’s also frequent costuming tips, such as the recent two-part post on how to modify your bras to be more covering. I think it’s a really great resource for the community.

So please wander over there and have a look not just at my article, but at the archives as well.

Belly dance, breasts, and beauty

Yep, we're going to talk about boobs.
Yep, we’re going to talk about boobs.

Yesterday, my afternoon got hijacked by a little blog post titled My Husband Doesn’t Need to See Your Boobs. My first thought, before reading the article, was a cheeky “Well of course he doesn’t need to see them, even my own husband doesn’t need to see my boobs, but hey, boobs are awesome, of course people want to see them.” And note that I say people, not men, because men aren’t alone in liking to look at breasts. Many people find breasts, and the rest of a woman’s curves, objectively beautiful. There’s something very aesthetically pleasing about a body, whether it’s the soft curves of a woman or the chiseled planes of a male athlete.

And that’s what I’d like to talk about today, because much like the bikini-clad young women decried in the above article, belly dancers like me often get accused of dressing immodestly and attracting the attention of other women’s husbands and boyfriends. Well, of course we attract attention, we’re beautiful. And we dress to be beautiful. But we don’t dress to be sexually attractive — that’s a side effect, but the truth is, as a woman, no matter what you’re shaped like and how you’re dressed, someone is going to find you sexy. There were times and cultures where just a glimpse of a woman’s wrist was considered provocative, whereas in our current culture we only notice a wrist if it’s adorned with a nice tattoo or piece of jewelry.

When I dance, I dress to impress. I show my belly, the better to display my torso isolations. I might wear a skirt that hugs my bootie, the better to draw attention to my hips while I do a slow, languid maya. But then again, I might wear a huge, fluffy cotton skirt over billowing pantaloons, to make my spins all that much more showy and impressive. Either way, my intention is to create a beautiful image, an impression of something at once exotic and artistic. The dance would still be beautiful if I did it in sweat pants, but it would lose some of its magic.

There’s this weird idea that when women dress or put on makeup or do our hair to make ourselves more beautiful, we’re only doing it for men. Either we want to attract a man, or we want to make our man feel good about choosing us. As such, it’s obvious that a belly dancer must be showing off her body and wearing 50lbs of stage makeup to seduce a man. Why else would we go to the effort?

But quite simply, I think that women like to feel beautiful for our own sake. Is it wrong to think “My eyes are gorgeous, I should use this shade of eyeliner to really highlight them” or to enjoy smoothing a skirt down the curve of our hips? Is it wrong to be pleased with the size and shape of our breasts, whether we’re happy that they’re still young and perky or nostalgic about the way they sag from when we nursed babies that are now grown to adults? Is it wrong to sit down with a tutorial from Pinterest for a complicated braid, because your hair is finally long enough and you’ve always wanted to try that style? I don’t think it is.

Likewise, when I meet up with one of my female friends, whether it’s to grab lunch or to get ready for our show backstage, and I say “You look great” I’m not saying “Damn girl! You are going to seduce the hell out of someone tonight!” I’m saying “You know what? I find you to be objectively beautiful. You go girl, great job picking that skirt.”

We’ve long known that the human form was objectively beautiful. If it wasn’t, instead of the Venus de Milo we’d have a lovely sculpture of some flowers.

Talk about some objectively beautiful curves.
Talk about some objectively beautiful curves.

Proponents of the modesty culture like to say that once a man has seen an image, he can’t unsee it. Well, I believe that. I can’t unsee some horribly graphic pictures that friends have posted on Facebook, and I wish I could. But I don’t wish that I could unsee the Venus de Milo, or Mira Betz stepping on stage “dressed like the Queen of Sheba” as she likes to say, or me and my friends wearing bikinis and eating pizza. Why would anyone want to unsee those things? I think that our society needs to spend less time policing women’s modesty, and more time learning to differentiate between beauty and seduction.

Yeah, so, I got braces yesterday…

Yeah, so, I got braces yesterday…

My new look.
My new look.

Well, I put it off long enough, but in the last couple of weeks I finally put the plan into motion… I made the appointment to get my braces. And yesterday, I got the upper set put in (my lower teeth are not so unruly, so they get to wait a bit before being reined in). I am unfortunately not a candidate for Invisalign, but I did get clear braces, so as you can see from the above picture, they’re not nearly as obtrusive as the old-school silver ones we’re all so familiar with. And that’s a good thing, because I’ll be living with them for the next two years or so while I get these teeth straightened out.

Throughout the years, I’ve had a pretty complicated relationship with my smile. I used to hide my mouth a lot in photos, or avoid having my picture taken at all. Plenty of people have told me that I have a beautiful smile and I’m pretty the way I am, but in the back of my mind there was always the mocking words of all the kids who teased me, and even the adult who told my parents that my teenage self had a beautiful figure (complete with miming the curves I didn’t really have), but they should really do something about my teeth. Yes, this was said right in front of me. Yes, if I had a time machine, I’d go back and kick her in the shins.

And the truth is, while I’ve become more comfortable with my image and I know my friends mean it when they say I have a beautiful smile, I also know that if I want to work as a professional dancer, I’ll have an easier time getting gigs if I have straighter teeth. And as I’ve said before when discussing body love and self image, I don’t think there is anything wrong with loving your body but wanting to make the occasional improvement. Do I think I am beautiful? Oh yeah I do! But do I think I will be even MORE beautiful when I don’t have huge gaps between my teeth and a massive overbite? No question about it. So if you want to tell me that I am fine just the way I am/was, I will thank you for that, but this is still something that I want to do for myself.

And now: mini cosmetics review! When I posted the above photo on Facebook yesterday I got a ton of compliments on and questions about my lipstick. It’s Violet by Bite Beauty. I purchased it as part of this cute double-end mini, but you can also buy it as a full-sized product. I think the color looks great on me, it’s a nice example of 2014 Color of the Year Radiant Orchid, and I found the formula to be non-drying and easy to wear. It did get worn off when I ate dinner though. But over all, I think it’s a great product to check out if you like that bright lip look. I intend to wear it a lot.