Dealing with Failures.

What does failure mean to you? Is it getting fired? Not passing an exam? Being rejected from something or someone you love? How have you dealt with it? Are you able to forgive yourself?

For myself and other ballet dancers it could mean messing up on stage. In this post I admit my biggest “ballet fail” and tell you how I overcame it. 

Let me set the scene for you. It was a beautiful summer’s night in Estonia. The stage was set up on top of castle ruins and 400 chairs sat with their backs on the moon and setting sun. If any of you have been to Estonia at the end of June, you will know how it gets difficult to distinguish the day from the night. I stood unnervingly in the most golden tutu and tiara you'll have ever seen, about to embark on one of the most frightening variations of all the classical repertoire. Aurora, 1st Act. To all my non-ballet audience that involves starting with many balances on one leg, then several pirouettes and ending with a double circle around the stage by turning. It’s long, gruelling, requiring the peak of technical control. It came to around midnight and I was doing my best to stay warm, and at the same time compose myself. I like to stand on one leg before I go on stage, trying to “zen myself out”, wake up the intrinsic muscles and lower my heart rate. But to my surprise, when I tried to lift one foot up, my ankle was shaking so much it sent shivers up through the rest of my body. As I got my cue and heard my music, there was no turning back. Things started ok, but when the pirouette section started I fell off the first… and then the second…and I think by the third I even heard shrieks from the audience. The audience were cultured, for Christ’s sake it was a festival in honour of Tchaikovsky, filled with the countries’ top opera singers and musicians and they were sitting outside late at night watching this poor golden spectacle fall off every single time. 

I finished it, but it was a downwards slope to the end. I remember the feeling of humiliation as I took my bow. Tears filled as soon as I got off stage and I remember apologising endlessly through them to my director. I felt so thankful that she could only console me, because it wouldn’t be long before I had to bite through the embarrassment and step back on stage to perform Onegin. That was, at the time, what I thought would be my last performance in Estonia. What a way to finish… so thank goodness I came back.

If anyone asked me about that performance I told them it went well… too ashamed to tell the story. Usually after every show I like to to keep the programmes and when I stepped into my next venture I tore it up wanting to forget it forever. But when I was faced with some challenges again in my next job I found the back page of that programme and I decided to transform it visually in to something I could grow from. I drew a picture of myself flying out of a small box, perhaps representing my comfort zone, perhaps representing myself being liberated from the denial of my failure. The picture was inspired by an Estonian Surrealist Artist called Kylie Sparre. Next to it I wrote affirmations. One great way to assure positive thinking is catching yourself with negative thoughts and replacing them with their opposite positive ones. 

Now, back in Estonia, my director had the tact to ask what happened that night a whole one year later. There were a lot of contributing factors. It was midnight and freezing, I wasn’t prepared enough, I was about to leave my boyfriend-then of 2 years, and never see him again. The pressure of moving country and this feeling like “that was it”. I honestly don’t know. Sometimes there doesn’t have to be a specific reason for your failure. It happens, quite often, out of your control and it’s up to you to transform it into something to aspire from. Luckily I have the last rehearsal video of that variation and I enjoy to watch how it could've been, and try to hold no resentment towards beautiful Aurora. 

How do you feel after reading that? Are you brave enough to share your “biggest fail?” I hope you can step away from this post and transform them in to something to make you grow beyond your belief. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to read mine!