How I learned to love my middle-aged body as a ballerina

This First Person column is written by Julia Zarankin who lives in Toronto. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ. 

By my early 40s, I had exhausted all the hobbies that were supposed to make me feel better about entering middle age. I had taken an improv class, started learning a new language, launched myself into an unsuccessful pursuit of a craft only to amass a collection of unevenly stitched handmade books and given yoga a second chance. I'd even bought a recliner to help alleviate the malaise. 

And then, at the height of my low-grade desperation, I decided to sign up for a ballet class. 

"But you're not very flexible," my husband gently reminded me. He wasn't wrong. I nearly injured myself the one time I tried to lift my leg onto our bathroom vanity in an attempt to stretch. 

Also, my track record for committing to physical activity wasn't great: between short stints on the recreational badminton court, a brief flirtation with cycling, an on-and-off relationship with swimming and near-total abandonment of my dumbbell-lifting regimen, I could see how I didn't exactly look like prospective ballerina material. 

But I was determined to give it a try. I needed confirmation that my body was capable of movement and grace.

Before leaving the house for my first intro class for adults at the National Ballet School, I grabbed a rhinestone headband that had been languishing in my drawer for years. I figured that if I would be standing in front of a mirror, in front of a group of strangers, with all my postural infelicities exposed, I might as well do it in a rhinestone headband.

I hadn't expected any of it to stick. After all, this wasn't my first time in a ballet studio. But this time around, the exact same things that had made me flee the studio as a 10-year-old now brought a certain joy. The repetitive nature of exercises at the barre. The sheer physical exertion. The fact that my every move invited my teacher's critical dissection. 

And though I'd expected my classes to be physically demanding and my calf muscles to ache, I hadn't anticipated that my teacher's command to "take up more space" would change my way of being in the world. 

When I lamented my lack of grace in the deceptively simple act of pointing and extending my foot to the side in a tendu, my teacher reminded me that ballet isn't about perfection. Rather, he said it's about striving for perfection. As a writer who wrangles sentences all day with the hope that they will approximate the beautiful, perfect construct in her mind (reader, they rarely do, if ever!), this felt like the best, most searing writing advice I'd ever received. 

LISTEN | Julia Zarankin takes a ballet class as an adult ballerina

Now or Never8:21How I learned to love my middle-aged body as a ballerina

Julia Zarankin is self-admittedly not graceful, but when she decided to learn ballet in her 40s, she learned to love what her middle-aged body could do.

Slowly I started becoming more comfortable with the body I saw staring back at me in the mirror. My posture still needed finessing, my jumps were never as high as they felt, my grand battements rarely (if ever) hit the 90-degree mark, my hips wobble during my rond de jambe, and my pirouette is still lopsided on the best of days. 

But the idea that my body hasn't ossified and that it's still a work-in-progress encourages me. If anything, ballet is forcing me to rethink my relationship with my middle-aged body and instead of noticing only the beginnings of older age descending upon me, I now marvel at what my body is capable of and the incremental changes I've seen as I've learned to stand with more confidence and courage. And as for the imperfections? They're part of being alive. 

Six years into my ballet classes, I'm what you would call a lifelong advanced beginner. At the tender age of 47, I am finally a ballerina. Not the kind of ballerina that anybody would pay money to see on stage. Why do I continue? Because when I do my (almost) daily ballet class — virtually, for now — it has become a semi-religious practice for me. I focus on my breathing, move my body in ways that always challenge me and remind me of everything that is possible. 

Recently, my teacher taught us a watered-down, beginner-appropriate version of the rose adagio choreography from Sleeping Beauty. As I stood in my living room, balancing in a shaky cou-de-pied in relevé and bedecked in a rhinestone headband, dancing for nobody but myself, I felt every inch a ballerina. 

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