I'd Rather Be Dancing

Where I grew up, soccer was the popular sport. Everyone played soccer. Everyone. I wanted to be part of everyone, so I wanted to play soccer. So my parents signed me up for soccer when I was about five or six. They bought me bright red shin guards, and a little soccer ball that had red and blue where regular soccer balls usually have black. We went to the field, and I got a shirt with a number on the back saying who the sponsor was and everything. I think my number was three. A bitch named Jill made fun of my shirt, for having a lower number than hers did.

Then we did drills. Soccer was outside. I've never been a very crunchy person. Soccer was not what I thought it'd be. There was no playing actual soccer. There were just ... boring drills. Soccer sucked! It was so boring.

At the end of soccer I got into the car to go home and told my mother, "I'd rather be dancing." At the time, I didn't know that was a bumper sticker; it was just how I truly felt. Dancing made me happy. Dancing made me happy for almost two decades, until I couldn't walk and somehow forgot how to dance when I relearned to walk.

I spent most of my childhood depressed and frustrated and angry and generally unhappy. Dancing was pretty much the only thing that made me forget that. I did badly in school, both academically and socially. When I danced, I was happy. I could do well. I could FEEL myself doing well.

So to put into words how miserable I was when my shrink told my parents to use dance classes as leverage to get me to do homework would be impossible. Some child psychologist she was!

I can't help but think even less of her when I see this article.

Never mind all the reasoning the article mentions. What I care about is this:

I was miserable.
Dancing made me happy.
When I was happy, I was a more pleasant person for my family to be around.
I should have not had the only thing that made me happy taken away from me.
The end.