Learning to dance taught me to live

Learning to dance taught me to make mistakes.

It taught me that it's OK to be right.

It taught me interaction and friendship. By creating a structure and framework for interaction in manageable bitesized chunks.

It taught me that it's OK to be seen... It's OK to speak.

It taught me that you don't have to be perfect.

It taught me that my body needs movement and introduced me to even more ways of meeting that need.

It taught me to step out of my comfort zone.

It taught me that I can make things happen and that this is OK or even a good thing.

It taught me about the impact you can have on someone while being completely unaware of it (other people towards me, but this gives me hope that it can come from me too).

It showed me the magic of the expected.

It introduced me to some of the people I most aspire to be like. I suppose you call them role models.

It taught me tact and diplomacy.

It showed me the good in sharing life.

It taught me to walk with my eyes forward: the first steps to confidence in body and brain.

It taught me to acknowledge and feel emotions, and perhaps to consider expressing them.


I am still learning all of these things, and other areas of life have contributed too, but I can honestly attribute huge swathes of my social and emotional development to the process of learning to dance. This is of course true for everybody who learns dancing, but as somebody with autism, I have to consider the possibility that ballet has over the years been the therapy to teach me how to live in this world before I even knew why it was so difficult.

I wish I could thank all the people, past and present, who are a part of this process, but they'd probably think I was crazy (clearly I'm not, of course...). Some of these people know who they are, but most probably have no idea at all!