I cannot tell you how incredibly pleased I am to get to share this next Balllroom Village Blogger with you!

Please welcome Girl With The Tree Tattoo!

I appreciate her authenticity, enthusiasm, and willingness to share.  Please do check out her Blog at: 

http://www.thegirlwiththetreetattoo.com/

And for a special treat, you can see her in action, dancing! 

http://thegirlwiththetreetattoo.com/more-about-the-girl/videos/

Without further ado, Enjoy!

 

“I can’t…I have dance.”

 

Balancing a Full-Time Life and Ballroom

 

First of all, I am honored to be writing a guest post for the Biggest Girl in the Ballroom! I found Stefanie’s blog because it showed up on my suggested list from WordPress. Thank you, WordPress algorithms! It’s so exciting to be able to connect with a fellow ballroom dancer. As for me, I have been a student/addict of ballroom dancing for over 2 years. I have been competing for just under a year and currently compete at the bronze level in Smooth. I call myself the Girl with the Tree Tattoo because of the tree tattoo that covers my entire back. Important to note: I have not been dancing my entire life. I did a couple years of ballet, jazz and tap when I was 6 and 7 years old. But that’s it for my dance education. So I can’t do a split and spray tanning still weirds me out.

 

I wanted to take this opportunity to share the challenges I face in trying to maintain a balance between my “regular” life and ballroom. I am a full-time member of the cube farm, working as a technical editor. And to help pay for ballroom, I’ve taken on two additional jobs, freelance editing and personal assistant to my ballroom instructor, and started selling scones (I love baking and scones have become my specialty). A typical weekday for me starts at 5am and goes like this: get up, take my two dogs for a walk, eat and get ready for work, go to office and work, go home, take dogs for another walk, eat (maybe), go to ballroom studio, take group class and/or practice, go home, take dogs for another walk, go to bed. Two days a week, I have private lessons, so insert another “go to ballroom studio” in between work and home. I’m usually home for the night around 9:30pm and try to be in bed by 10:30. Somewhere in there, I find time to write, take care of any freelance jobs I may have, and complete entry forms or other assistant tasks for my teacher. Doesn’t leave much time for anything else! I hate it when I run out of food. It’s such an inconvenience.

 

If you’re like me, once you started ballroom dancing, your entire life pretty much revolved around it. You scheduled other appointments so they wouldn’t interfere with your lessons. You declined non-dance friends’ invitations because you were going to a practice party that night. If your teacher asked to reschedule a lesson to an atypical time for you, you did whatever you could to rearrange your schedule to make it work. Everything starts to take a back seat to ballroom, including grocery shopping.

 

Unless you’re independently wealthy or you find a way to get paid to be at the studio all of the time, you have to establish a balance between your ballroom and your work. And if you want to maintain relationships with the non-dance people in your life, like your family and friends that were there before you discovered the missing piece that was ballroom, you have to establish a balance between your ballroom social life and your “regular” social life. It’s not easy!

 

I’ve been blessed with friends and family who are very supportive of my ballroom dancing. They see what a positive impact it has made on my life, how much happier I am, and they want that to continue. And it just so happens that my boss is a fellow ballroom dancer and is the one who introduced me to the studio I dance at now. So she understands when I tell her “I can’t stay late today, I have a lesson.” But their support and understanding will only go so far if I start neglecting things other than my dancing. The key is balance. I rarely go to the studio on weekends, saving that time for social time with friends and errands/chores. Also, I make an effort to return the support. It’s easy to get swept up in your own passions, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be there to support your friends in their passions. So I will skip a group class and I have even told my teacher “sorry, I can’t reschedule.” Dance withdrawal be damned!

 

It’s an odd feeling to be so dedicated to and passionate about something that others view as just a hobby, secondary to “real life.” Sometimes it feels like I cross into another dimension when I enter the studio. There, people understand why I have three pairs of shoes in my dance bag – rhythm, smooth and practice. I can say that my next goal is Emerald Ball and they nod and smile and say “that’s great!” They know what I mean when I say I need to work on my frame. Outside the ballroom dimension, people just ask me if what I do is like Dancing with the Stars. No, Dancing with the Stars is like what I do, not the other way around. It’s a little anti-climactic when someone at my office (other than my boss) hears that I wasn’t at work the other day because I was at a dance competition and they say “oh, that’s cool, how was it?” and I exclaim “I won best of the best in bronze smooth!” And they just stare at me with a blank smile and then say “ok, great!” while walking back to their desk, because they have no idea what that means or what a big deal it is for me. Like I said, different dimensions.

 

On the flip side, having a full-time job outside of ballroom means I can’t dedicate myself as much as I might like to my dancing. I can’t make it to the day classes offered at my studio unless I take a long lunch and then make up the time at work, assuming my workload allows for a long lunch. I always have to request time off to attend a competition, and I almost didn’t get it approved for Emerald Ball next month because my boss is on vacation at the same time. She has no issues with it, but my time off also has to be approved by a manager above her. When my teacher asked me if I would be able to afford a few entries at the upcoming San Diego Ballroom Beach Bash, organized by one of his coaches who he wanted to support, I had to tell him I probably could figure something out finance-wise, but there was no way I would get the time off because my boss was also competing at San Diego. I tell him it’s because the company is very focused on utilization goals right now and I get that familiar blank smile/stare. Different dimensions.

 

I say again, the key is balance. I am not one of those people with endless amounts of energy; I have a limited supply, and so I need to be particular about how I spend it. Some weeks are really hard to get through. By the time I get to the studio for a lesson and my teacher asks me how I am, the most I can say is “I’m here.” But it’s so incredibly worth it. That ballroom dimension provides something you just don’t get in the “real world.” And once you get a taste, you don’t want to give it up. So do what you have to do, walk that tightrope between those dimensions, and keep chasing those dreams!