"I resolve to never define life by those terms again."
My 2016 resolutions are not to lose weight, to nail the deadlift, the fonji, or the eagle, to sit on my head, or to win a competition. In fact, I resolve to never define life by those terms again. Why? Because doing so for so long took all of my enjoyment out of pole dance.
I, like so many, have an inability to live life without the amp turned to 11. I don’t know how to do something without giving my whole being to it, to have my view of myself as a person be defined by it. I am Carolyn Peters, professional competitive pole dancer. There has never been a separation between who I am and what I do, and I have taken great pride in wearing that badge.
I had the opportunity to leave LA for a once in a lifetime opportunity in 2015. When evaluating the opportunity, I realized I had accomplished all the things in pole I had moved to LA to do. I looked at the lack of personal momentum I had within the past year, and realized that I wasn’t going to accomplish any more than what I had already done here. It wasn’t just a plateau. It was a full on stop. What I need to be a better artist and dancer was not going to come from more classes, more performances, more anything that LA had to offer. How can that be? Because I had stopped enjoying any of it. It all became rote, and I still did all of it because that’s just what I did. And so it became that pole was making me miserable.
I took the opportunity. I left. I moved to a place where I am three hour drive through the Rocky Mountains to the nearest pole studio. I had put myself in a position where I had to step back from pole, whether I wanted to or not. It has taken six hard months to understand again what pole does for me as a person, what parts bring me happiness, and what parts don’t. I have had to face down my “amps to 11” lifestyle, and now understand how that approach destroyed my joy many, many times in life. But how to live life otherwise? How do I do something for love and enjoyment, to not be defined by it, to not let it eclipse me?
The answer is that I have to walk a hard path to build the best version of myself, and let that be the foundation on which I launch everything else. It means making personal upheavals in my day to day approach to living and thinking. I have to reprogram myself, and that means working through a lot of backlog I’ve let collect over the years, because it was easy to gloss over until this point. But now it is front and center, because I want to go back to loving pole, and I want to be able to enjoy it for a long time to come.
So, in the end, my resolution is that on December 31, 2016 I will be proud of the person who I made myself into this year. And then maybe my 2017 resolution will be to move back to LA to do the things I love with the people I love, and to live life just as Carolyn Peters. period.
The post Resolutions, Revelations, Revolution appeared first on Pole World News.
No comments:
Post a Comment