I Am Maggie

I’m a dancer. You will know that if you have read my previous post, or if you have ever had a decently long conversation with me. I don’t try to hide it. That’s part of who I am. The problem is, that’s not all of who I am. I am more than ballet. I am more than what I put my time into. Sometimes I forget that, and sometimes that’s lost on those who don’t know me very well. My public identity is, at times, too tied to ballet.

When I first came to Uni, my public identity was variable based on who you talked to. To most of the school, I was not known at all. That is, I had no identity. To my brother’s friends in his class and above that, I was “Neil’s little sister,” the cute, younger, female clone of Neil Tewksbury (except to Marie Su, who knew me from ballet, but she’s the exception). To a few of the freshmen, I was “Neil’s sister.” To others of them, I was one of the pretentious subbies who had decided to skip subbie math. In my class, however, there was a huge variance. To a few people in my class subbie year, I was just a girl who played IFC on the U13 team. To others, I was Sophia’s friend from ballet. Also, I already had spent at least a few years of school with 11 of my classmates in middle school. To them, I had a complicated identity that probably included my nerdiness, my quietness, and the fact that I did ballet and soccer.

Almost as soon as I stopped soccer, or a year before, ballet took over my life. To be fair, I did stop soccer because I physically could not do both it and ballet, so I wasn’t very surprised. But still, it was weird that freshman year, ballet was one of only three extracurriculars I participated in, and the other two took up little time. I became known as just one of the ballerinas to people who didn’t even know me at Uni. “Hi I’m Maggie.” “Nice to meet you. You do ballet, right?” It got old quickly when I often had to prove myself as more than just a dancer. Some of my teachers ask about ballet all the time and that’s the only thing they know about me. Again, it gets old.

This semester, I’m taking a class at the U of I and working at a lab on campus. In both places, everyone knows me as the high school student pretending (not too badly sometimes) to be a college student. No one, or few people, know that I do ballet. It’s refreshing because at the lab, we chat about Champaign and school and all sorts of stuff. No one ever asks about ballet or makes any assumptions because I’m a dancer. To be fair, it is getting better at Uni now that I am a senior and talking to people about college apps, school, and other stressful senior year stuff. Also, I don’t mean to say that people are ignorant. I think the issue is instead that ballet takes up so much time, it is easy to forget that I do other things too, even for me sometimes. I am more than my sport. I am Maggie, and that means so much more to me than ballet.