This is me at one of my Irish dance competitions during high school. And yes, that is a wig.

I didn’t start taking dance classes until middle school, after having tendonitis in both legs put me almost a year behind my peers in gymnastics, but I instantly fell in love with them, and took everything from ballet to modern, to two different kinds of Irish dance. Right from my first semester of modern dance here, I knew I wanted to keep taking classes. I became a minor for two reasons: 1) because doing a dual major would have required some overloading, and 2) I was clear right from the start that I was becoming a dance minor because it was something I loved, not because I wanted a degree in it. One of the greatest things about having the privilege to go to a small liberal arts college is being able to do things just because you enjoy them, and that is my philosophy when it comes to my minor. Unlike classes for my major that I expect to stress over, I rarely find myself stressing over dance assignments, because they’re the “fun” that I balance all the hard work for my major with.

But what happens when I can’t dance – when I’m injured? Most people smile and laugh when I say that I spent my Thanksgiving break lying in bed and watching television. The part I don’t necessarily include is that I was doing it because I currently have injuries in my right hip and left ankle, and moving around a lot right now is painful. It tends to result a couple of hours of lying still with ice alternating between my hip and ankle, and lots of ibuprofen (and yes that is what happened after I made the long trek to Some Crust Bakery for the egg slider I’ve been craving all semester). I have a long and rather repetitive history of ankle sprains (I say repetitive in part because the majority of them I don’t even remember happening – just noticing the pain a couple days later). The first time I injured my ankle while in college, I remember having a phone conversation with my sister: “If you want to dance,” she chastised me, “you need to take care of your injuries.” I groaned and complained, but I listened to her, and went to the health center to get it checked out. Even though I’ve gotten better at taking care of my injuries in college, the one time I feel stressed about dance classes is when I’m injured. If dance is what makes me happy, then not being able to dance tends to make me unhappy.

Nobody likes being injured. But being injured and having to sit out in dance class is very different from being injured and having it affect your livelihood. Dance is my minor because I love it, and I specifically would never want to pursue it as a career for this reason. I like having certain things that I do for fun, and not because it’s potentially helping determine my future. I like having things I can take a little less seriously and Scripps has given me a place where I can pursue dance, and just enjoy it.