Today was a good day

*NOTE:  I couldn't for the life of me get this to post last night before I when to sleep, so it is being posted now at 1:30pm, 10/24/10.  I will leave it up to the others as to if this makes me lose the blog challenge since I technically did miss a day of posting....though even if I lost, I still plan on continuing for at least the rest of the 30 days*

Today was a good day.  

Even the things that went wrong (meaning, did not go exactly the way I planned), actually turned out to be even better than my original intentions.  

I’m too tired and a little too overwhelmed to fully break down my thoughts on the artistic aspect of what I think was accomplished today....

But on a purely personal level I had a major breakthrough and am kind of in tears as I really think about it...For the past close to two years, before doing anything physical (class, rehearsal, performance), I have a prescription pain reliever that I have to take approximately an hour beforehand.  It doesn’t fix everything by any means, but it takes the edge off enough to keep things from being too tense to properly warm up my muscles and joints.  But today, in the midst of the craziness of the day and getting ready, I completely forget to take my pain meds....and was fine. I improv-ed on the fabric for a total of an hour and a half, then played capoeira on and off for probably 4 hours.....and didn’t even notice or realize that I had forgotten until things were already over.  I’m almost afraid to hope and am knocking on wood as I say this but, I think that maybe I might have more years of this in me than I thought.  Today I felt strong and invigorated as I moved and was the master of my body and of my pain instead of the other way around.  And I truthfully don’t remember the last time that happened.  I often refer to my body as a separate entity, because that’s what it seems like most of the time.  Like I’m on one team, and it’s on the other, constantly fighting against me and trying to sabotage what I’m wanting to do.  When I was diagnosed with scoliosis at 13, I think one of the hardest things to deal with was that I felt like my body had betrayed me. As a dancer, you spend so much time honing your skills and molding your body into not completely natural positions or shapes, and then, without my permission, my body went and did something that threatened to not only undo everything I had worked for, but also keep me from going any farther.  As I’m thinking about it now, maybe that’s why I push myself so hard and do so many different things...it’s an almost frantic attempt to regain control from that betrayal.  But maybe instead of seeing my body as the enemy, maybe I should be trying to convince it that we are really on the same team.  Even if today was not the norm, it still was a step, and it gives me hope for a future that is maybe not as downhill as I thought.