Weakness

I started taking a circus—specifically, adagio—class a couple of months ago at the instigation of my friend Rachel, who is a certifiable circus freak and who is on mission to recruit everyone she knows so that she can have a Friend Circus. She drives a hard bargain; after telling me to do it for months she finally sealed the deal by telling me that she keeps an Excel spreadsheet comprised of a column of all her friends who are currently doing circus and a column of her friends who have yet to do circus. “You get,” she told me very earnestly, “your first AND your surname in the spreadsheet. Both names!” With an incentive like that, how could I refuse?

So I started two terms ago, doing pretty much the easiest beginner class there is—which, frankly, is not saying much, because I find circus incredibly physically difficult. A lot of what we do in the beginner class looks pretty simple—and it is, in the grand scheme of life—like forward rolls and headstands and balancing on one anothers’ feet like when you give a little kid an airplane ride. It’s still really hard—you need a lot of flexibility, which I have a bit, and a lot of strength, which I have none at all. I went to class once a week, on Monday nights, and on Wednesdays I would be texting everyone else who was in it with me, going “Are you sore too? Because I’m really sore. Like, really really sore.”

It was fun though—it still is fun. I like fun, and I like learning new things, and I was starting to feel like doing something else, physically, than yoga. Some of the yoga stuff and dance stuff I’ve learned over the years came in slightly handy but not as much as you’d think, so in addition to starting to learn the physical stuff I had to learn a whole new body vocabulary, and even, I’d say, some new values around how the body works and what the body is for, what it can do.

In bellydance we talked a lot about expressing with the body, about dropping and snapping and turning; pushing down through space, shaping it. In yoga we talk about opening, extending, reaching. In circus there’s more focus on tightening, balancing, and straightening—it’s a lot easier to lift someone who’s really tight and hard than someone who is loose and floppy, for example, and we do an exercise the very first class of the term where you have team of three try to pick up a fourth who is completely relaxed, which is very difficult, and then again when the person is tight and engaged, which is way easier. We talk about tucking and piking, dishing and arching.

(I still mourn tribal, a little, by the way—I haven’t danced for almost two years but I still have to stop myself from a street corner three-quarter shimmy when certain songs come up on shuffle. I miss the communities I was a (peripheral) part of, and I miss that magic you can only get when you really know your troupies and your music and you pick up your cues with no effort at all and you are on time and right where you’re supposed to be and you can’t help smiling and it just happens, you don’t think, your body just goes, you just go with it. I haven’t found that since in any physical activity, and on some level I don’t expect to again. )

I wasn’t thinking that I would come to circus the same way I did to bellydance, which was intuitive for me from the very beginning, and I knew it would be a lot more physically challenging. I knew I would learn a lot of new stuff and that it would take me a long time to do so, especially if I only went once a week. I thought it was probable that I would be good at some things and suck at others, and I was fine with that.

So it was with all this in mind that I signed up for the between-terms acrobatics/adagio intensive course, which is when you go every night for five nights. I am going to be in the States for the first half of the winter term so I thought I would try to get a good dose in before I go. I was a little nervous about it because there would be more of an gymnastics-y feel to it than the adagio class, but I know the teacher and knew a couple people taking the class with me and thought that, even though I was sure to not be able do to lots of stuff in the class, I’d still be okay and have a good time.

I pulled a muscle in my right leg about twenty minutes into the first night’s class, doing a plain old cartwheel, like what kids do on playgrounds. As I write this, more than a week later, it’s still a little twingey and I still can’t do my various stretchy things like sitting in a straddle and putting my forehead on the floor. I tried stretching it out, that night, and the nights after, and that kind of helped, but not as much as I wanted it to, and I spent the rest of the week being very careful of it and not being able to do what everyone else seemed to, and feeling sort of scared–much more than seemed reasonable–that I would hurt it further.

And I kept apologizing, and making excuses, and making unhappy faces, and trying not to let it bother me, and freaking out quietly for the rest of the course. I worked on headstands or bunny hops when everyone else was doing round-offs or pop-pops. I did box pose when everyone else did handstands up against the wall. When everyone else was doing flippy stuff onto the mats I did dive rolls over and over again, or tried to do a forward tuck jump. My face got squinchy and I didn’t respond when the assistant coach said “Nice!” or “That’s looking better,” I just grimly got back in line and acted like I’d been sent to circus jail.

I actually took the Thursday off and sat at home feeling guilty the whole night, like I’d failed the class and failed circus and just generally failed at everything everywhere. Those aren’t new feelings for me—I don’t think they’re new feelings for anyone—but I behaved as though I was the first person to have them ever.

Weak, I thought, weak weak weak. Other people can do cartwheels. Other people can get an injury and just work through it, or stretch it out, or ice it, or heat it, or just make it go away and keep going. Other people are naturally good at every new thing they try, or if they’re not they’re at least committed and stubborn enough to practice until they get better. I sat there on the floor of my room (it’s easier to heat than the lounge) and got angrier and angrier, more and more upset, my leg aching and aching.

But I hurt my leg, part of me would protest.

So what, another part would retort, meanly.

In dance I wanted to get better, and felt like it was taking forever to get better, and struggled with beginner’s mind. Reading over that old post I can see that some of the issues were the same: I can’t do it, I don’t understand. My body won’t do what I want it to do. It doesn’t work, it won’t happen.

I don’t think, though, back then, that it was about physical strength, or, like, capacity. At the time I identified as a dancer and knew I could dance, at least a little. I was relatively confident that I basically knew what I was doing, that I could eventually get it, that my body, if practiced enough, that I could learn how to use my obliques correctly, that I could express more smoothly and more meaningfully, that I could dance more intentionally. It’s even sort of like that with practicing my song–I don’t have an awesome voice and I admit the lyrics are pretty silly, but, like, I don’t care. I practice singing it and it gets better, or better enough. I may not be awesome at it but I can do it.

It’s not like that with circus, and I can’t decide, exactly, why that is. I wondered if it’s because you have to start when you’re very young, but I’ve met plenty of people who started in their thirties and forties who are gorgeous and amazing. It may be because the body stuff is still so strange to me—I find being upside down very disorienting, for example, and I never know what my arms are doing when I try to do a flip—and it seems unintuitive (“Dish? What?”) and weird. It might be because you just have to be so strong to do it, and I’m not willing to put up with the pain of getting stronger because I don’t get enough pleasure out of doing circus well, not yet, and maybe not ever.

I just keep thinking about weakness: how do you decide what to do about it–do you give in to it or do you power through? Whose advice do you listen to? Whose voice do you hear in your head telling you that you’ll never be able to do it, it’s not worth it, even if you work very very hard you cannot do it?

I’m going to pick up the beginners’ adagio class (for the third time) when I get back from America in September, and I’ll try to do the generic Circus Fit class as well. I don’t know if that will change anything. I still don’t know if it’s going to be worth it, if it will be fun, if I will get strong or stay weak.