“Keeping Life In Balance”
By Isabelle Kramer
 I am a dancer. I dance at a prominent ballet school in the Washington D.C. area. I enjoy dancing and never want to quit. But I know that to be a dancer I need to stay hip, happy, and healthy. How do I know this? Easy. I learned from another’s mistake. I will tell you what her mistake was and how it affected her.
When I first saw “Clara,” I thought, “Wow, what a good dancer.” She was the lead dancer in The Nutcracker. She was being lifted up in the air, looking as graceful as a swan, and all I wanted was to be just like her. I was seven.
Then as the years went by, Clara, my role model, got older I started to see a difference between her and the other dancers. While the other dancers were growing in a perfectly healthy way, Clara remained small and frail. At first I thought, “Why are all the others dancers so fat, while Clara is perfectly healthy?” I had fallen into the trap of believing my Clara was super beautiful and perfect and the others had become fat.
The year I was eleven, I attended my first health class and became more aware of what a healthy person should look like. As I danced in The Nutcracker, I watched my Clara. She had become so skinny I could see the bones in her back – each vertebra. Her hips jutted out. She didn’t look happy. And she danced as if she was tired all the time. I finally noticed how skinny she really was.
A few months later I heard that the director of the school told Clara that if she didn’t put on weight she would have to go. He, too, had noticed that Clara was too thin. Clara’s not eating affected her health. Her not eating affected her happiness. And her not eating affected her hip, upbeat personality. Luckily, someone caught her mistake, and was able to stop my Clara’s disorder so she could regain her hip, happy, and healthy mood.
From this experience I have learned that an important part of being hip, happy, and healthy is to be balanced and not go to extremes. Clara went to extremes of not eating enough. It’s not just in ballet that people go to the extremes. If soccer players think that they need to practice more soccer in order to be good at it, they could push themselves too far. They would not be hip; they would be tired and weak. If someone got in a fight and kept her/his feelings and pain inside and didn’t seek advice, she/he would not be happy, but would feel depressed. So, you see, it is not in just ballet where people take things to the extreme. It can be in any activity or situation. Now, if I am tempted to make an unhealthy choice, I think: Keep life in balance!
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