Winter Ball, the Last

“Winter Ball comma the Last”

It’s very weird because ballroom dance has been my big extracurricular all throughout college, and yes, I’ve had plenty of previous dance experience, but ballroom was never something I had done before. Now that senior year is drawing to a close (it still feels unlikely, but Lily was just telling me that her last final is two months from today), I can feel my ballroom aspirations and enthusiasms also naturally winding down. I’m grateful, because I don’t want to leave Yale and miss ballroom too desperately- I want the mental space to make new choices and try new things.
Of course I still love spending time with the team. Just as ballroom has been my main/only extracurricular, it’s also been my biggest social outlet at Yale. The people on the team are not just “my team” but some of my best friends, and I hope to stay in touch with them for many years to come. The fact that I’ve stayed in close touch with a few previous graduates bodes well.
Ballroom dance may end up, for me, becoming inextricably linked with my Yale experience- my college self- and being one of the sweetest parts. Just how horses and horseback riding is so much bound up with middle school and high school, and Girl Scouts with elementary.
If we can learn anything from history, it’s that if I leave ballroom behind I’ll still love it and miss it, just as I miss horses (but less so riding, which started to get very stressful when I reached a certain competitive level). And even if I leave ballroom behind chances are that I’ll still be dancing, somehow, somewhere. I’ve been dancing for more than ten years and I can’t imagine life without doing something like that (even if it’s only social or… in the privacy of my room with the music loud 😉 ).