By Ben
Moving to Philadelphia to experience the life of a professional ballet dancer has taught me as much about independence and finding social connection as it has about dance itself. My struggles with learning how to cook for myself, navigating city life, finding ways to productively use my downtime, and staying connected to my friends and family represent many of the ways in which I’ve grown throughout the first half of my gap year. In this blog post, I will reflect on my experience from a non-ballet point of view and will tackle the other side in a future post.
When I first arrived in my new apartment in Philadelphia and thought about what was to come, I assumed that feeding myself would be the least of my worries. The day before, I had spent about an hour asking Claude (the AI LLM) to come up with a few recipes that would be easy to meal prep and would effectively fuel a full week of dancing. At the time, the suggestion of roasting a whole turkey every Sunday afternoon for the week ahead seemed perfectly reasonable to me. Needless to say, in the first few days of being here I quickly realized that my planning had been far too ambitious. So instead, I decided to make my meals as simple as possible. I ordered a 10-pound bag of quinoa to serve as the base for my evening meals and relied exclusively on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. This actually worked for a while. I would make the quinoa on Sundays and then ground turkey every other day.
Soon, I realized that I could easily add sweet potatoes and other vegetables to improve the nutrient profile of my dinners and also add some flavor. I slowly started adding a few different meals to my rotation until I was switching between 3 main proteins and 3 main carbohydrate bases: eggs, turkey, and chicken with quinoa, rice, and pasta. Throughout all this time, though, the most I did in a single night was make ground turkey. Everything else I made ahead of time. The thought of doing anything more than just heating something up at 6 pm after dancing all day seemed too difficult. During these first few months I also realized some workarounds for my laziness. For one, I realized that the process of washing and cutting up fruit (as easy as it sounds) usually would be too much of a barrier for me to actually do it when I was hungry. Instead, I started buying a lot of pre-washed and pre-cut frozen fruit that I enjoyed just as much and also didn’t have to worry about spoiling. My biggest breakthrough, though, came when I bought an air fryer. It changed everything. Now, I could easily cook chicken, frozen vegetables, and sweet potatoes together in 15-20 minutes and not have to worry about prepping anything ahead of time. For the past month, this is how I’ve been cooking, and while I’m still nowhere near a good cook, I’ve learned a lot about my personal preferences and am able to effectively fuel my days of dancing. Above all, I’ve learned to appreciate the wonderful luxury of a dining hall and that my tolerance for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches is virtually limitless.
The next challenge revealed itself in the first few weekends of being here when I was confronted with what to do. It quickly became apparent that being eighteen in a city really limits your options for what to do on the weekends. My first weekend, I tried to go to an F1 racing simulator place and then a popular restaurant. After being turned away from the F1 place for being under 21, encountering waits of at least two hours at every restaurant I tried, I started to realize that many of the benefits of being in a major city are lost to the underage and underprepared.
After that first negative experience, I began seeking out social activities to do instead. My first breakthrough came when I discovered that my apartment building had a pool table. My building is right next to the ballet studios, so it has ended up being a great place for people to gather. That first night of friendly competition forced me to speak to a lot of other dancers who I otherwise wouldn’t have approached and sparked my interest in a game that I had previously ignored. Soon, pool night was becoming an almost weekly occurrence and served as a great way to spark interesting conversations and bring people together. As the friendly pool nights turned into championship tournaments, I experienced the full range of emotions in a single night. From the elation of performing a successful jump shot, to the dismay of scratching twice in a row on the 8-ball to lose the championship game. The game that served as a great ice breaker the first weekend has ended up providing a regular source of fun and meaningful connection. It also inspired the idea for a similar game that I’ve grown to love even more.
A few weeks after that first pool night, my roommate suggested that a group of us go bowling. At only a 10 minute walk from our apartment, this seemed like a promising solution to the problem of what to do on a Saturday night. That first night, I don’t think I scored above an 88. Unsurprisingly, hand-eye coordination is not a skill that is usually well-developed in ballet dancers. Still, I had fun and was relieved to have found something to do on a night off. As the year progressed, however, my roommate started getting very serious about bowling. He would watch professional bowling videos in his free time, go on solo bowling sessions during his lunch break, and became obsessed with finding the perfect ball. Before this year, I had probably bowled a total of three times in my life. Yet, my roommate’s enthusiasm started to rub off on me. Eventually, we started going every week and it turned out to be a great activity that wouldn’t interfere with dancing the next day. During the Nutcracker run when we had to be here during the holidays, we still found ways to go bowling — even on Christmas Day. As unlikely an activity as it seems, it has turned out to be a good activity for recovery days and has produced some of my fondest memories of this year so far.
The final challenge has stemmed from my demanding schedule that does not allow for much time to visit family. So far, I’ve only been able to go home for a total of eight days — four for Thanksgiving, and four for New Year’s. Each time I’ve jam-packed my time with as many visits to friends and family as I can fit. Nevertheless, to remain close to some of my friends and family, I’ve needed to become more proactive in reaching out. Before, I could simply rely on our shared physical location to spark spontaneous social connection. Now, however, I’ve had to get more comfortable with reaching out and setting up times to chat on the phone. Sending random reels and snaps no longer suffices in the absence of regular in-person interaction. Though difficult to initiate, these phone conversations have ended up being far more meaningful than the majority of our interactions before because of the new intentionality behind them. Talking on the phone has also made some of my friendships evolve as a consequence of us deliberately deciding to remain friends instead of relying on random circumstance like shared classes.
Overall, my adventures with cooking and bowling, and my commitment to staying close with some of my friends and family have forced me to become more intentional with how I spend my time. In my last few years of high school, I almost never felt like I had free time, as I struggled to balance schoolwork and dance training. This year has been a welcome respite from juggling so many different commitments. With more of my time freed up, I’ve had to confront some essential skills that I’ve neglected thus far. While I have taken a break on my academic progression, I’ve instead developed the arguably even more important ability to intentionally create social connection and the self-sufficiency to provide for myself while living the life of a professional athlete.
Stay tuned for my next post where I will talk more about the physical side of my experience so far.
