Advice most parents would hate...

"So do put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington. She may not always make a decent living there but she will be part of an ancient and honorable mystery, and it is on the stage that she will most likely be able to find herself." 

- Robert Brustein

...but that I love.  

When the stress, rage, passion, and exhaustion is culminated during that routine - it combusts into an electrical energy that is static. Tangible. Something I feed off of like a drugged up animal. When I'm on stage, nothing else exists. Hell, even the stage beneath my feet doesn't exist. It's just movement and music that pump through my veins. I'm slicing through the spotlights but cruising between the dancers. It's everything and nothing in the same heartbeat - self-destructive in more ways than one but gives my life meaning. 

If I'm lucky, I'll continue to find that feeling either on the stage or elsewhere. That feeling when you're waiting in the wings, filling your body with the rhythm, and there is that brief second before you start - just a second and no more - that you know you're about to create magic.