You don't Know

All Alone

I'm sitting in a room full of people who don't know me. We are introducing ourselves so everyone can know a little more about each other. Everyone is talking about how many kids they have or what they do for work. As we go down the line of people and gets closer to me, I try to find something about me that's interesting or worthy of a note but there's nothing. I can't think of one thing that I can say about myself. As the people who are talking get closer and closer to me, my heart starts to beat faster and faster but nothing comes to mind. As the person besides me starts to talk I think about just getting up and leaving but that might seem rude and I don't want everyone to stare at me as I get up and leave the room. But the will all stare at me right as soon as I start talking. As the person beside me who has the longest most beautiful brown eyes finished speaking she looks at me and see that her chocolate brown eyes stare at me indicating that she is done and it's now my turn.

I look down at my hands and start to pick at my right thumb with my left index finger to try and distract my hands from shaking to much. I don't bring my head up as I begin to speak. "Hi my name is Amelia." by habit my brain takes over and I begin to say "and I'm a dancer." I pause and think about what i just said. I look up and to the side to see a familiar face it's Alex my best friend sitting right there. He smiles at me and grabs my hands noticing that I'm picking at them. He exaggerates a big breathe in and blows out the air that he just inheld to tell me that I need to take a deep breathe and calm down. I do as he motions and I look right into his emerald green eyes and begin to talk again. "Let me rephrase that. I use to be a dancer until my whole world came crashing down on me all at once. I was diagnosed with a chronic injury that will never completely heal in my foot. The one place that will end a dancer's career. It's the type of injury that is so painful that somedays its hard to walk and that isn't able to be healed. Just shortly after I got that news I was also diagnosed with anxiety. I had never felt like this way in my entire life. I didn't know how to express my feelings and I just kept them all bottled in all the time. Some of you may ask why I just didn't talk to someone about the way Im feeling. But you don't understand that I don't know how I'm feeling cause the way I figured that out and let all of those feeling go is through dance. I now can't dance. Since I was little I was told to hold all of my feelings in until I got to the studio and then you put all of those feelings into your dances and that made you a great dancer. But I can't do that anymore without being in horrendous amounts of pain. But I have to choose because I can either be in physical pain because I danced or an emotional pain because I held all these emotions in for so long. I don't know which kind of pain is worse to go through. I wish I didn't have to find out."

I want to say all of these things to see if anyone else feels the same why but I don't because I'm afraid that if I do and people don't understand that will think that I'm insane. So I just take a deep breath and say "I use to be a professional dancer." I'm almost in tears until Alex squeezes my hand and reminds me that he his right there next to me. He always there for me and I'm grateful for that but I wish he was more than just my best friend.