CHAPTER 6

SWEET SIXTEEN

Once they hit their teenage years, all dancers who are serious about their sport have to spend so many hours every day with their partner that there’s rarely time for what preoccupies most teenagers. Dating! And at 16, I was about to learn that couples who are together on stage are together off stage, too.

Kenneth and I had been dancing with one another since we were nine. We loved each other like brother and sister (well, like brothers and sisters who get on) and I couldn’t imagine partnering anyone else. Our school days were coming to an end, so it was the time for decisions. We were both going to go to further education colleges, but would it be one that led to a practical qualification or one that would be a precursor to going to university? I hadn’t really given the matter much thought, but the decisions we made would impact the time we had to dance. And so, when Kenneth chose the academic one, we both realized his dancing career was going to have to go on the back burner.

Parting with him was my first experience of a break-up – I was losing one of the closest people in my life, and it hurt. But even so, I wasn’t about to give up on my dream. I still wanted to dance, that’s why I decided to go to business school and study for a qualification to fall back on.

My coaches looked around and came up with a new dance partner for me – Klavs. I know it sounds like a cliché, but he really was tall, dark and handsome. He had lovely curly hair and the kindest hazel-brown eyes. There was just one snag, though: Klavs lived in Copenhagen, a four-and-a-half-hour journey by road and sea from my home in Jutland.

The only way we could train together was if we lived close to one another. Aalborg is a lovely little city, but compared to Copenhagen, Denmark’s wonderful capital, there was little it could offer Klavs. Copenhagen had better trainers, better training facilities, and better transport links to the UK, where many of the important dance competitions are held. It was a no-brainer, so I packed my bags and headed for the big city. I moved into the beautiful penthouse that Klavs’ family owned and took an after-school job in the bakery that they ran.

Klavs was better at ballroom than Latin, and, although I was Junior Latin Dance Champion, my long-limbed body was actually better suited to ballroom, so we focused on that. And we did brilliantly! If we didn’t come first in the competitions we entered, we were almost never out of the top three.

We won the Italian and German Open Youth competitions, making it to the top 48 amateur dancers in the world at just 16 and performing in London’s Royal Albert Hall. I was now so serious about my dancing that when we came fourth in the Danish Championship it felt like taking a booby prize. When I got home that night I picked up my diary and scrawled, ‘Fourth place – Bad Mood!’

Looking back, in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t really such a big deal, but back then it was huge. Being fourth meant we lost our funding, which only went to the top three couples. Without it, our dancing careers didn’t progress as fast as they would have had we been even only one place higher.

First love

Living in the same apartment and dancing together every day could never have worked unless Klavs and I hit it off. And we did: we hit it off so much that, after a first kiss, an oh-so-precious first kiss, we found ourselves falling in love.

I couldn’t have picked a more suitable boy to fall in love with, for Klavs shared my beliefs and values. I’m sure that if I’d met him later in life, we could have made a serious go of it. But sometimes we meet the right person at the wrong time, and, sadly, although it took me a couple of years to realize the fact, it was the wrong time for us.

My life was a whirlwind of business school followed by working in the bakery and then training every night. Fortunately, I’d read about a Danish businessman who power-napped in his office chair, holding his keys in his hand. When they dropped, the sound woke him and he knew it was time to get back to work. If power naps work for him, I thought, maybe they’ll work for me with my schedule that was so tight that I couldn’t risk oversleeping and missing work or training. So 20 minutes every afternoon found me asleep in a chair, and when I woke up I was raring to go.

Dancing’s dark side

After two years of living like that I was physically and mentally exhausted. I’d been ill with pneumonia and forced to spend a few weeks at home to recover. I’d also started to see another side to the dance world, and it was a side I didn’t like. The same people who coached us were also in the pool of experts from whom the judges at dance competitions were drawn. In some events, there could be two out of the seven judges who knew me well. In others, it could be just one, or even none at all.

By the time I was 18 I’d come to the conclusion that it was impossible for the judges to be truly impartial. If they knew a couple, then that was bound to influence how they marked them. And that wasn’t fair. Unless a couple are head and shoulders above the others, then it must be impossible for there to be a clear winner. In football, the team who scores the most goals wins the game. There’s no goal line in my sport. It’s not just about glamour, glitter and perfectly synchronized movements: it’s about, or should be about, what’s fair and what’s not. And once I’d started to think that the competitions and the method of judging were unfair, I couldn’t shift that idea. I came to believe that the system would work much better if coaches only coached and judges only judged!

For the first time in my life I started to seriously question whether I really wanted the life of a dancer. Not only did I become completely disheartened, I became more and more unhappy with my whole life in Copenhagen. I even became unhappy with Klavs.

We had become incredibly close, dreaming and planning our future life in London together, but I was starting to realize that I was no longer sure about his commitment to dancing going forward, and began to think that he wasn’t meant to be part of my future at all. I was totally overwhelmed by my feelings. I didn’t know what to do with them. I felt like I had met the right guy, but I’d met him ten years too early. The thought of our being together forever started to freak me out.

Breakdown

When all these complex feelings about the judges, about Klavs, about where my life was going, were spinning round and round in my head, my mother came to Copenhagen on a visit. As soon as she saw me she knew at once something was wrong. ‘Camilla,’ she said. ‘If you’re not happy tell me and I’ll take you straight home.’

I burst into tears and couldn’t stop. All the feelings I’d been bottling up, hardly even acknowledging them, came flooding out.

The very next day she came with me to Klavs’s house and we packed up all my stuff. Mor must have told his mum what was happening and why. I was in shock, in absolutely no state to do so. I cared so deeply for that lovely family that there was no way I’d want to hurt them. And even though I didn’t want to hurt Klavs, he must have been broken-hearted by my sudden disappearance from his life.

It took me a year to come to terms with what I’d done. Once I had, I made a special trip back to Copenhagen to apologize and try to explain myself. They couldn’t have been nicer about it.

Leaving my life in Copenhagen, upsetting Klavs and his wonderful family was no easy thing for a 19-year-old girl to do, but it taught me several lessons. I’d found out the hard way that I’m not superhuman, that I do get tired, and that winning was not the be-all and end-all if it wasn’t making me happy. I’d learned I could say, ‘Enough is enough. I can’t do this anymore.’ These were all vital lessons that were to shape my life, but I would find myself in similar situations again before realizing I should listen to my gut feeling: that when my soul is unhappy, I need to change something in my life. I have come to believe that the same or similar challenges will present themselves over and over again until we learn the lessons we are meant to learn from them.

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY

When I went back to apologize to Klavs’s family, I learned another life lesson that was just as important as the others. And that’s sometimes we make decisions that we don’t fully understand or that feel out of our control. Those decisions can be hurtful to other people, but it’s never too late to apologize to them. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, go back, say sorry and explain. I had to tell Klavs’s family that my decision to leave had nothing to do with them, that I was simply overwhelmed and overtired and couldn’t cope any more. If I hadn’t done that they might always have wondered if they’d done something to upset me. Of course they hadn’t.

Starting over

So there I was, at my parents’ house, back to square one. Although I was disheartened with the business, I was still missing dancing and started looking for a new partner, although after Klavs, I couldn’t imagine I’d ever find anyone I’d dance so well with. But, if there’s a constant thread to my life, which you’ll find out as you read my story, it’s that in situations like that, someone else has always come along – and when they have it has never felt like I’m settling for second best. I tried out with a couple of boys, and even partnered a British one for a while. We actually went to a summer dance camp when I was back in Aalborg and I met Lars, a lovely Norwegian college boy there. I had a huge crush on him and was really happy when we started dating with no thought of dancing with each other. But when my coach suggested him as a prospective partner, I was more than keen. I even said I would move to Norway to dance with him.

I needed to live exactly how everyone else my age seemed to live

Lars was one of those lucky people who are simply naturally talented. And not only was he one of the best dancers I’d ever been paired with, he even shared my passion for Latin, which I’d put on hold during my years with Klavs. When Lars came into my life, it was as if the partner I had always looked for had finally arrived. But, he was coming to the end of his college days and although we had started planning our future and me actually moving up there, he decided to prioritize differently and go to university, so our partnership never really got off the ground. I felt as if I’d hit a brick wall.

Coming after all my growing disillusionment with the dancing world’s politics and the grief I felt about leaving Klavs and his family, Lars going to university was the final straw. He was such a great dancer that I’d truly believed he was the one I’d make my name with. But when he gave up, I suddenly decided I’d had enough, too. It was as if the years I’d sacrificed in my childhood had finally caught up with me. I didn’t have the energy to look for another partner and start afresh. ‘That’s it,’ I yelled at my mother during a particularly dramatic scene that blew up one day in our kitchen in Aalborg. ‘I never want to dance again!’ And opening the kitchen bin, I threw my dancing shoes into it in a melodramatic gesture that could have come straight from a bad movie, shouting, ‘And I won’t be needing these any more!’

When I’d done that before I was five years old, Mor had known not to cancel my dance classes and tell my partner Torben to find someone else. This time was different. She knew better than to even think about dissuading me.

This time, I was 19, and my life for almost as long as I could remember it had been one long treadmill of work, work, work, then more work. There was no alternative route if I was to make my dreams of being a successful dancer come true. If you don’t work hard at it, you’ve got no chance. And though I had never regretted a minute of it – even the exhausting extra training sessions I jumped at whenever I could – now I felt I was done with it. With Lars off the scene, I couldn’t see any future for me in dancing and despite all the time, effort and money my family and I had invested in it, I didn’t feel any regret as I called round my coaches to explain that I wouldn’t need a new partner because I was giving up, too.

Maybe that seemed impulsive and rash, but I have never regretted it. I needed that time away from dancing to grow up, to really get to know myself and understand what I was all about. For years, to follow my dreams, I had sacrificed partying, friends, family, and basically my whole life. Now I needed to just enjoy myself and not have the constant pressure of rushing from college to training, or forever planning for the next competition. I needed to live exactly how everyone else my age seemed to live. I went to parties. I hung out at cafés. I dated boys who weren’t on the dance circuit. It was fun and I wouldn’t go back and change that time for the world.

In years to come I would wonder if having had that time to let my hair down, something Brendan never had, could in some way have contributed to our break-up because we weren’t on exactly the same path.

When I met the man I was to marry, Kevin, he told me he’d done lots of partying in his life. I was thrilled because I knew he would never be worrying that he’d missed out on something!

DECISIONS, DECISIONS …

As you can see, I made some very difficult decisions in my teens – leaving Klavs, and giving up dancing. I wish I’d known about this classic NLP exercise at the time. It really helps you to find out if the decision you’re contemplating is the one you truly desire. I recommend you try it whenever you face a dilemma of some kind in your life.

With a specific question in mind, in this example about taking a year off abroad, say, ‘Should I go travelling for a year?’ Go through the model below, step by step, writing down your replies to each question.

1. What will happen if I don’t? For the example above, the answer could be, ‘If I don’t go abroad and travel I will regret it later in life or I will be without those memories.’

2. What will happen if I do? You may say, ‘If I go, I’ll feel proud of myself for travelling on my own and I’ll come home feeling inspired and happy having fulfilled one of my dreams.’

3. What won’t happen if I do? You might answer, ‘I won’t have any regrets of what might have been.’

4. What won’t happen if I don’t go? Maybe your answer will be something along the lines of, ‘I won’t come home feeling excited’ or ‘I won’t have spent my savings.’

Try the same exercise for all sorts of different scenarios, for example, ‘Should I stay in this job?’, ‘Should I start exercising?’, ‘Should I give up smoking?’ You’ll usually find it’s much easier to reach a decision once you have answered all four questions and seen your answers to them written down. The intention behind why we want to do certain things also becomes more apparent, which helps us in a decision-making situation.