I suspected that my body had its own inner life over which I had no physical control long before I encountered the photographs of Augustine. It goes back as far as I can remember, I should say, since one of my earliest childhood memories is watching a recording of a dance rehearsal filmed from the wing by another dancer’s doting mother. Even now I can recall the sensation of sitting on the gritty sprung studio floor the week after the rehearsal, peering up at the outdated television in the corner, which seemed very high above me, as we were each asked to observe our performance and make notes on the areas we could improve. Then I remember the nauseating feeling as the excitement of seeing myself on-screen gave way to the realization that something had gone terribly wrong. Not with my performance—I danced well. The faster and more precise the movements, the more stoic and focused my expression grew. But as I made my exit from the stage, as soon as I was adequately shielded by the draped cloth of the wing, my face contorted into a grotesque wince. It was as though I had been waiting for this moment to surrender to an enormous, oppressive pain. I slid to the floor, crumpled, but did not hold onto or gesture toward any one part of my body: the pain seemed to come from everywhere, or nowhere. The woman holding the camera ushered the other girls away but allowed me to continue to tremble in the wing. I looked up at her pleadingly, both offering and protecting myself, and she finally seemed to understand that what she could do was grant me the small mercy of turning off her camera.

It may have been one of the earliest moments I preserved vividly, but as the next decade passed, I seldom returned to it. There was no need to: though this nameless pain continued interrupting my life, I was still able to insist upon a kind of belligerent sovereignty over my body, which had already been offered up to ballet, had already been spoken for. Sometimes, the pain became what I could describe as “unbearable,” but so much of ballet feels unbearable; one is always finding new limits to what can be tolerated or sought. Dance isn’t mind over matter; it’s matter—flesh, bone, blood—over mind. Yet I still crumpled. Often. Anywhere.

Early in the course of an illness, symptoms might resemble affectations. My childhood was all blue fingers and toes, spells of being unable to eat because “flavors hurt,” flu symptoms that persisted for months at a time. I always had a fever, like a baby, I was told. If these symptoms continue long enough without the discovery of the cause, people come to think of them as who you are. Immersed in the fantastical stories of ballet, I wondered when “the way I was” might become “the way I died.”

In the ballet Giselle, a young peasant girl with a weak heart and delicate health is doomed to premature death by her love of dancing. Though her protective mother repeatedly warns her to remain still, Giselle can’t help herself: she has to dance, and continues to flit around the stage. In a clichéd village scene, the other dancers stand around nodding, clapping, and gesturing toward her to indicate to one another that there is dancing happening at center stage. Ballet requires a great amount of pantomime—dancers gesticulate feelings and experiences instead of talking about them, a tendency I have found carries over into real life. Indeed, Giselle’s fragility ends up being fatal: after she learns that her love interest is a nobleman and already engaged to another girl, she loses her mind—the mad scene is one of the most famous in all of ballet—yet maintains the impulse to dance, staggering around, grabbing at things that aren’t there. In most modern renditions, the ballerina’s hair is pinned in such a way that it will tumble down in tangled glory during this scene, so she can tug at it in a desperate, lionlike rage. Then Giselle’s heart gives out, and she dies.

A young girl watching the ballet might believe that, in moments of terror and self-loss, she is supposed to do something with her hair. I was one of those girls. When I first saw Giselle being rehearsed by the older teens at my studio, I was overwhelmed by the sense that it was my story. Perhaps I already sensed that my love of ballet would harm me, or that I was dancing on borrowed time, but in all likelihood, I was too young and impressionable to have developed any immunity to the values embedded in the ballet: ritual, physical sacrifice, impossible beauty, and a story born of the mistreatment of women—or of a woman mistreating herself. Théophile Gautier, who cowrote the scenario for Giselle, was celebrated as an abandonné (one who yields or abandons oneself to a great artistic vision). It shows. The second act, which I then thought was even more beautiful, follows Giselle into the afterlife, to the land of the Wilis, a group of ghostly girl-spirits who were betrayed by their lovers in life. The Wilis, clad in eidolic white tulle, are confined to haunt a graveyard and encounter mortal men only when they happen to wander through their domain by night.

They are a delicious, dynamic embodiment of collective female anger, indiscriminately seeking revenge on any man who comes their way before forcing him to dance until he dies of exhaustion. There are several different interpretations of the Wilis’ backstory, though most agree that they are women who died before their wedding day or were left at the altar and could not find peace in their graves. From that point, readings differ: some choreographers and critics depict the Wilis as sexually frustrated (this might have been useful self-knowledge in my adolescence) or suggest that they find sexual fulfillment in their murders. The group’s leader, the formidable Myrtha, either continues to condemn the women to their sexual frustration or provides them release and satisfaction with each dead man. Giselle begs the Wilis to spare Albrecht, the nobleman who misled her, but they insist that he is as guilty as any man and must die. Romanticism is often described as a rejection of popular morality in the pursuit of individual desire. When we interpret the Wilis in this way, it’s noticeable that Giselle does the opposite, denying herself a sexually fulfilling experience in an attempt to save Albrecht. A dancer will deny herself anything for the story.

Now I wonder if dancers and the characters they portray abandon themselves to or for something. In the traditional stage production of Giselle, Myrtha ignores the girl’s pleas for Albrecht’s life. Male energy can run dry, but the wrath of women is infinite and unyielding. Albrecht deserves to die, Myrtha insists, and Giselle should relish his death with the rest of the scorned she-ghosts. But because it’s a ballet, Giselle’s merciful love rescues the nobleman, and she gets to rest peacefully in her grave. I’ve always wondered if a small but significant part of Giselle wanted to join the Wilis in their ravenous animus—the opposite of balletic virtue. The conditions of her choice feel modern: weaponize your ballet angelhood or lie, with your mercy and love of dance, in a coffin.

That’s ridiculous, my own mother said of Giselle. Why would you keep dancing if you knew it might kill you? Still, I remained convinced that the most beautiful, meaningful pursuits would require correlating sacrifice. The older girls danced on shin splints and stress fractures. Some of them took secret “vitamins” that gave them boundless energy. If they gained weight, they dieted it away. The girls who couldn’t see things that way, had bad feet, or gained the typical amount of weight during puberty—you can see more, Balanchine had said of his preference for thinness in his ballerinas—transitioned to modern dance, or became “civilians,” the term some of us used to refer to nondancers.

One of my teachers had danced for Balanchine in his glory days at the New York City Ballet. She went by only her first name, perhaps in an attempt to mythologize herself in the same way she mythologized “Mr. B.” When she spoke of him, her eyes took on a cultish, erotic glaze, which I mistakenly attributed to her love for ballet itself instead of her inability to get over having been touched by the Master. When she warned us that our aging would be an accelerated process—as though we were already, even as children, deteriorating in dog years—I felt let in on a secret that connected me with a grand tradition. But she was also a cautionary tale: as I imagined her preparing for her goddess-like descent on our class—brushing her wispy, waist-length white hair into a severe bun, wrapping her frame (which had no loose skin to indicate that she had ever gained weight or strayed from a balletic body) in tights and a chiffon skirt as though she were still a student—I felt unsafe from myself, as though I were quickly approaching a day when there would be nothing I could change about my life, either. Wanting might become an end unto itself.

In the old days, ballet dancers used bits of lamb’s wool inside their pointe shoes, but by the time I was dancing, there were toe pads. From the outside, they look like socks, but there is a thin, valuable layer of gel cushioning built in. People often assume pointe shoes are made of wood from the sounds they make, but they’re actually just layers of canvas and paper and glue, which make pointework quite painful, especially to young dancers, whose bones have not yet hardened. Our more traditional teachers, who wanted their girls to feel the floor through their shoes, to engage with the material matter of their art, abhorred these toe pads. As the civilians were weeded out, those of us who remained needed less padding in our shoes—just a little tape on the toes or some wadded-up paper towel did the trick. That taste, that desire to feel the floor, is what makes a dancer. The taste and the ability to know something many times over, forgetting and remembering and forgetting again.

In the 1860s, one of the last ballerinas of the Romantic era, Emma Livry, was famous for her portrayal of the title role in Le Papillon, a princess who is turned into a butterfly and burned when she flies into a lit torch. In 1862, Livry was rehearsing a mime part for an Auber opera when her skirt caught fire on one of the stage’s gaslights. Costumes caught fire all the time—gaslights were everywhere—so ballet companies had begun fireproofing them. But Livry didn’t like that the chemicals used stiffened and discolored the fabrics, and she refused the fireproof costumes. She spent months in the hospital as a result of her burns, but swore that if she were able to return to the stage, she would never wear the safer costumes, insisting that they were too ugly. She died in the hospital, and the remains of her charred costume can now be viewed in the Musée de l’Opéra, in Paris.

Group identity, suffering, sacrifice—it is no wonder that anywhere one looks, there are balletic relics and martyrs. Staunch exposés about the secret, ugly brutality lying beneath the calculated perfection of ballet are tedious because they’re disingenuous. Ballet’s cruel ferocity isn’t a secret; it is at the heart of what ballet is—historically, in the popular imagination, and in the hearts of the tenacious, naïve children who pursue it.

Things could have been much worse, I often told myself. Tanaquil Le Clercq, the first American ballerina to be trained since childhood by Balanchine and the prototype for the thin, sleek Balanchine dancer, once told a friend that it had all seemed too easy: she had a scholarship to the New York City Ballet Company’s feeder school, the School of American Ballet, at age eleven; was a principal dancer at NYCB at nineteen, and married Balanchine at twenty-three. Years later, while on tour in Europe, she caught polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. Of course, she at first wanted to die. Balanchine would pick her up from bed, place her feet atop his own, and dance around the apartment with her, propping her up—a hopeless endeavor. A year later, he choreographed Agon, a ballet containing a blunt pas de deux in which the male dancer controls and guides the legs and feet of the female dancer, poking and prodding and guiding, cruelly, erotically. When Tanaquil was fifteen, Balanchine had cast her in a onetime polio benefit at the Waldorf Astoria. He played an ominous character cloaked in black named Polio; Tanaquil portrayed his victim, falling to the floor at his touch, paralyzed. She was picked up and placed in a wheelchair, where she performed joyless arm movements until silver coins fell down upon her, “curing” her disease. When Tanaquil herself contracted polio, Balanchine believed that the performance had been an omen. It took him much longer than Tanaquil herself to accept that she would not dance again.

All I saw were stories—signs.

I played mental games with fate, listing tragedies that could ruin my life: the omens of harrowing ballet roles come true, a car accident, cancer, or a lifelong illness like Crohn’s disease, from which my aunt suffered. Did I expect to feel a sense of control by imagining, in excruciating detail, each worst-case scenario? That won’t happen to you, my parents insisted. You’re a Wells. A hard worker. The casual association of debilitation with laziness provoked me to constantly reassure myself I was industrious: I could push through anything; enfeeblement would not happen to me—beneath pride there is always shame. My parents confidently distinguished between those who were poor and sick and failed by the cruel arrangement of society and those they thought to be a drain on the system, leeches who wouldn’t do their part. To their disappointment, I failed to see any difference. Their judgments seemed to be made through a kaleidoscope of age, perceived choices, and appearance.

In a famous anecdote often told about Balanchine, now something of a cliché, a doting mother consults him about whether or not her daughter is suited for dancing. Mr. B. responds, “La danse, Madame, c’est une question morale.” Dance as a moral consideration: while the abstraction is a bit maddening, it also seems predictive of who chooses to become a dancer. A young woman well suited to ballet considers sadism, masochism, and relinquishing her will to be moral questions. She is pleased to be an instrument.

In 1847, author Albert Smith published a “social zoology,” The Natural History of the Ballet-Girl. While a widespread fascination with the seeming otherworldliness of ballerinas was common in the era, Smith instead painted a picture of dancers’ lives full of bodily abuse, long hours in subpar conditions, and poverty, which gave them a sick appearance. But the physical demands were only the beginning. Smith wrote that the girls also looked ill because ballet roles emotionally manipulated them and overtaxed their feelings. The dancer must “express the most vivid interest in, and sympathy with, the fortunes, sorrows, or joys of the principal performers. Possibly, no other class of humanity is actuated by so many different sentiments in five minutes. Were the ‘heart-strings’ which poets write of, really bits of cord to pull the feelings into different positions, as the string makes the puppet kick its legs and arms, then you would see that those belonging to a whole Corps de Ballet are tugged at once.” Because dancing in unison with the rest of the corps members does not allow for catharsis the way a principal role might, the ballet girl of the corps is left to feel too much.

Dance’s easy historical association with madness did not help my case. In Dance Pathologies, Felicia McCarren argues that Smith’s pathologizing of the ballet girl is indicative of how dance of the era addressed the discourses of literature and science, which became more pronounced as Romantic ballets moved toward wordlessness. Citing the purported connections among dancing, madness, and death in Romantic ballets like Giselle, she writes, “in a culture that views dancers as vaguely ‘sick,’ as Smith does—hysteria’s myriad causes and symptoms seem a reasonable diagnosis.” Both dance and medicine rely upon a normative concept of health, in contrast to which bodies are measured. While ballet responded not to medical theory or medical writing but, rather, to a general medical culture, it seems likely it informed the latter as well. Even Charcot, practicing what he called médecine rétrospective, noted the pathological association between hysteria and dancing in his discussion of medieval and Renaissance European dancing manias, claiming that hysteria and hystero-epilepsy played “a predominant role.”

Romantic ballets like Giselle were used as political tools, inextricable from the pathologizing or sexualization of the young dancers. The noble Albrecht’s betrayal of the poor peasant Giselle could be seen as a symbol of the harm done by the bourgeoisie, the very audience to which the ballet was presented. In his book A Queer History of the Ballet, Peter Stoneley writes that the tradition of ballet blanc, in which the female dancers are clad in white and tend to portray ghosts, nymphs, maidens, fairies, and other ethereal creatures, was likely seen as an erotic spectacle: when Giselle premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1841, the corps de ballet members who played the Wilis were expected to participate in a system of prostitution légère, endorsed by the Opéra, in which the women were connected with wealthy ballet patrons who made donations to the ballet in exchange for sexual favors or special attention from the dancers. The Palais Garnier even featured a foyer de la danse, an offstage arena designed to encourage encounters between high-paying patrons and the young dancers—a space that wives and male dancers were not allowed to enter. In the 1800s, these practices carried the fatal threat of syphilis, which McCarren believes was reflected onstage: the Wilis represented “many of the nightmares about female sexuality made evident in contemporary attitudes towards prostitution.”