That other Balanchine adage—about his wanting not the dancers who wanted to dance, but the dancers who had to dance—really meant something to us in those days. There was a world outside the tidy, homogenous life within the studio, but it was inconsequential. We all had to dance, but only I got sick and then couldn’t. I thought, with calm abiding, I feel so queasy; this means I am alive. I feel dizzy; this means I am a living being, that I can feel this, all these sensations. I did not grow through puberty like civilian children. I commiserated with the other dancers on our constant fatigue, on the endless ministrations of the body, our worries so out of sync with those of other young people. We were living at an accelerated pace in which each year counted for more than an ordinary fraction of life.

This is probably when it started: when ballet became difficult. More than difficult: rather, extraordinarily painful. People described ballet as painful all the time, but I wondered if this was what it felt like for the other girls, if the simplest tendu sent searing pain through not only their pointed feet, but also their entire bodies. I wondered if they too had learned to angle their faces precisely during a grand jeté in such a way as to minimize any wincing. I assumed that this was what worthwhile endeavors felt like, that the ability to perform required suffering and sacrifice and ruin. I practiced what I called simply inhabiting, during which I would close my eyes, drive everything away, and drop into my body. I had muscle memory to fall back on, and this is what allowed me to get through class while I simply inhabited. Pain exists in the mind, and I knew I could be happy if I focused on a purely physical selfhood, one I spent several hours per day, six days per week, crafting. For a while, no one noticed how much harder things were getting for me, because I could appear to keep up, suffering the consequences later, alone. I got thinner; I was complimented. My hair thinned; I cut it. I got shin splints; I developed a taste for stimulants. My bony body remained pliable but became soft like an oil painting.

A dance teacher once described his own retirement and the bodily sensation of no longer being able to dance familiar movements as a loss of muscular sanity. Each of us looked down at an ailing limb as he said it.

When did it feel like a normal part of your life? I asked him.

He shook his head to indicate that it never did.

It was a term he might have read—though I doubt it—in an 1890 entry from Alice James’s diary: “Owing to some physical weakness, excess of nervous susceptibility, the moral power passes, as it were for a moment, and refuses to maintain muscular sanity, worn out with the strain of its constabulary functions . . . it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I not only had all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and straight-jacket imposed upon me, too.” In this same entry, Alice references a paper by her brother William, titled “The Hidden Self,” in which he writes that the hysteric “abandons part of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it all together.” William believed the theories emerging out of the Salpêtrière that the abandoned part of the hysteric’s consciousness “may solidify into a secondary or subconscious self” and that hypnosis could be used to “make her give up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part may be.” Alice seems to have believed in this conception of hysteria, too, but often, the way she describes the cognitive aspects of her condition feel more akin to the sluggish “brain fog” that so often accompanies chronic illness: “When the fancy took me of a morning at school to study my lessons by way of variety instead of shirking or wiggling thro’ the most impossible sensations of upheaval, violent revolt in my head overtook me so that I had to ‘abandon’ my brain, as it were . . . conscious and continuous cerebration is an impossible exercise and from just behind the eyes my head feels like a dense jungle into which no ray of light has ever penetrated.” Alice’s mother believed her to be suffering from “a genuine case of hysteria.” As my symptoms continued to be interpreted as a lack of “nervous togetherness,” I began to wonder if I might be, too.

My mother attacked the diagnostic process with all the deliberation of a nosediving dolphin. Blood was tested. Everything was scanned. I had no STDs, no mono, no epilepsy, no detectable viruses. A rheumatologist found no reason for my joints to be as they were. A primary physician looked at my blood and found slight anemia and vitamin B and D deficiencies, but nothing that should have been causing my long list of symptoms. A neurologist scanned my brain and found no reason for me to be dizzy so frequently. A gastroenterologist instructed me to keep a food diary in order to troubleshoot what might be causing the ulcers along my digestive tract. I updated that diary with religious devotion. I narrowed my daily food intake to cucumber, ciabatta, herbed mayonnaise, and a sleepy sheet of lettuce.

Easy, the gastroenterologist said after examining the food journal. Nervous stomach.

This does not explain any of the other symptoms, I reminded him.

As a doctor, he knew this. He offered me more painkillers. While I was fortunate enough to have access to medical troubleshooting, my body was categorically deceitful.

A common image of me from those years: I’m sitting on an examination table, wrapped in a paper gown in those insipid colors chosen specifically for women—lavender, maybe. I’m already suspecting that the brutal heat through each muscle, each joint, and in my blood itself will not be made legible through any conducted diagnostics. At each appointment, a nurse writes down my details in order of increasing incrimination: a young woman, a former ballet dancer (control issues, short career), experiencing recurrent episodes of fainting (restricted eating), nausea for extended periods of time (histrionic), sourceless pain everywhere (performative), rashes (neurotic), sleep paralysis (a benign condition). The nurse would ask me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. Each time, I’d hesitate, unsure of how to turn a sensation into a number. Should I have said nine and risk confirmation of my suspected inclination toward hyperbole, or four, and risk being misunderstood? Sometimes, the nurse then asked if I was anxious, which I was—anxious about what everyone else seemed to see: that it was a matter of anxiousness, not my body. I was anxious about being anxious without language to express what the body felt, the necessary crossroads of breath and text that might lead this suffering to the small mercy of a name. Or, in a confluence of visual data and psychology, she’d ask if I thought I was fat, or make an asinine comment about my thinness. I would explain, with the saccharine cadence one might use to speak to a child, that I ate all I could but that “the flavors hurt.” Dry arugula met me with a shock of spice; I was pricked by the harshness of cilantro in a bowl of bland rice noodles. Hunger pangs, I would explain, were often easier to bear than the searing pain that followed soon after a flavor, or than the inevitable vomiting, diarrhea, and nosebleeds. She would write something down, furrow her brow, and ask how my periods were (rare). Had I tried protein shakes?

I’d sit there in the stupid gown, huddled and cupping my blue fingers around the warmth of my breath, and wait for the doctor. Dancers, I thought, were ideal patients: compliant, receptive to critique, and pleased to solve problems through bodily manipulation. I would look down at my body as if for the first time and try to see if there was anything that might indicate a problem to an outside eye. Aside from some tragedy behind my thinness that could be guessed at, or the bruises that perpetually sprinkled my arms and legs, no matter how careful I was moving through the world, or the general malaise of being a young woman, already working so hard, already so tired, I didn’t look sick.

The doctor would come in and scan my chart while I disappeared. If he asked what I thought was going on, I would think it was a positive beginning: to be granted this authorship over my body. I always brought notes about recent symptoms on index cards, the same ones I used to memorize the minimal amount of information necessary to do well in school. They featured new sources of pain (light, cold, heat) scrawled in pencil, newly infected body parts (fingers hurt the most) or new observations about a correlation between diet and ulcers. As I spoke, I would often be struck by the pity in my own voice, as if I were speaking about some other unfortunate person in a state of undeserved catastrophe. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to contemplate one’s medical legibility—the chasm between suffering and what can be found to be wrong—without self-pity. Pity slips through when we are told we will remain impenetrable to ourselves. I’d try to explain whatever my most recent incident or symptom was, speaking slowly and calmly: This time, my most recent fainting spell was not provoked by anything in particular. It happened after a pleasant lunch with friends on the patio. When I rose to clear my plate, I felt the flurry of clichéd symptoms that occur before losing consciousness: the room spun. I felt a weightiness throughout my body and the sensation of being pulled downward before blacking out, hitting my head, and receiving a minor concussion. Since then, the sensation of being pulled downward has not left me. I’ve lost my sense of balance and endured an unrelenting migraine and ringing in my ears.

Sometimes, while recounting my symptoms, I would get uncharacteristically flustered; would mumble, cough, skip some of the items listed in my notes. (It feels like there are knives flowing through my blood, and all my blood is rushing to my head.) Then, the doctor would clear his throat, explain that my cranial MRIs, assisted by vibrant dye dripped into my bloodstream in the days following my fainting episodes, had come back normal, that there was no reason to assume anything was wrong with my brain or anything else and that they were running out of tests that could be run. Always, it concerned him that I seemed anxious, which he could offer me something for. Always, he reminded me that women, especially women under a great deal of physical or emotional stress, often do not realize they are experiencing anxiety or that this anxiety is what causes ailments that seem physical in origin. Always, he said that our minds and bodies interact in mysterious ways. There was never anything conclusive. Once, I asked what I really wanted to know: If all my symptoms persist while the tests continually, conclusively show that nothing is wrong with me, does this not suggest that it is the diagnostic process that is inadequate?

Maybe, he said, but in the absence of an observable cause, the overwhelming likelihood is that what we’re dealing with—we!—falls within the realm of psychiatry. If whatever was causing my symptoms had an organic cause, it would show up on tests. This was the rule by which he had to practice medicine, he told me. Maybe it’s the rule that is broken, then, I said under my breath. He prescribed an antidepressant.

Sometimes I pleaded, knowing fully that objecting to the diagnosis that it was all in my head would only reinforce his belief that it was all in my head.

Surely, this pain, this physical pain, cannot come from anxiety alone, I said.

If the doctor was generous, he’d ask how often I was in pain.

Even today, while I am in considerably more pain considerably more often, I wonder if I know the answer to this question. One day, I might find myself feeling adequate and relatively positive; the next, I will not be able to leave bed, giving in to a pain I can’t verbalize. From a medical perspective, my self-conception is unreliable at best. I would tell myself it was fine for the doctor to cushion the air with banal assumptions. I understood that his interest was restricted to the zones stipulated by the form he was filling out and that for me to offer information that could not be put into that form only made both of us uncomfortable.

To ask, to beg the doctor to explore my situation, to ask him to inhabit my bewilderment, was pointless. If your scans do not contain the necessary indicators that lead to diagnosis, they will be thought to reveal similarities between you and those who allegedly only imagine themselves ill. If you present as composed, poised, you will seem too well to be suffering as much as you say. If you present as distressed, the distress serves as an easy scapegoat, the reason you feel so unwell. A plea bargain is as good as it gets.

Philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman writes, “All the efforts of pathological anatomy in the nineteenth century were not only directed toward configuring the illness through a distribution of symptoms, but also and above all to subsuming this configuration: to localizing the essence of the ill. The sign of the illness became less the symptom than the lesion.” Symptoms prevail.

“One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience,” Alice James wrote in her diary.

Charcot’s disciple Désiré Bourneville noted that “the hysteric always seems to be outside the rule.” She might suffer from seemingly incongruous symptoms, like stupor and hypersensitivity, anorexia and bulimia, constipation and diarrhea, depression and profound intelligence (once again, it is the rule that strikes me as inadequate). Thus, hysteria became known for its ability to mimic countless other illnesses. Charcot had become famous as a neurologist for his ability to find the “essence” of a disease visually—first, by identifying common patterns of patients’ symptoms and, then, by overseeing postmortem dissections of their brains, seeking a common structural abnormality. This “clinico-anatomic” method sought to ensure he would not be led astray by the specificities of individual cases. Charcot’s job, as he saw it himself, was to turn disarray into classification. He identified two kinds of hysterical symptoms: permanent physical defects that, as a dig, he called “stigmata”; and periodic fits that could come on spontaneously or when a patient was surprised, distraught, or scared. Charcot believed that with better microscopes and scientific techniques, he would eventually be able to find the abnormality of the brain that was surely the source of the hysteric’s symptoms. But after centuries of inquiry, we still do not know what caused them. There was certainly a culture shared among the “career” hysterics—our illnesses are always social. One of them, Marie “Blanche” Wittman, too unpredictably violent and disorderly to be of clinical value (though her angry outbursts may have been a result of her addiction to ether, a common anesthetic used at the hospital), was transferred from the hysteria ward to a cell in the insanity ward for over seven months as punishment. When, seven and a half months later, she returned to the hysteria ward, where patients were offered more freedom and privileges, she worked to become a model (hypnotizable) hysteric and was featured prominently in Charcot’s demonstrations. It’s easy to see why a young woman resigned to spending her life at a hospital might try to climb its ranks through imitation, but a predictable assemblage of symptoms and their progression had already been established as requirements for something to be classified as a disease by medical pioneer Thomas Sydenham in the seventeenth century. Even subtracting symptoms that might be explained as imitative or social, like the attacks—many hysterics were indeed housed with epileptics when they arrived at the hospital, and Charcot’s famous demonstrations there tend to be read today as theatrical performances—what of the others? Charcot himself claimed that the hysterics’ fits and hallucinations were too intense not to be authentic. It all raises the question: if Charcot was looking for a brain lesion, proof that the hysterics’ condition was rooted in biology, not the mind, why was the diagnostic process so obsessively visual, with hysteria symptoms staged under hypnosis in darkrooms and amphitheaters opened to observation? As cultural historian Cristina Mazzoni puts it, “[Charcot’s] clinic ends up resembling its object of study, be it an artistic text or hysterical woman.” (Was I perhaps drawn to the hysterics’ images because they offered some false hope that pain could be made visual?)

The pathologizing of Giselle’s sexual “deviance” and her “madness” provided the basis for Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s poststructuralist reworking of the ballet, which premiered in 1982. In this rendition, Giselle propositions Albrecht, indicating to him that although she is not fertile, she still has sexual desire. Albrecht’s requited desire stems from his exchanges with Giselle rather than from a myth surrounding her figure. Instead of dying of a broken heart, Giselle is banished to a mental asylum. Thus, the death of her body at the end of the first act can be read as synonymous with the loss of her sanity. The second act takes place in an asylum, where the Wilis are recontextualized as Giselle’s fellow patients: they will never be mothers, will only ever be frustrated. With nothing to control their desire, they are ruled by sexual impulsivity. Myrtha is a nurse reminiscent of Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The surreal sets feature dismembered pieces of the female body scattered across the asylum walls. In a maneuver akin to that of the fainting husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Albrecht follows Giselle in succumbing to madness.

Ek’s isn’t an emancipatory vision, but it does seem to hold culture and, by extension, ballet culture more accountable for what it does to women. When asked if he considered his staging of Giselle to be deromanticized, Ek responded, “That depends on what you mean by ‘romantic.’ If you mean ‘pretty and sweet,’ well, no, they’re not part of it. But if you mean what ‘romantic’ signified from the beginning—something wild and illogical, something to which you can’t respond with your reason—then, absolutely, this is a romantic ballet.” His answer is akin to the surrealists’ post hoc obsession with the hysterics; or to Lacanian psychoanalysis’s defense of hysteria as a condition capable of entertaining dichotomies. When the body itself is wild and illogical, it demands to be met on these terms.