The thinking body is all that remains of my time in ballet. My memory is littered with holes—or, rather, certain details are out of order in my mind: when my bones started to splinter, when I gave in to certain choiceless clichés, when I knew I would be spat out in fury but danced on anyway. I couldn’t understand back then why some teenagers left ballet. It’s to save our bodies, one of them told me. I scoffed.

Contempt was my first mistake.

My second mistake was pride. When a ballet teacher pulled my mother and me aside one afternoon and gently suggested I consider taking a meeting with an acting agent, I understood that my simply “inhabiting” wasn’t cutting it—I was destined to be a civilian. I didn’t take a breath the entire time she spoke. My notoriously harsh ballet mistress was trying to tell me, in the most generous way, that my time with her was waning. Ballet careers are rare and punishing, and it was already resolutely clear that I would not have one. The summers I’d spent in acting classes held at ballet intensives—Loosen up and have some fun!—and the overlap of skills used in ballet meant that acting might have been an easy transition, and it certainly would have earned better money and been less strenuous on my body. None of this mattered. Losing ballet meant losing the illusion I held closest: that all my physical suffering was for something—ballet, beauty, a Mr. B., a god, or a Charcot. If my body’s usefulness as a vessel was about to run dry, I believed that the only relief I might find would come from transcendence from my boiling flesh-prison. I began to see my body as not a temple but an escape room.

I have never found a version of life that expresses itself like dancing, but sometimes, in a dream, I am able to recall what the pleasure of it felt like in my body, and I am briefly consoled.

I swore to forget the sick girl and speak of her to no one. I wanted to stop thinking about her entirely—her confusion; her harshness toward herself and her surroundings; the conflict between the world and how she wanted it to be, the manufactured perfection of a well-executed performance; her conflation of matters of taste with laws of nature; her inability to provide a satisfactory account of the chaos enveloping her. But I have never managed to forget. Years later, all my fiction was written toward her, toward her posturing, her tendency to act like she knew what she wanted before she did. Obeying the instinct to immerse myself in that part of my life once more, to investigate a medical event devoid of evidence, was a daunting prospect. The narrative has lugged me along in directions I have not chosen: toward Augustine Gleizes, toward martyrs, and now toward my unproven body and the secrets it harbors.

“Hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences,” Freud and Breuer wrote in Studies in Hysteria.