If anyone knows anything about me, it’s that I love dance. So much so, that my mother introduces me as ‘this is my daughter, the dancer,’ and not as ‘this is my daughter, the doctor’. This is not to say that I don’t love my profession, it’s extremely fulfilling and stimulating, but it’s also extremely draining, what with the long on call nights, huge responsibility and the vicarious trauma.
Dance on the other hand replenishes me and gives me the mental and physical resources to better perform said profession. After a 48 h on-call and pent up energy, I go to my International Samba class and shake it all off. Or I lean back and throw myself into a Viennese waltz and spin my fatigue away. I pump up my brain and focus all my attention on making my body move exactly like the amazing professional ballroom dancers. Well, not exactly, but my mother thinks I can, which goes to say that your family and friends can also share your joy of dance and can either become inspired or dance vicariously through you!
Still, I think that ballroom dancing does have some similarities with my profession. Like Medicine, ballroom dancing is very physically rigorous and requires you push yourself, it makes you go down to the nitty-gritty details, it requires you to always be learning, and most of all, it helps develop humility.
You can’t be a good doctor if you aren’t humble and open to learning and self-improvement!
I find this similarity interesting, because many of the members of my dance family also have challenging and demanding professions; engineers, geologists, astronomers, software designers and business women. Evidently, dance offers release not only to the body and soul, but also to the mind.