A former dancer reckons with the rigors and ordeals of life in ballet.

If ballet was all self-effacing torture, there would be no need to wrestle with it. But despite the inhumanity of its current training methods, Robb also makes it clear that it gave her so much. “At ballet, I had learned not only to think about how my body looked from the outside, but to fully inhabit it from the inside,” she writes. “As much as I obsessed about my reflection in the mirror, I thought even more about how my body felt.” –Madison Mainwaring, The New Republic