What to Do With Loving Early
Girlhood, Devotion, and the Ongoing Practice of Attention
I’ve been thinking about what it means to love something early in life—to feel a sense of attachment, connection, even devotion, before you have the language to name it that way. For me, that early love showed up through dancing—not love for another person, or even for the dancing itself at first, but something quieter and more internal, something that felt like making contact with a part of myself that already existed but hadn’t yet been spoken to. Dance became my first language in that way. It was an exchange with myself, something I stepped into before I understood it cognitively, before I could explain it to anyone else. And from a young age, I loved it—which is to say, I found something I could hold, something that held me, a connection that made the world feel possible, feel open, feel mysterious, even as it made sense.
That early loving is bound to girlhood for me—not just as a time in my life, but as a structure, a way of being with time, a way of making space for awe. And the commitment I’ve made to build a life in dance has always been, in some real way, a commitment to staying near that feeling. That sensation of being caught up in something that connects attention and imagination and body, and does it all at once.
But I’m not sure what to do when that feeling isn’t anchored in the same place anymore. What do you do when the shape of that loving changes, when the conditions around it shift, when the thing you once oriented everything around becomes harder to reach—not because you don’t love it, but because something else is asking for your attention, your time, your breath?
This isn’t a declaration that I’m leaving dance. It’s not even a question of staying or going. It’s more like trying to speak honestly about the long duration of choosing something. After thirty-five years of choosing dance, and continuing to choose it in shifting ways, the choosing itself looks different. The reasons I stay have changed. The movement I make, both literal and metaphorical, has changed. And none of this feels like a tragedy. It feels like life.
I’ve been thinking through all of this while walking the Beara Way, a 10-day trail that traces the Beara Peninsula in the southwest of Ireland—between County Cork and County Kerry—where the Atlantic pushes in, hard-edged and expansive. This is not a place built for tourism or performance; the landscape insists on its own shape. The hills rise not for show but out of old geological memory, the kind that doesn’t care why you’ve come. And yet, it holds you. The trail winds through boggy farmland, stone paths, mountain ridges, small villages, and back roads where the sheep outnumber people.
It’s early May, and everything is green, wet, blooming, and reluctant. I came here during a hinge moment in my life—having just turned forty, deep into ACL recovery, and moving through a stretch of time marked less by clarity and more by sensing. Not a collapse exactly, but a period of low light—of asking different questions about what still matters, and what can be let go. I wasn’t looking for resolution. I was looking for rhythm, for something to meet me where I am now: inside a slower pace, inside a body reorganizing, inside a life that’s shifting underfoot.
I think of the stones I walked by the other day—those standing stones set into the hills, older than recorded history, placed in the earth without inscription. There’s no formal marker, no rope, no carved plaque explaining anything. The area around them is shaped more by passage than by preservation. The grass is worn down in patches. There’s cow shit nearby. Fallen stones lie at strange angles, half-buried or left alone. A narrow path leads to them, if you know where to look. A tree nearby is tied with bits of fabric, ribbon, foil, and plastic—offerings, maybe, for the fairies or for something else unnamed that people want to stay in good standing with.
The stones themselves are not especially large. They’re weathered and uneven, their edges rubbed down by wind. You could walk by them and not notice. Or you could notice and mistake them for something else. That’s how it goes on this trip—stone after stone, the way they sit in the land, the way the rough baldness of their surfaces catches the light, makes you stop. You see one, then another. You try to read into it, then stop trying. There is no single conclusion, no clear designation, only a repetition of placement and erosion and your own attention returning to the same gesture again and again.
I end up learning more about them from a woman named Eoigha in a pub in Eyeries—Na hAoraí in Irish—than I do from any sign or official description. She shares stories that have been passed down—about the land, the stones, the people who walk them and what they leave behind. She talks about memory not as a thing to store, but something carried. Something alive in motion. Listening to her, I start to wonder what it would mean to hold time that way—to imagine history not as something behind us or beneath us, but as something beside us, walking too.
Walking through that landscape, I felt the kind of possibility I used to associate with dancing—curious, open, slightly unsure of myself but wanting to keep going. That early loving was there again, but it wasn’t only about dance. It was about playing with stones as a kid on the low wall outside my house. It was about arranging them and naming them and making entire worlds out of what was around me. It was about being with myself in a way that felt real and alive and not performative.
There’s a line I return to often, especially in moments like this one, when I’m wondering how memory and place and repetition shape a life. George Eliot wrote, “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it... What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?” And something in that settles me. Not because it provides an answer, but because it grants value to the act of staying. It reminds me that repetition is not failure but depth. That the things I’ve seen a hundred times might hold more than I thought, if I keep looking.
So yes, I love dance. But what I’m learning is that the loving I found in dance belongs to a broader way of loving—one that stretches beyond the studio, that appears in walking, in arranging, in organizing my breath and attention toward whatever is in front of me. Sometimes that happens inside a classroom, and sometimes it doesn’t. Loving dance and walking. Loving movement and staying still.
Even on this walk, I find myself taping my toes without thinking. It’s muscle memory, instinct, that comes from years of pointe shoes, blisters, bloodied bandages, and a very specific kind of pride. I feel my bones ache, I feel the strain and the limit of my body, and at the same time I feel a kind of joy, a real and present pleasure. My lungs open wide, and I remember rehearsals where I had to learn to let breath into the shape of the choreography, to let it be a part of the structure rather than something to push through.
And as I sit here reflecting, the thought comes: this was long-form across the floor. And then, just as quickly, the voice in my head rolls its eyes—really, Jessie? Are you going to relate every life experience back to dance class? Is that what this Substack is now? A collection of metaphors that somehow always lead back to a fan kick?
And maybe it is.
But maybe it’s not about returning to dance class as some didactic endpoint. Maybe it’s about letting there be room for interconnection. That one kind of loving might make another possible. That the muscle you built learning how to stay with one thing—how to pay attention to it, how to grow with it—might make it possible to notice when something new needs to be loved with the same care.
“That one kind of loving might make another possible.”
Isn’t that the real teaching? That you can learn how to love, and then let that way of loving show you other things worth your attention?
I think about friends who didn’t stay with the thing they first loved, and how often they speak about that with a kind of embarrassment, like they gave up. But what if the measure isn’t staying, but learning how to move with your own desire? What if the gift of that early love is that it showed you how to care, how to wonder, how to be present—and that you carry that with you, even when the form changes?
So much of making a life in dance has meant asking: what do I do with what I know? What do I do with what I’ve lived? What does it become? And none of these questions have clean answers. The knowing doesn’t always accumulate in ways that are legible to others, or even to me. And the same is true of loving. What does it mean to love something deeply? To love it long enough that it becomes a part of your nervous system, a part of how you see?
You give it attention. You stay with it. You name it. And then you watch how that loving shapes you, even as it asks to be transformed.
There’s a term I think about—truing. It’s something you do when a wheel is slightly off, when it’s wobbling out of alignment. To true a wheel means to adjust it until it spins in balance again—not perfectly, but in rhythm. And I think that’s what this process is. To love something early, and then continue loving through changes, through questions, through shifts in form, is a kind of truing. You’re not discarding the wheel; you’re not starting over. You’re paying attention, making small adjustments, staying in conversation with the structure of your own life until the movement feels right again.
This isn’t about turning away from dance. It’s about noticing that the loving that once sat inside the practice of dancing now exists in other forms too—in walking, in learning, in listening, in breath. In touching the earth with care. In showing up for history. In moving from loving into loving again.
And I think that’s the question I’m walking with now—not how to go back to the first love, but how to stay close to the practice of loving, of paying attention, of staying curious enough to find what’s next.
Bravo! I love this broader sense of truing. Thank you!
Absolutely beautiful, Jessie. So thought provoking. Thank you.