Dancing through life

When I was four years old, I was kicked out of Kinderballet at the Berest Dance Studio in my hometown of Port Washington, NY. "You wouldn't stop dancing around the room," my mother said. "No matter how many times Olga [Berest, the owner of the studio] told you to stop, you just kept dancing."

Whenever I tell one of my friends this story, they always laugh and shake their heads. And whenever I ask them why, they all have different answers.

"Because your independence makes you who you are," my friend Courtney Klamar said. "You do your own thing." Her roommate agreed. "It just doesn't surprise me," my friend Lauren Linhard said. "You dance down the hallway, you dance at the shuttle stop. You make life fun and damn anyone who wants to stop you."

My friends from high school agreed completely. "You're just always looking to have the most fun you can in the things you do," my friend from high school Cassie said. "And when things are not fun, you twist the situation to make it your own and make it interesting to you."

"Even today, you break the mold," my dad said when I told him what I had chosen to question people about. "You dream big. For you, almost nothing is impossible, and everything has a positive aspect."

Sometimes, I'm told I'm too optimistic, too willing to give people a second chance, believe the best in them, and keep dancing. Maybe that's true. But if you live life as a wallflower, constantly negative, thinking nobody will dance with you, you'll lose the will to dance by yourself - and, in turn, lose the pep to make people want to dance with you. The independence to dance is my greatest opportunity to make every situation my own.