Aurora's Blog

1. In the past year, from your birthday to your birthday, what are you proudest of? I got into multiple Ivy League schools, and was even offered a merit scholarship at one! And I have officially matriculate and started at the big, bad, Iiiiiivy League! Ever since I was in high school, I always thought I maybe kind of could. And now I proved myself right and I did it! 2. The opposite of the first question, biggest regret, lesson, failure, etc. I think my biggest failure of the year is that everything is just going so much slower than I want it to. I’m having trouble bouncing back in some areas post-pandemic. (One example is that I broke my foot and it took quite a long time to heal. Then it took quite a long time to get back into dance and do it well, and it took quite a long time to get back to being on pointe, and now it’s taking quite a long time to get comfortable en pointe/able to do it for long periods of time.) I know people say when you get older it takes you longer to heal from things – physical and emotional and just everything. And I always kind of thought it’s mind over matter and that your body will only start acting ‘older’ when you act like it’s older. But maybe it’s not just mind over matter and there might be some matter to mind. I don’t really think it’s merely an age thing. I think there are a lot of circumstance-type issues of various things that have happened over the last years. But yeah, just slower to progress/bounce back on things I would to. 3. Biggest goal for the upcoming year? I feel like every year I say “be the hottest I’ve ever been” and then I never accomplish it. And one year, I’m going to look back and be the hottest I ever was and it’s not going to have been hot enough. So, that’s scary. But, I guess instead of merely saying I want to be the ‘hottest I’ve ever been’, instead let me get a little more actually practical than purely visual. I have always dreamed of dancing in the NBA and the years keep going by, it’s definitely getting to be time to put up or shut up. I was making my kind of ‘long-term’ life plan the other day, and the way things are shaking out, I am deeply hoping to dance in the NBA in the 2025-2026 season. So, while I have a number of goals, my main goals in the next 2 years need to be in service of that. Some things on the horizon are that I’d like to feel I’m truly conquering advanced dance classes. I’d like to be able to do the ‘dancer’s pose’ with beautiful alignment. More than anything, I think my goal for the upcoming year is just to really have a lot more consistency. I think one of the reasons things are taking so long is because a) I get frustrated things aren’t going fast enough and stop working so hard for a bit because I’m not immediately seeing the results instead of being a little more patient with things that have been proven helpful or b) My life has been a bit on the unstable side for a while (for examples, basically since November I’ve been living out of various hotels, switching at least on average every month if not more. So never feeling I have a home base has been fine but a little jarring), and sometimes I think I just use that instability as an excuse not to have *some* habits that *are* indeed consistent and stable, no matter where I am. So, I think my biggest goal for the upcoming years is consistency in progress toward my goals, if that makes sense. And tomorrow I’ll tell you about jetskiing!