Try Riding a Tricycle Without Its Front Wheel: Open Thoughts on Attempting to Juggle Two Fledgling Careers

By: Natalie Carabello

I use the word juggling in the lightest, most flexible fashion possible. What I want you to think when I say I’m juggling a teaching and dancing career simultaneously is that I effortlessly create engaging content, classroom manage like a boss, and challenge kids to grow a bit during each class by day—and subsequently rehearse, train, and perform harder than any of the lycra-filled dancing scenes in Flashdance by night.

I’d be an academic, legging’d-up hero of sorts whose heroic capabilities include super-sonic ears (with built-in whisper capacitors) and golden daggers (slang: good feet).

But sadly, this is reality and not the fictional universe I paint for myself in my brain while daydreaming on the train.

In this reality, where I’m still weaning myself off the snooze button and stumbling through the poorly-constructed strip mall that is adulthood, I can barely manage to incorporate one career if I’m fully engaged in managing the other.

Where is the damn pretzel stand in this place?

And because I am currently focusing on my teaching career through to the summertime, dance is very much for me like the rice you cook on the second burner while you prepare your main course. The simpler the cooking process is for whatever you have simmering in the main pot, the easier it is to make sure your rice tastes like fluffy white clouds of goodness. The more difficult the cooking process, the easier is it for your rice to disintegrate into chunks of burnt sadness (yes, pegao tastes like burnt sadness to me. I don’t care what any of my Puerto Rican brethren say).

As someone who’s been subbing since January and is preparing to take on an extended substitute placement in just a few short weeks—my meal simmering in the main pot is so elaborate I've neglected to even get the water in my other pot to a rolling boil.

Metaphor.

For example, just a few weeks ago I attempted the full-time juggle. 

I signed up for a 10 day winter intensive with Mike Esperanza’s Bare Dance Company that culminated in a performance piece in one of Peridance’s showcases. The intensive ranged from 6/7-10pm every night, meaning I’d be home by 11:30pm if I was the luckiest of all the charms, in bed by 12:30pm-1am, and up by 6-7am for a full day’s teaching only to go straight to the intensive from there on most days.

It’s no surprise what happened to me, really.

By day four (Monday), I informed my school facilitator that I would not be coming in on Friday—the rehearsal soup du jour consisting of three hours of rehearsal followed by a separate tech rehearsal.

By day five (Tuesday), I was so fatigued I woke up incredibly sick and was forced to call out the next two days. And yep, you guessed it—I still had to rehearse every evening in this condition. This was also the week that New York decided to see if it could it mimic the native temperatures of the Arctic Tundra.

My point of this whiny anecdote is that one of these careers—one of these loves of mine—will always be that pot of rice cooking on the second burner until I can afford to focus solely on it. When dance is the main dish, I’ll be a sore, sleep-deprived zombie viciously grunting at the overhead projector while five students ask me if they can go pee in rapid succession. When teaching is the main dish, I’ll be a slightly dehydrated, frizzy mess who ends her sentences with “unfff” and takes super-naps to compensate for sleep deprivation. I will never be able to cook both perfectly at the same time because I am not Rachel Ray a crazy superhuman whose body can subsist on granola bars and caffeine.

And that’s okay.

It is possible that once I become a more seasoned teacher (although they say it takes at least five years for you to literally not suck, and ten years to truly get in the swing of things—so my clock’s a tickin’) this delicate balance will be a more achievable goal.

Until then, I will be stumbling through adulthood and these two careers of mine with little to no semblance of grace. If anyone sees me stumbling, I’ll make a show of checking for pebbles on the ground or investigating the cracks in the pavement before proceeding to continue stumbling once they move out of eye shot.

Here, have a collage of my ever-evolving resume. 

And most of all, when one of my professors chides me for not quite having finished my Official State Certification yet, and I explain that I've been rehearsing and auditioning in addition to teaching, and he replies “Well this is your career. That is your hobby,” I’ll laugh awkwardly (because let’s face it, I’m a little bit awkward) and say “Uhh no—it’s my second career.”

Peace, Love, and sometimes over-caffeinated mini-lessons,
-Natalie.