God Bless This Mess(63)

Happy birthday to me.

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The next morning, I had to be in rehearsal at 8:00 a.m. to learn the rumba.

It’s so hard to be the girl in ballroom dancing. It’s harder because it’s not just about the strength and the poise and the act of leading; the woman has to do it all in a dress and heels, and backward, and upside down, or standing on one leg. “Balance!” “Hold core!” I had to do a turn while Alan threw me in the air, and keep a smile on my face the whole time. Sure, he had to throw me—and catch me. That takes tremendous strength and skill. But I had to do all of that other stuff while looking ladylike and pretty, no matter how twisted up and thrown in the air I might get. So did all the other women. And the pressure to get it right was huge.

Sounds a little bit like a metaphor for old-fashioned male-female relationships, doesn’t it? The woman has always had to jump through hoops and twist herself into knots while the man stands there being “strong.”

As a dance partner, standing strong, I came to trust Alan more and more every week. I think that showed in our performances. Our chemistry on the stage led to the press speculating that we had something more going on between us, but we didn’t. Off the dance floor, we were not compatible people.

We performed well together, for sure, but we weren’t really compatible in the rehearsal studio, either. We both wanted to win, but our communication styles were just totally different.

I felt like maybe the best way to get through all of the drama was by talking about it. Maybe that could be good, right? Maybe I could channel some of those big feelings on the stage. But after sharing something really personal with Alan, there were times when he would just blow me off. He didn’t even ask about my Bachelor stuff. I would tell him everything whether he asked or not, so he could understand why I seemed to be crying for no reason, but he never asked me about any of it himself until a week before the finale, in mid-November, in the context of filming a scene for the show. So it felt like we were on pretty different frequencies.

When the emotional fatigue of the past year caught up with me, I broke down in tears. Anyone who watched my season knows I cried a lot on that show, but I can tell you now it was less about the stress of the dancing than it was about the stress on my heart.

My heart was exhausted.

There are always tears on Dancing with the Stars. There are always fights. It’s intense work between partners who’ve only just met. But Alan and I had the most volatile relationship of the season, by far. It was either we acted like best friends and true partners, or we couldn’t stand each other. He’d push me too far in rehearsals, and I’d say, “Get out of my face. I’m not doing this,” and he’d say, “You’re lazy! You’re not trying!”

While I worked hard and focused on the prize, and concentrated on becoming a better dancer every day, the process itself kept bringing out the worst in me.

I was emotionally unwell. I was on the brink of tears every day, and nobody on the set knew what to do. On one hand, I was a girl who was living her dream, but then I couldn’t stop crying. I would stand up for myself one minute, and then shut back down the next. I was so tired and so lost that I cried in my apartment pretty much every single night. As millions of people watched me on TV, thinking I was doing fine, I was “winning” and “improving” and “being strong,” I felt more and more alone.

I didn’t reach out for help. I didn’t reach out in prayer. I disconnected almost completely from any friends I had. I know now, looking back on it, that was not the right thing to do. I had people in my corner who wanted to help me, who were just waiting for me to call. Maybe if I had called them things would have gotten better sooner.

The only thing that seemed to be getting better for me in those three or four months was my dancing. After always being put in the back line as a kid, I was right out front now in the spotlight. I worked harder and harder every week, getting closer and closer to taking that Mirrorball trophy for myself. It was the only thing that I thought I could look forward to.

I pushed myself hard and put so much expectation on myself—an approach that hadn’t always been the winning thing for me in the past. But every second I had was focused on winning. Not enjoying it. Winning. Because I needed that win. When Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews were busy interviewing other contestants, I kept practicing off to the side. When I got home at night, I watched tapes of myself, like a football player might. I obsessed over every move, every detail, of being the dancer I needed to be to come out on top.

And this time? Focusing on winning worked.

My partner and I wowed the judges. We wowed the audience. And we won.

I won the trophy!

The audience cheered, and buckets of confetti poured down from the ceiling, and I felt . . . let down.

I’d spent all this time chasing the high, and once I got it? Once I reached that prize? Well . . . This is what I wrote in my journal a few days later:

I worked to bless myself. I needed to make a win, a positive out of this all. Winning DWTS was my way of doing that. And when I won . . . it felt so empty. I remember standing there waiting for Tom and Erin to answer, almost feeling emotionless. I didn’t hear them announce my name as the winner, because I was perplexed by how numb I felt. Why wasn’t I excited? I’m standing in the top 2 . . . it felt like I was an onlooker outside of my body, like an anxious mom watching her child go to the podium to give a speech and the child just stared blankly to the crowd. That’s what I felt like. I was happy for the excitement and celebration Alan was feeling . . . but the feeling I had was “Well . . . I did it. What’s next?” I hate admitting this. It shouldn’t have been that way. I worked so hard but I was so miserable. Winning and having no feeling, and still feeling defeated because the high wasn’t all you thought it would be I think is more heartbreaking than losing and feeling the sting of the defeat. And I’ve felt my fair share of heartbreaking losses, too.