What Twenty Years of Moving My Body Taught Me About Moving My Life

Before I had words for anything, I had movement. That's just true. Long before I could tell you what I was feeling, my body already knew, and it would say so in a room, on a stage, down a hallway when I thought no one was watching.

I grew up in Auburn Gresham on the South Side of Chicago, and dance was the first place I ever felt like myself on purpose. Not performing for anyone. Just... moving because something in me needed to move. That never really left. It just kept changing shape.

By the time I earned my BFA in Dance Performance from Northern Illinois University, I thought I understood discipline. I didn't, not yet. Discipline is easy to talk about in a studio. It gets tested somewhere else, in a body that's tired, in a season that's long, in a room full of people deciding whether you're good enough to stay in it.

My career kept asking me to move. First the Chicago Bulls. Then Carnival Cruise Line. Then Universal Studios Singapore. Before long, airports became more familiar than neighborhoods, and home became something I carried instead of somewhere I lived. I traveled through Australia. I spent part of my twenties in Japan. My body adapted to places faster than the rest of me ever did.

Here's what almost nobody tells you about a life like that. Movement teaches your body incredible things. Resilience. Adaptability. How to recover quickly. How to perform through pain you haven't dealt with yet. How to keep going when going is the only skill anyone's asking of you.

What it doesn't teach you, at least not automatically, is how to be still.

I came home to Chicago in 2020 after about eight years abroad. Not because the dream ran out. Because something in me had been asking to stop moving long enough to actually feel what all that movement had been carrying. That was a different kind of work than dance ever required of me. You can perform your way through almost anything. You cannot perform your way into stillness. It has to be welcomed.

Somewhere along the way, Psalm 46:10 stopped sounding like a command and started sounding like an invitation.

There's a version of me that spent two decades becoming exceptionally good at movement and surprisingly unfamiliar with stillness. Coming home wasn't the end of movement. It was the beginning of learning how to move inward.

Now I'm finishing my NASM certification, with my AFAA Group Fitness certification right behind it. More than twenty years into moving professionally, I'm back in a classroom learning the anatomy underneath what my body already knew how to do. And I'm building Resista, a resistance training system born from every chapter of that journey. The cruise ships. The Bulls. Singapore. The airports. The miles. Every experience shaped the way I think about movement, and every one of them found its way into what I'm building today.

I don't have a car. I move through this city on my own two feet, the trains, and whatever else gets me where I need to go. Most days that feels less like a limitation and more like the truest thing about me. My body has always been how I get somewhere.

It's just that these days, where I'm getting to is home.

Chicago raised me once as a girl who needed a way out. It's raising me again as a woman who came back knowing exactly why she left, and exactly why she stayed away long enough to return different.