Trying Ballet as an Adult Helped Me Log Off

Guest Newsletter by KL Provenzano.

Here is my confession: I’ve been chronically online for as long as I can remember. As a blog-obsessed teenager, I spent my evenings flicking through multiple tabs on my powder-blue Dell laptop (my first love), sometimes until the early hours of the morning. 

My respite from screen time was gymnastics: the sport I’d joined when I was six. I trained for six hours a week, took part in competitions and displays, and frequently travelled all over England with my club. Being a gymnast taught me how to spend quality time offline with others, and it curbed my screen use for many years.

But when I left the sport aged 24, I felt lost. I’d never had so much free time in the evening. It didn’t feel freeing, as I expected it might: it felt daunting. What could I do if not gymnastics? What will fill the void? Naively, I didn’t account for there being hungry algorithms specifically designed to occupy the real estate of my free time.

Before I knew it, my evening activity was a combination of Netflix, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and Pinterest. I was frequently multi-screening; if I was watching a film with my housemates I was also compulsively scrolling. Like an addict, each time I closed an app, I reopened another, eager to see what notifications awaited me.

One afternoon recently, feeling inspired after watching Billy Elliott with my housemate Emma, I searched for ‘adult ballet classes near me’. The first result was a local ballet company specifically for adults, and their website insisted they were welcoming to all ability levels. Before I could change my mind, I booked their Beginner Ballet class. A few days later, I showed up at the school dance studio, clutching my water bottle in one hand and a little hope I would find my tribe in the other.

It didn’t take long for ballet to become a big part of my life. I had new dance friends, and they’d persuaded me to try tap and contemporary classes too. Before I knew it, I was packing up my ballet bag and heading to the studio multiple nights a week. The company was a wonderful cohort of women of all ages. We took workshops together, went to dancewear sample sales and watched touring ballet companies perform. 

Starting ballet as an adult gave me back something leaving gymnastics and my excessive screen time had taken away: the feeling of being part of something.

When the pandemic hit, ballet classes moved to Zoom, which saw me jumping around my kitchen and trying not to bash my knee on the table. When lockdown rules lifted, I found myself drawn to other local groups, including an amateur theatre company, which I spent a couple of years with. I still go to the odd ballet class here and there, but it’s not the number of classes that’s important. Starting adult ballet showed me there were communities out there waiting for me, and being a part of them was far more rewarding than spending my leisure time scrolling.

My new rule for downtime is to watch out for proper nouns. If my activity starts with a capital letter—Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Netflix—I probably shouldn’t be doing too much of it. There are plenty of lower case activities to enjoy instead: walking my dog, reading in a coffee shop, cooking new recipes, working out with friends, going for a swim and then writing in the leisure club cafe afterwards (a personal fave).

Reclaiming focus can be hard when everything online is designed to occupy your attention. Trying a new sport in adulthood gave me the space I needed to find a community beyond threads on Reddit or WhatsApp group chats. It was scary to walk into the ballet studio for the first time. But the anxiety it stirred was the good kind: the kind that comes with being brave, with trying something new. Not the soul-sucking, can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it-but-something-feels-off anxiety that comes from doomscrolling.

If you’re looking for new ways to log off, consider trying a sport: the communities you find might surprise you. Swapping algorithms for allegros was one of the best things I’ve done.

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KL Provenzano is a writer and advertising executive. She is the host of Paper Places, the podcast that demystifies the journey to becoming a professional writer. You can read more of her work on Substack.