My story begins like many Catholics — I was baptized as an infant and grew up in the Church. I am blessed to be part of a loving family with parents who lived lives in the Holy Spirit and taught me how to have a relationship with Jesus.
I started ballet classes at age 7, and I quickly fell in love with it. By senior year of high school, I was dancing 20 hours a week, sacrificing my social life for the dream God had put in my heart. It was an exciting time of life — I was given solo opportunities and chances to work alongside local professionals as I honed my craft. After graduating high school, I apprenticed with a local ballet company and then moved to Wisconsin to dance with a new ballet company opening in Madison.
Ballet is hard, and the only acceptable level of performance is perfection. As I became more serious about dance, this standard seeped into the rest of my life, even my faith. I loved Jesus and wanted to please him, but I became so unsatisfied with myself that I felt like I couldn’t trust a God who loved me the way that I was. By the time I was dancing professionally, I felt exhausted and lacking. I couldn’t keep up with my own standards, let alone the standards of the directors I danced for. I started to resent the years I’d offered to this art form that had taken so much from me and seemed to give so little in return.
My dance career ended in 2019. I took a gap year to do mission work with NET Ministries. There I had a powerful experience in confession, where I came clean with the Lord about how unsatisfied I was with myself, and how little I trusted Jesus. After absolution, the priest invited me to pray with Psalm 139: “You formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am wondrously made.”
Four transformative years later (OK, so I did more than one year of NET), I felt healed and redeemed in so many ways. I was so glad that my dance years were over and that I wasn’t spending my days focused on all the ways I was a failure. However, I unexpectedly received an opportunity to teach ballet, and I felt a tug from the Holy Spirit to give it a try. Returning to that world was something I feared a lot, but the joy of sharing dance with others ignited in my heart. I found myself able to encourage and cheer on my students in a way that I wish I had experienced as a young dancer.
I stepped back on stage after four years as an ensemble member for Missed the Boat Theatre’s “Catholic Young Adults, The Musical.” The rehearsal process and preparation for a show is demanding and intense, and to be honest, a lot of old insecurities and pain followed me back into this show. But they weren’t the end of the story. The beauty my heart was drawn to as a little girl still draws me in, and Jesus offered me something new in this experience. Instead of performing for myself and seeking my own perfection, I got to work within a community to create a beautiful piece of art. It wasn’t about me anymore. It was about something bigger.
At the end of the day, it’s not who I am — it no longer defines me. Jesus asks me over and over again to give him my whole heart, to hold nothing back. Little by little, bit by bit, I’m learning that I can trust him with my life. He’s the only one who sees me fully and will never turn his back on me. He doesn’t ask for perfection. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light, and I am free living the life he chose for me, instead of the spotlight I had chosen for myself.
Meuer, 26, grew up in the north metro as the second of six children in a vibrant Catholic family. She works at St. Mark’s Preschool and attends St. Mark parish in St. Paul. She teaches ballet at NorthEast Dance Center in New Brighton. She spends her free time cooking, talking on the phone with her mom, exploring coffee shops or singing karaoke with friends.
