Table of Contents | hartebeast

NAVIGATION:

1001 TALES

--"Izzy, how did you start dancing?"

--"What got you into martial arts?"

--"What kind of dancer/martial artist/writer are you?

--"How do you deal with brain damage, bodily injury and cPTSD, yet still dance, write, train, live the way you do?"

--"How do you still find joy and beauty amidst pain and loss?"

--"Wow, you should write your memoirs!"

This Is My Story

POST NAVIGATION IS BELOW

SEE THE ANCHOR MENU

(ALAS, ONLY ON THE DESKTOP VIEW) 👉

OR FIND ALL THE NEWEST POSTS

IN THE ORDER I WROTE THEM HERE

People come to read about my life for many reasons. Often, their curiosities are pinpointed around one or two particular topics, but they're not interested in a bunch of the other issues I cover. The way I tell stories is 100% driven by The Muse, so this blog is a Scheherazadean labyrinth.

In fact, I really wouldn't call it a blog anymore. It started out that way--and failed. And started again and failed and sorta gained some momentum and then sputtered and died once more.

I finally allowed it to become what people have been saying I should write for decades: my memoirs.

Until I began using this interactive, interconnected, multimedia format, I've never been able to do that because I could never figure out how to segregate the tales into categories that would fit into memoir-specific book lengths. The threads are too interconnected. One tale gives way to another topic, or that tale over there needs clarification and some background information. Guaranteed all my topic series have holes because, to tell the full story I would have to go off on another tangent.

Sometimes I do just that, and it can be frustrating for someone who only wants a specific aspect of my story. So I have created this Navigation page to help you find your way through the multilayer maze.

This site really is designed like a bunch of books, rather than a collection of stand-alone blog articles. But then again, I am a novel writer.

Alas, at the moment we can only arrange these Categories from newest to oldest, so if you want to read the tales in order, I suggest starting at the bottom of a category feed and following the series threads from there. At the end of each post is a link to the next one I wrote, and to the next in the series if I didn't write it in order.

Many of these tales are NSFW. They're not written for anyone under the age of 18 either, so abandon ship now if you need them to be. You may wind up learning way more about me than you ever wanted to know. You're about to get a look at my holey underwear and the skeletons rotting in my closets. For example, there are many, many reasons I became a martial artist. As such, I don't pull punches when I write about them. I do change names to protect the not-so-innocent, and I sometimes obscure or mix-match identifying details of our...cast of characters. But I rarely give specific trigger warnings because I'm a storyteller, first and foremost.

Consider yourself warned.

Now that I've begun telling these tales through this online medium, I don't think I would ever try to make books out of it all again. (If somebody else can see how and wants to publish them, I'm all ears.) At this point, I'm too attached to being able to give you the soundtrack that is such a vital piece of my story. I'm a dancer, after all, and music is my life's breath. I'm also a child of the 80s mixtape. Through sounds and rhythms, I can convey certain aspects of what I feel and think more efficiently and deeply than an entire post of my words.

So if you're not playing the music videos, you're actually missing half the movie.

Plus, being in this space allows me to deliver any corresponding dance performances hand-in-hand with the stories that inspired them.

We're going to be taking some long treks into the Underworld. As a member of Team Disability, I live much of my life down there. It's why I am a devotee of Persephone. Like Her, I have found beauty in the darkness there. Sometimes I even choose to go back and forth. It gives me balance. It makes me happy.

So rest assured, if we seem to be diving down and down and further down with no glorious light in sight, it's because I couldn't have learned what I learned and become who I am without being stuck down there longer than I would have wanted.

And it's because there is no Almighty Overcomer's Hollywood Ending that we're driving toward.

There's just my life.

NAVIGATION

DANCE

THE MAKING OF A BELLA DANCER