Tango has been the love of my life since I moved to the USA almost a decade ago.
Today is my 1-year anniversary in San Francisco -- the longest I've ever lived in any place since college. It's also the second time I was offered -- and turned down the opportunity to run a tango school. For people who've known me for years, this seems absurdly uncharacteristic of me---after all, tango was my life, blood and soul!!
365 days ago (after backpacking in Europe for a year), I taught my last tango workshops in St. Louis and took a flight to San Francisco with three goals in mind:
1. Move to San Francisco
2. Find a job in tech
3. Make non-tango friends
Since that day, my life has been flipped over, shaken, stirred, replaced, and shoved forward in a new direction.
I chose SF because it's the place where I can feel like I'm traveling without actually having to travel.
I wanted to work in tech because unlike tango, it's highly scalable (you wouldn't be able to hire a team of to-be-tango-teachers and train them up in a year).
And I wanted non-tango friends because I wanted to try---for the first time in my adult life---to make deep connections outside of a dance context.
Stepping away from tango was really difficult. There are some tango friends who really made an effort to stay in touch and meet with me outside of dancing contexts, and vice versa. I lost touch with others, naturally, because I was no longer hanging out with them every day of the week.
So I packed my calendar to the brim with networking events in SF and forced myself to talk to strangers at events. Within a month I began co-organizing a (now international) cultural, social, and intellectual meetup every single Tuesday. This allowed me to make friends---some who still don't know that I'm a dancer!
I worked at a transportation startup (Sidecar), which got acquired after I was laid off, and I'm now at Square, which went public after I joined. I'm also helping out at another early-stage startup, Magpie (which I'm intensely passionate about), to help women travel alone safely. Ironically enough, I stumbled upon this opportunity because the CEO wanted to learn more about women who traveled alone within the tango community (or any niche community).
I began to bartend at a dive bar (Club 93) to get to know Square's product better from the merchant's side, but fell in love with serving and people-watching from behind the bar.
I'm now taking 3 hours of classes at a bartending/mixology academy every day, and sometimes start my day at 6:30AM to fit everything into my schedule----which usually doesn't have tango in it.
Friends keep asking me WHY I'm not teaching, why I'm not dancing every night----did I stop loving tango?!
The answer? The exact opposite.
Tango is that one constant in my life that I'm so, SO sure about that I have no doubts I'll return to it one day. I'm so confident that tango will always be in my life, I feel safe to take time off from it now. And I don't want to ever need tango. I just want to want it -- forever!
There are some things I was unsure about so I went ahead and did them----
- Can I backpack the world alone if I didn't take this opportunity? No idea.
- If I don't try bartending now, will I ever be a bartender? Probably not.
- Will the tech scene always be this alive? I don't know.
- Would I have the time to help out at a friend's early stage startup ten years from now? Not sure.
- Will I still love tango? YES! Yes, yes, I will!
I'm not avoiding tango---rather, I'm finally opening my schedule up for new experiences because I'm so comfortable with the idea that tango will be there for me that I CAN schedule new experiences and work and activities for a few years. I want to try my hand at all the things I'd never tried before--careers, hobbies, people!
Tango will be there when I'm ready and steady and (tan)go.
