True Gyrotonic Story

I came back to San Francisco and, in a last-ditch attempt to train myself for steady employment that I could actually do, threw seven thousand dollars I didn’t have into becoming a Gyrotonic instructor.

Except life got in the way.

The program was run by ex-ballerinas, and had a Black Swan mentality. Eight hours a day of gruelling exercise. Interminable sequences told once, that we were expected to instantly memorize…and the 20-year-old ballet dancers around me did instantly memorize them. Somehow the middle-aged soccer moms also instantly memorized them. I remembered that I had always been memorization-challenged. I had assumed that I couldn’t memorize things at all until I studied violin. Even I could memorize some Bach after playing it a bazillion times. But full-body sequences, no. I still cannot remember the tango eight-count “basic.” — I knew I was one of the worst students, if not the worst student in the training, and I could feel our teacher’s palpable disapproval.

But the real problem was the time of year.

It was flu season, and the flu shot did not match what was going around. Healthy young Californians were dying within single days, within droves.

Pair that with the studio’s cast-iron policies. Thirty minutes late = a no-show, and a no-show = you fail the class. NO REFUNDS. Under any circumstances. There were no make-up opportunities and no available outside assistance. So — and I had the teacher clarify and repeat this a few times, in everyone’s presence, to make sure we all understood this — if you were thirty minutes late, one time, you had just cost yourself seven thousand dollars and had lost the chance to do the training until next year. (Or if you were fifteen minutes late twice.) “What if you get sick?” I said. Then you lost your $7K and your chance at training and had to do it again next year, she explained.

So somewhere between the gruelling physical training and the exposure to loads of germs and the biking up and down the hills in the cold and the wet and the sleeping on another miserable series of strangers’ couches, I caught the flu.

Two other people in the program also caught the flu, and they were excused from class for three days and allowed to come back with no repercussions. I asked for anything, a day off, an afternoon off, even the chance to sit and watch for an hour instead doing the exercises. I was denied.

So I staggered through my days with a high fever and vertigo, barely able to walk, hiding my flu and exposing everyone to my germs, biking through freezing rain, happy to see my kid, and hating myself for endangering other people’s lives but on the other hand I was sick of being homeless and I had student debt and I needed money. This certification would bring me money. I didn’t have another seven thousand to redo it, I had put my last money into this, and I needed to make it work.

The high fever lasted and got worse. It probably didn’t like how I was treating it. Then I got laryngitis on top of that and couldn’t call out the commands in the training. So my teacher made me mimic everyone’s motions but wisely wouldn’t let me touch anyone. I could barely hold myself upright and asked her if I could please go home and she said no. But then after a few days of this situation she said she had to fail me because since I wasn’t touching anyone and wasn’t calling out the commands, I wasn’t doing the work. However, she expected me to keep showing up for the training. I asked, for what felt like the millionth time, if I could do some outside makeup tutoring, I would be happy to pay. She said no that was not possible.

It was all I could do not to faint at her feet. I said, thank you, but I was going home now.

I piled into a Lyft I couldn’t afford, exposed the driver to my germs, collapsed onto my ex’s couch, and spent the next two months grappling with pneumonia with no health insurance and no money for medical care in this crazy-expensive capitalist country.

I survived, but I had lost the money. And the chance.

There was no more money. There was no more chance.

Ironically I had done the entire training except for the last two days, one of which was not even scheduled to be an exercise day, just a talking day. So…I basically have all the hard-earned and extremely expensive chops of a Gyrotonic instructor now, but no certification, so I can’t teach anywhere.

When I got better from the pneumonia I complained to the head of the international Gyrotonic association about how I had been treated, and demanded a refund and the chance to take the training next year for free. I was denied both and reprimanded. I pointed out the unfair difference between how the other sick students and I had been treated. I was reprimanded more severely. I fought back, wanting justice to be served. They told me this conversation was at an end and never spoke to me again.