Lauren Anderson

When did you work out that you needed to free yourself?

To find freedom in yourself, you have to know that you’re in bondage of some sort. You have to know there’s something going on. As a young person I never really felt comfortable, I never felt good enough. I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying I never felt good enough for my parents. They were so uber intelligent and I didn’t want to disappoint them.

My teacher, my director, Ben Stevenson, gave me a life and the knowledge for me to have a good life, so that after dance I could do something else. He gave me the want to help other people or to teach. But I never felt comfortable or good enough at any of the things, so I changed everything about me to accommodate. I always prided myself in being a chameleon. All I did is change myself to accommodate the husband or the job, and I guess that made me a good ballerina, because that makes a good actress. But what makes you really good sometimes is not so good for you.

It got to a point where I got pulled over, I had warrants for my arrest, I got taken to City Jail where they go through your things, and I had a baggie that had a trace of whatever. So then it snowballed. From City Jail I’m now going to County Jail, then I’ve got court and warrants and all these things. I still wasn’t ready to stop. I wanted to get the heat off. But I had to go to court-appointed 12 Step meetings and get a paper signed. That was the best thing that ever happened to me. Hitting rock bottom was the best thing. I had a judge who understood, I had community service, I had to pay $500 to Crime Stoppers, throw money at it, but I’ll make more money, I’ll pay it off.

I had two hundred hours of community service. That was the humility bit. I was on probation, so I had to go and do a urinary test to make sure I didn’t drink or have drugs in my system. That was another humbling experience. The Sugar Plum Fairy was not supposed to go to jail. The Sugar Plum Fairy was not supposed to be sitting in a room with probation going through my clothes. That was so good for me.

Then I’m going to these 12-step meetings and going to intensive out-patient treatment, doing all these things I hated doing because ‘I didn’t belong here’. One day, I heard this woman tell my story. She was a mother, she had so much shame and guilt about what she’d done, where she’d been, and she didn’t know how to stop or how to ask for help. She had so much pride and ego, because she was successful. She was the one who made her business great – she’s an attorney – and she’d done all these things besides putting her kids to bed and not going out. She could not stop drinking. She told that story and I looked at her and went, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s me.’

She looked nothing like me. Tall, white chick, blonde hair, attorney. But she told my story; I saw myself. She became my sponsor and we went through the steps. After a year, when my deferred adjudication was done and I didn’t have to have the paper signed anymore, she said, ‘To keep this, you have to give it away. You need to help another woman’. That saved my life, literally, because I would have gone right back to doing the same thing I was doing.

Now I have sixteen years clean and sober. I’ve walked many women through the steps. Some stayed sober, some didn’t. I’m still sober. I’m a good mother, I’m a good wife, I’m a good employee, I’m a good friend. It has nothing to do with being the first Black chick to do the thing; it has to do with what my legacy is going to be when I’m gone. What do I want on my tombstone? ‘She served her community’. That’s what I want on my tombstone.

Did I make things better? Yes. Do I like to work? I like adults, but I work with children. If I can help one child feel comfortable in their own skin, they will not go down the path I went down. They will feel okay and have purpose. The truth was, I was running from me. I didn’t want to feel, because I didn’t think people would like me, because I didn’t like me. That was my truth. Once I felt okay with me, I could accept me being me and surrender to the process of how I was going to stop doing this.

I consider myself a pretty strong woman, but before all that, I was in a physically abusive relationship. It was during that time when I was trying to be all the things for all the people and I thought I could save this guy, let him know how much love I could give him and he would accept me. But I had to change, because I was nothing like he wanted me to be. I had a lot of that, and actually I went to therapy for that.

I was going to shoot him and I thought, first of all, it would kill my father if I went to jail. Of course I couldn’t kill somebody, so I thought, ‘Maybe I should just leave’. Now, it’s hard to leave. He’s got the car, he’s got control of the bank account, he’s got control of everything. He picks me up from work, he drops me off at work. I never know when I’m going to get hit. I never know what it’s going to be like. I don’t know how I’m going to have to cover up the next day. There’s a lot. I was in absolute fear and terror for two years. One day, there was this window of opportunity. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m just not going back’.

I was at the theatre and I went to Ben Stevenson and said, ‘Ben, I’m not coming to work tomorrow, I’m going to go to the Hyatt, I’m going to get a room and I’m going to stay there. I cannot go home.’ He said, ‘I understand’. I thought no one knew. Everybody knew. They were trying to figure out how to get me out of this. He said, ‘You should go to my house. He doesn’t know where I live.’ I told him I couldn’t go to his house; I’d just walk down the street to the Hyatt.

But Ben had two guys from the company pick me up and take me to his house in La Porte. I stayed there for two months. I had a sweatsuit, my purse and my dance clothes were in my locker at the ballet. That’s it. I left, and that was the first time I felt like I was in control of my freedom, because I’d lost it for two years. How did I stay there? I danced. I actually got promoted to principal dancer during that time, because I had not wanted to go home. I was in the studio working all the time. That was the first time I had to free myself from something.

In the context of your whole life, when do you feel most free?

I’m in recovery, I’m sixteen years sober from alcohol and drugs. I get to work with other women who have the same disease I do. When I sit with another woman, she tells me her story and I tell her my story and she finds hope in my story, and I can help her through the 12-Step Program and do the thing, I am absolutely free at that point. It’s God pouring through me. It’s not me doing the thing; I’m the guide on the side. There’s a freedom in that like none other.