"My feelings about myself have been terrible"
About this Quote
Ailey’s bluntness lands like a confession delivered backstage, when the applause has faded and the body finally stops performing. “My feelings about myself have been terrible” is almost aggressively unvarnished: no metaphor, no inspirational pivot, no neat lesson. That refusal is the point. Coming from a dancer, it reads as both emotional truth and professional reality. Dance trades in grace, control, and the illusion of effortlessness; Ailey names the private corrosion that can sit beneath the polished exterior.
The intent feels less like self-pity than an attempt to puncture a cultural script: the celebrated artist as naturally confident, “gifted,” and therefore emotionally immune. Ailey’s career was built on transforming interior states into movement, often pulling from Black spirituals, blues, and gospel to stage collective endurance. In that context, “terrible” isn’t just personal mood; it hints at a lifetime of pressures that don’t disappear when you achieve acclaim: racism in the arts ecosystem, the punishing discipline of the body, the demand to be exemplary, and the loneliness that can come with being both icon and outsider.
The subtext is also about visibility. Ailey made work that insisted on Black interiority as worthy of high art; here he admits his own interiority wasn’t always survivable. The line functions like a crack in the monument, reminding us how often brilliance is paired with self-attack. Not because artists are uniquely fragile, but because they are trained to measure themselves relentlessly and publicly.
The intent feels less like self-pity than an attempt to puncture a cultural script: the celebrated artist as naturally confident, “gifted,” and therefore emotionally immune. Ailey’s career was built on transforming interior states into movement, often pulling from Black spirituals, blues, and gospel to stage collective endurance. In that context, “terrible” isn’t just personal mood; it hints at a lifetime of pressures that don’t disappear when you achieve acclaim: racism in the arts ecosystem, the punishing discipline of the body, the demand to be exemplary, and the loneliness that can come with being both icon and outsider.
The subtext is also about visibility. Ailey made work that insisted on Black interiority as worthy of high art; here he admits his own interiority wasn’t always survivable. The line functions like a crack in the monument, reminding us how often brilliance is paired with self-attack. Not because artists are uniquely fragile, but because they are trained to measure themselves relentlessly and publicly.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mental Health |
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