I found ballroom dance. I found a group of people that, for the first time in my life, let me feel like I was at home.

But, as has been said so many times by so many different people, “If you love someone, set them free.” The same concept applies.

Fall of 2012 was the beginning of the end for my short-lived love of competitive dance. The summer brought around a lot of life changes and challenges that I needed to adapt to and overcome. I stretched myself thin with family problems, a new job, paying bills, academics and ballroom.

I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating, my grades were starting to slip and I was having more breakdowns in a week than I had in the last academic year.

In the process of talking to a therapist to sort out the hot mess that was my life, we came up with an organizational system: bubbles. There was a work bubble, a social bubble, an academic bubble and a ballroom bubble.

One of the bubbles had to pop.

I started to lean toward the ballroom bubble with a needle. I cried at practice and felt like I no longer belonged to a team. I dreaded going, debating whether or not my presence would be worth staying up all night.

It seemed like it would be an easy decision to make: to stop pursuing something that makes you question whether or not it’s right to pursue.

But not when you love that something.

Dancing was, for a while, equal to breathing or eating or drinking water. How could you give up something so amazing, something that you loved, simply because you have the possibility to be able to find something equally as great? Hint: It isn’t easy.

But people don’t remember the second half of that famous quote: “If they come back, they’re yours; if they don’t, they never were.”

There is a time and a place for everything in the world. People are in your life for a reason, and they leave for different ones. Things come and go when you need them to, even though you might not realize it. Giving up on something or someone you love, if you have the sinking feeling it’s right, probably is the best route to go.

After becoming the ballroom ghost in the spring 2013 semester, I stopped talking to a therapist. I opened up about my problems. I stopped crying. I found a new passion, and I can pinpoint exactly where it started: in the middle of the woods, crossing streams and trekking through mud with 15 pounds of camera gear in pursuit of an ROTC class. Somehow I was enjoying myself — enjoying myself more than I had waking up at 5 a.m. to apply stage makeup and run off in a dress to make it onto a competition floor on time.

A door was opened, and I fell in love with my job.

At first, it was just a job to help pay the bills. I never wanted to go into a career in photography, and the people whom I worked with could see that. But slowly, over time, the less I went to dance, the more I enjoyed being at work.

The people I work with made me feel like I was part of a team again. They made me feel like, in a small bubble, I was exactly where I needed to be. I was home.

Ballroom came into my life to help me discover who I was, to help me discover what passion could truly feel like. Ballroom left my life because it had done the job it needed to do.

It had shown me what having a home outside of home could feel like, and it was time to move into a new house. Work came into my life to show me the opportunities that I now had in my life, to show me that closing one door and peeking into another could be the best thing you ever do.

It’s a risk. It always is. Leaving something that made you who you are today for the possibility of something else is a daunting jump.

But life is all about the jump, all about the urge for something new. “L’appel du vide” translates loosely to “the call of the void,” or the urge to fall when one comes across a high place.

So while the jump is daunting, sometimes the call is even stronger to fall from one place to the next, from one love to the other.

And still, maybe, one day, it will come back and I will once again step back onto the ballroom floor in 3-inch heels and find that desire to glide across the floor. But until that point, my heart will always find the beat and long for someone to dance with.

Danyelle Morrow is a Photographer at The State News and an english junior. Reach her at danyelle.morrow@statenews.com.