You don't need to walk a mile in a ballerina's shoes to understand her life. Just a couple steps on your tippy-toes wearing her pointe shoes should do it. It's hard, it's painful, your feet literally bleed, and soon you're on the floor thinking, "No way is this worth $900 to $1,300 per week (source). I'm going to go get a real job flipping burgers."

Just kidding. Oh, not about the salary part. The typical ballerina—the one who isn't the reincarnation of Anna Pavlova—scrapes together about $25,000 to $55,000, depending on where they work and what their rank is. 

The average salary at the Joffrey Ballet is $35,500 (source) per season. If the Joffrey isn't paying big bucks, how well do you think the Twinkle Toes Troupe of Nowhere, North Dakota, is going to pay you?

No, the part we were kidding about was the one where the ballerina quits because it's hard. They may look pretty, but they have to be tough as nails to make it more than a few steps in the ballet world.

If you've seen a production of The Nutcracker or Swan Lake, or if you've been on Earth for a couple of years, then you know what a ballerina is. Ballerinas are female dancers (male ballerinas are just "ballet dancers," or, if you're feeling pretentious and/or French, danseurs) who really like standing on the tips of their toes for hours on end and lifting their legs right up next to their face so they can smell their calves. 

When other people are going to their offices at 9:00AM, ballerinas head to the studio for a long, grueling, eight hours of dance.

People first started dancing around and turning their feet outwards and calling it art sometime around the 16th century in Italy. "Ballet" actually comes from the Italian word ballare, meaning "to dance." It made its way to fancy French courts, where it became all professionalized and whatnot. By the 19th century, the Russians decided to get in on the whole ballet thing too. 

The United States was late to the dance party, though, only seriously getting interested in ballet around the 1930s, when prominent Russian ballerinas left to live in the U.S.

But nowadays, people around the world roll up to the ballet for a night on the town, uptight parents schlep their kids to ballet class at the local youth organization, and young women in pursuit of a "dancer's body" head to trendy barre classes at their local gym to work up a few droplets of sweat.

Amateur ballet is everywhere. Professional ballerinas, however, are not. Are you friends with any professional ballerinas? Probably not...because they spend more than sixty hours every week in the studio and at rehearsal. This isn't a career that allows for a lively personal life. A ballerina's friends are usually her fellow ballerinas.

 

They also do a lot of intense posing. (Source)

If you ever do cross paths with a professional ballerina, you can safely guess a few things about them: They're intensely dedicated to their art form, their feet (carefully hidden by closed-toed shoes) are probably covered with ripped, disgusting calluses, and physically, they're muscular and flexible. 

They're like stretchy rubber bands made of pure muscle.

To get to that level of mental fortitude and superhuman strength, you need to be more uptight than a New Yorker trying to beat the morning rush at Starbucks. 

Professional ballerinas aren't lackadaisical people who'd rather stay in bed all day than go to the gym. They're perfectionists who'd rather spend their lives trying to get their leg a little bit higher or make their pirouettes a little tighter, than spend time relaxing (ugh) with people (yuck).

No one's yelling at them to work that hard. Well, alright, maybe someone's yelling at them, but a professional ballerina must be relentless with her self-discipline and self-motivation, willing to push her body to the point of breaking simply because she loves dance. (And yes, they also get paid to dance. But not much.)

Do you have what it takes to be a professional ballerina? If you're in your early teens, then there's a pretty easy test you can do to find out. Are you a professional dancer right this second, hired and paid by a ballet company to dance? If the answer to that question is, "No, not yet," then tough luck, because you probably won't become a ballerina in this lifetime.

Almost across the board, professional ballerinas started with rigorous, one-on-one dance training before they had their front teeth, then attended elite dance training programs all through their middle school years when the rest of their peers were battling pimples and exchanging charm bracelets, and then made their professional debut before (often long before) they turned eighteen. 

Does that sound like you? If it doesn't, you're behind the curve—and there's no catching up in ballet.

The following advice might only be useful if you're already on the right track, moving full-steam ahead, and are the best dancer your private instructor has ever seen at the best dance school in the country. If you think you might someday teach ballet, you should get an undergraduate degree in dance. 

Look at professional dance schools that offer a concentration specifically in ballet. There are also MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs that you can do to study advanced dance theory and hone your skills. Most future dance teachers have an MFA. Even if you don't want to teach right now, you'll rethink that when you suffer a career-ending injury at twenty-six years old.

But school does have to end sometime, and you'll need to find a way to pay the bills…which is no easy song and dance on a ballerina's paycheck. A ballerina, like any other adult, has car payments, rent, and loans to pay off and groceries to buy. But unlike many other people, ballerinas don't have steady work. 

Despite their control-freak disposition, ballerinas work in an industry where they have almost zero control over what happens to them. When they can find work, dancers work for companies that pay them less than a twerpy college kid with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML makes during a summer internship.

As if finding a steady dancing paycheck wasn't hard enough, companies also lay dancers off every summer when the "season" is over. Many ballet dancers set aside as much money as they can for those summer months, while others spend the small amounts of free time they have during the spring—if they're not on tour, that is—auditioning for summer gigs that pay.

 

Watch your back. (Source)

The reality is that competition for any spot in any ballet company at any point in the season is nearly as fierce as the Hunger Games. While you probably won't need to worry about taking a spear in the throat, you'll definitely get the occasional knife stuck in your back from your hypercompetitive, calorie-counting fellow ballerinas. It's not uncommon to work for free in order to raise your profiles and score a better-paying job in the future.

And then, even if you can cobble together a career out of dance, the average retirement age is late twenties if you're relatively unknown, and maybe mid-thirties if you're a superstar. 

You're not retiring because you want to, or because you've made enough money to live comfortably. You're retiring because no one wants to hire you, because there are younger and better dancers out there, or because you've broken, strained, or injured some part of your body. 

If you become a ballerina, you'll likely find yourself thirty years old, possibly injured, without any life savings, and without a career. It's how the industry works.

The life of a professional ballet dancer is brutal—physically, mentally, and financially. Stand on your toes all you want, but think very, very hard before you dip a perfectly nice, undamaged toe into this career.

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