My body is very different from most of the dancers I dance with. My hair is different than most I dance with. But I didn't let that stop me. Black girls rock and can be ballerinas.

For me, I was in school and I pushed myself to be a good student, just because that's the type of person I was, but I never had a connection to any of it. I don't think my brain functioned in a way that was at its height, when I was in school. I needed something like art to really value the way my mind works. I wasn't reaching my full potential by sitting in a classroom and reading from a book. My mind didn't work that way.

I learned how to communicate and articulate myself from ballet. It's just insane to me, when they don't think of that as a part of our education.

I know that most of the time I have to work overtime to do everything that I want to.

But I think the more you eat healthy clean foods the more you create them.

Ballet found me. I was discovered by a teacher in middle school. I always danced, my whole life. I never had any training, never was exposed to seeing dance, but I always had something inside of me.

The word "prodigy" was thrown around a lot, but I didn't understand what that meant, or the weight of it. It didn't really mean anything to me, until I was older and could look back on it.