20Something: Dani
“Let’s take up space.”
For the first time since I met Dani almost two years ago, I’m sitting across from her in street clothes and makeup. We’re in a small coffee shop in Lincoln Park, a hidden gem I discovered a few months ago with green subway tile counters and an air that somehow always feels sun soaked, even on Chicago’s bleakest winter days. I picked it for its quiet ambience and low foot traffic, but today it’s bustling with people taking advantage of a rare 40s-and-sunny February day. I can’t blame them.
Sitting across from Dani is not a new experience for me - I see her every Wednesday morning at 6:10 a.m., and we spend the next 45 minutes facing each other. The difference is that this time, we’re separated by a table and our iced lattes (mine with whole milk, hers with oat), rather than a row of spin bikes. I’m pretty sure she’s only ever seen me with sweat dripping down my matching workout set.
I’ve been taking Dani’s spin class for almost two years now. I wandered in on a random Wednesday, my move to Chicago still fresh, and I’ve been to class almost every Wednesday since. My proclivity for routines and her eternally infectious energy make the pre-sunrise wakeup call easy.
At the moment, the Dani I’m best acquainted with is Spin Instructor Dani. I know that I can always count on her to kick my ass on the spin bike at 6:00 in the morning with an astonishing level of energy that seems like it should be reserved for a Friday night at the club. I know that I’ll leave class with some new nugget of wisdom, or motivation, or positivity to carry with me throughout my day. I also know that somehow, Dani balances teaching several spin classes a week with a full time finance job.
I have one question for her: how??
“It’s literally my joy.” She smiles. That fact alone makes her busy schedule worth it. Although it means she has to give up other pastimes (“I don’t really watch Netflix”), her days are packed with the things that fill her cup up the most, and teaching spin is one of them.
She began teaching in college, and found that her background as a dancer and a cheerleader lent itself well to rhythm-based spin choreography. It also meant she was comfortable leading a class from the instructor’s stage. “They kind of just threw me into it,” she says of her first teaching gig. “I just loved it.”
When she moved to Chicago she knew she wanted to continue teaching, so she took a class at Studio Three. At the end of class, she asked if they were hiring instructors and they told her to come back in October, when formal auditions were held. It was August at the time. Come October, her corporate job schedule wouldn’t leave much room for the instructor training process, but in that moment she had the time. So she asked them to give her 10 minutes to audition. Two songs.
“I feel like I had never been that bold before,” she says. “But I knew that I was a decent instructor, and I just wanted a shot.” Spoiler alert: she got the job.
After two years of Dani’s high energy classes, there’s no doubt in my mind that she’s is a fantastic teacher. Her instructions are clear and well-informed: I know when I need to engage my core, when I need to shift back over the saddle, and when I need to focus on speed over resistance. But there’s one thing she says in class that I’ve been wanting to ask her about: “Take up space.” I’ve picked up on it more and more frequently over the past few months, and whether it’s something I’ve only now become conscious of or a new coaching technique she’s introduced, I want to know what these three words mean to her.
It’s a phrase that used to be foreign to me. In a ballet studio, unless you’re dancing the principal role, much of your value as a dancer lies in your ability to fit a mold. Your every movement must match that of the dancer next to you. You are not an individual. You do not take up any more than your designated space. After I stopped dancing, I realized that trying to take up as little space as possible was something that had seeped off the edges of the dance floor and into my everyday life. I tell Dani this.
She nods. “One of my favorite things about spin is that the lessons that we learn [in class], we take outside of it…. When we learn to take up space, find joy when we’re riding, push through when things get really uncomfortable, we can take that out with us.” She adds that she finds beauty in a group of people coming together at such an early hour to work on themselves. “Let’s take up space. Let’s celebrate that hard work.… Let’s walk out of this room proud of choosing ourselves this morning for 45 minutes before we’re spending the rest of our day serving other people.” When she puts it that way, allowing myself to take up space as I move through life seems like a no brainer.
At this point, we’re fully in Spin Instructor Dani’s Words of Wisdom territory and I’m lovin’ it. My next question for her is, perhaps, selfishly motivated: “Where do you get your confidence?”
Dani seems effortlessly confident, and I envy her for it. I’ve grown tired of the TikTok mindset gurus telling me to just wake up one day and choose confidence for the rest of my life. There are so many factors that impact my level of self confidence, and I find that they shift constantly. So in that vein, I’m relieved to hear her answer: “It’s evolved over time,” she says. “As I’ve gotten older and more mature… it’s like, this is where I’m supposed to be.” She explains that as she looks back on the last few years and everything she’s been through up until this point, it’s clear that this is where she is meant to be. That, for now, brings her confidence in the present moment.
As much as I could talk to Spin Instructor Dani for hours, I decide to shift gears. I want to know about Regular Dani, and who she is outside of the studio. A quick glance at her social media shows a highlight reel comprised of dinners with friends, cute gestures from her husband, and weekend expeditions around the city.
Dani moved to Chicago from Arizona four years ago after graduating college, and works a finance job by day. She’s a U of A alum, where she studied accounting after a short-lived trial run as a marketing major with a fashion minor (“The classes didn’t really sound super interesting to me”). She graduated in three and half years, the first two of which she spent immersed in U of A’s flourishing social scene. For the last year and a half of her time in college, she focused her energy on her close group of friends, nurturing relationships with people who are still in her life today.
I ask her what it was like to transition from a robust collegiate social scene to a city where she knew no one. It’s a transition I know well, and I’m always interested to hear how others navigated it.
“I’ve always been a girls’ girl,” she says. “[When I moved to Chicago,] I really wanted good girlfriends.” Reeelatable. Wanting to find a close circle of friends is a sentiment I think many of us share, and it’s not the easiest thing to achieve. She goes on to tell me how important she finds it to be intentional with female friendships. “It took a while… I think it took, like, a good year to find girlfriends. I think you move to a new city and you’re like, ‘I’m gonna find friends and they’re gonna know me the same way my old friends know me.’” But the bonds of a deep friendship are not instantaneous. “It’s a long process, but I feel like it’s worth it to wait to find those friends.”
Later in our conversation, my coffee has dwindled to a sad watery mix, and we circle back to the topic of friendship. I tell her my biggest fear when it comes to post grad friendships: that they won’t last. All of my close friends from high school and college are now states away from me, and the constraints of our adult lives make drifting inevitable. So when it comes to making friends in my 20s, I’ve been admittedly cautious of forming any bonds that might bring more hurt than happiness when adult life takes its inexorable toll.
Dani’s solution, again, comes down to being intentional with who she spends her time with. When you dedicate your energy to a lasting friendship, the possibility of not always being physically close to each other isn’t as daunting. “It’s a two-way street,” she says. “There are going to be times when one person can give more to the friendship, and the other person, maybe a little bit less. Or vice versa.” She adds that part of maintaining a sense of closeness with her college friends involves celebrating where each of them is in life, whether they’re married, job hunting, in their single corporate baddie era (it’s me, hi), or anything in between. Having friends in vastly different stages of life is just part of your 20s.
I ask her if she envisioned herself living the life she is now, or if she had a completely different plan in mind. Her answer falls somewhere in the middle.
“I think that the life that I now have is better than I ever could have imagined. I wanted to move to Chicago, I wanted to live, like, the city girl lifestyle.” I nod in an “I-also-had-dreams-and-aspirations-of-living-a-city-girl-Carrie-Bradshaw-esque-life” kind of way. She continues: “But I think that over time, my heart has really shifted. [My priorities] are less about my career being everything, and more about my relationships. I think in that way, the life that I’m living now is really different than I pictured.”
She admits that she’s surprised by how well everything in her life has worked out so far - she’s married to her best friend, has a job that she loves, friends that she can count on. “It’s better than I thought it would be.”
But her sunny outlook was not born out of never-ending happy times. “Two years ago I was in, personally, one of the roughest periods of my life. I was going through a lot of grief. It was right after I lost my dad, a relationship had ended, I was [home] in Arizona, getting ready to move back to Chicago to start over.” It was one of those “when it rains it pours and just keeps pouring” seasons.
All I can contribute here is empathy, so I offer up a cliché in response: our lowest periods are instrumental to the growth that leads us to a happier, more fulfilled life. I’ve experienced this on a much smaller scale than Dani has, so I feel a little lame when I say it. But she graciously agrees with me. “As the curveballs come, you just roll with them, right? And you get a chance, a lot of times, to reinvent, and start over, and decide who you want to be.” She explains that walking through a season of extreme loss and grief gave her the opportunity to reassess who she wanted to be moving forward, and what she truly wanted out of life.
“That’s something I try to remind myself of,” I tell her. “We’re so young still, and we have so much time to reinvent ourselves.” I could completely fail at life tomorrow and I would still have plenty of time to start over. That thought has become a source of comfort for me whenever I’m being particularly wallow-y in self doubt.
Needless to say, the year she lost her dad was the worst year of her life, let alone her 20s. But she found a silver lining in her cloud of grief: it was a catalyst for healing. Facing her trauma led her into a period of growth - it taught her how to ask for help, and how to take responsibility for her own healing. And it led her to the best year of her 20s: this one.
“This last year, finding a new job that I love, getting engaged, getting married, and really feeling settled… I’m just really content where I am right now.”
————
Our official interview ends and I stop the recording, but we keep chatting for a while. She asks about me, how I’m doing, what’s going on in my life. And just like it does every Wednesday morning, her positivity and enthusiasm for life spreads through me as if by osmosis. We part ways, and I step outside into the February sun. I’m in the mood to take up space today.