You've mentioned that you had a tough time when you first started dancing How did you begin to fall in love with it?
I always loved dancing, but I hated that it made me feel so defeated [at] the beginning of my lessons. It took me such a long time to find a teacher that was willing to work with me. And at nine, I finally found the two most amazing teachers, and they've spent every year since then working with me and training me and inspiring me, and brought me to a place -- the Kodak Theatre -- that I never thought dancing could ever bring me. It was the hardest thing in the world for [my mom] to see me sobbing. She had this gut feeling that she needed to keep me in dance and that it would pay off one day.

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