When I was 22, I moved to New York City to be a bar-mitzvah motivator. I’d dreamed about this job ever since I’d discovered that it was a job—drunk on gummy candy at my cousin’s bar mitzvah in New Jersey, crushing on a man in leather pants pumping his fist to Ke$ha, thinking, Adults can do that for a living?
When I came across the audition listing, I’d been trying to be an actor while working a 5 a.m.–11 p.m. gig schedule of catering, babysitting, and staffing a SoulCycle front desk. I was desperate to be a performer, and the ad was for “Outgoing and Attractive Dancers for High-End Events,” ideally “model/cheerleader/club-goer” types. I figured I could be any of those things if I tried hard enough.
I sent in my headshot and showed up at a rehearsal studio, where I sweated furiously with at least 50 others for more than three hours, Pitbull’s “Fireball” bellowing from the speakers. Almost all were professional dancers; almost all were women. Two men stood at the front of the room, calling us up to perform solo; they made cuts, then more cuts, then invited those of us who booked the job back for a training the following week.
Ninety percent of the bar or bat mitzvahs took place outside the city, at country clubs and sports stadiums in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Westchester. We were not reimbursed for the Metro North tickets we had to buy to get there, or the 1 a.m. Ubers we’d have to take from Nyack to Brooklyn because the trains had stopped running. We had to buy all-black outfits, and then all-white outfits. We were stuffed into too-tight shorts and cheerleader costumes, fed cold chicken fingers, touched and flirted with, and tipped handsomely. We stole the mints and floss and hairspray from the bathrooms. We danced feverishly, deliriously, before thrashing crowds of middle schoolers, and doled out Brooklyn Nets jerseys and light-up plastic sunglasses to the tune of “Blurred Lines.” Every party felt like a boutique fitness class, a wedding on steroids, and a four-hour rave for children.
[Ellen Cushing: Americans need to party more]
And I loved it. I loved the energy that it required, the music, the adrenaline. But mostly I loved being seen. No matter what happened in the real world, I could stand on a podium in a flash of white lights, looking like the love child of a camp counselor and a prostitute, and feel the desire of a surging crowd. I had never been paid to be beautiful before. I was embarrassed by how much I relished it.
In Judaism, a bar mitzvah marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. Party planners hire motivational dancers to ensure that the party looks adequately “lit” for the parents who paid for it, but also to be a bridge between the teens and the adults. We stood bravely in that gap between generations, learning TikTok dances and the verses of ’90s hip-hop. We were old enough for the kids to think we were cool and young enough for the adults to think they still might be. “We’re going for fantasy,” our boss told us. Eighty percent of a motivational dancer’s job was looking good. The rest was the ability to make everyone in the room feel like they could grow up and stay young forever.
I was good at all of it. I knew the young woman’s best secret, the one that every 13-year-old girl in the room was learning: that our most valuable currency is the performance of our youth and beauty. I trusted my body. If all else failed, it would not fail me.
When I was 25, I had a stroke.
“But you’re so young!” the ER nurses and the technicians and the pharmacists exclaimed. “What happened?!”
I don’t know what happened. Blood workups and imaging revealed a vertebral artery dissection: a small tear that caused a major ischemic stroke in my right cerebellum. On an October weekend, I traveled home to Washington, D.C., for what I thought would be a quick trip, and went walking with my family in a state park. My mother wanted me to try a new exercise she’d learned; I planked on a gentle hillside, craned my neck upward, and the world canted sideways. Unable to stand, I sat waiting for the spinning to subside, but it didn’t. A high-voltage pain shot up the right side of my skull; I felt like I’d been plugged into a DJ booth. Later, in the parking lot at Walgreens, where we’d stopped for some painkillers, I vomited. I figured it was an unusually bad migraine.
When the pain had not ceased a day later, I went to urgent care. The doctors shrugged and sent me to the ER. A CT scan revealed no brain bleed; the doctors shrugged and sent me home with my parents.
Three days later, I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling as if my skull had been cleaved in two. The pain was so intense, I could barely remember my name. My parents took me back to the ER, where doctors waited another day and a half before putting me in an MRI machine. Five days after the onset of the stroke, I was finally given a diagnosis. I wouldn’t be making it to any bar mitzvahs that weekend—or for a long time.
“We see strokes in young patients all the time,” one doctor told me. “All the time.” My neurologist had seen a 27-year-old firefighter. My hematologist mentioned a hockey player, happily on blood thinners and back in action. My parents’ primary-care physician mentioned someone successful at the Democratic National Committee. A stroke on vacation in Europe. A stroke in utero. There were stories, but no discernible pattern.
“Every patient is an n of 1,” my mother’s friend Andrea said one night at dinner. She had Stage 4 cancer. She laughed and took a sip of her wine as the candlelight threw shadows across her face. She meant that there is no certainty when it comes to our bodies and their failures, that everyone’s suffering is their own. Our bodies betray us. We might never know why. It’s not fair.
Andrea’s dead now. Hers was the wisest advice I’d receive.
Having a stroke is like aging 60 years over the course of a few days. I couldn’t walk or shower without assistance. I couldn’t make it from 9 a.m. to lunchtime without napping. My vision was blurry. My hair fell out. My mother drove me to PT, OT, and speech therapy with all of the geriatric patients, sometimes twice a day. I developed bilateral stress fractures in my feet because I couldn’t remember how to walk correctly, so I was fitted with a boot and a shoe lift. My body shook with violent, uncontrollable tremors, and I took handfuls of pills three times a day, checking them off on a clipboard. Mostly, I slept.
Getting sick strips life of its fantasy, like sheets pulled from a mattress for the wash. I had left one world—Susan Sontag’s “kingdom of the well”—for another, the “kingdom of the sick.” A neurological anomaly, I struggled to comprehend the severity of my illness. If I sat still, I could almost pretend to be the person I’d been a few weeks earlier. But if I tried to stand, or use a fork, the disguise disintegrated. I’m not well! I wanted to scream. And I may never be again.
I felt like I was inhabiting a poorly constructed human costume. My brain didn’t work. The steroids that I was prescribed had given me “moon face,” shifting fat deposits so I developed jowls, and cheeks that bulged like a chipmunk’s. It took weeks to remember what walking unassisted felt like, one foot in front of the other. Inching forward in line at the grocery store felt like making a left turn at a four-way intersection; walking to the mailbox felt like being the most stoned person at the party. I was furious at and ashamed of my disobedient body.
“How lucky are you, to be alive?! You’re a walking miracle,” everyone told me.
But I had been a performer whose job was to show others how easy it was to move, to be free. I missed the clarity of the bar mitzvahverse. I was lucky to be alive. But at first, all I wanted was to be pretty again.
I got better.
It’s been five years since the stroke. Eventually, I tapered off the steroids and the anticonvulsants. The tremors subsided, and then, finally, so did the moon face. I practiced touching my thumb to each of my fingers, balancing on one leg, then the other. I remembered that I had peripheral vision, and slowly learned to trust the space behind me again.
After four months with my parents, I moved back into my apartment in New York, feeling like an alien citizen in a strange city. Once, my nights were filled with coordinated dance moves and screaming teenagers. Now everything was so still. I watched sunsets bleed pink and violet from my Brooklyn rooftop. I moved slower, multitasked less. I started writing.
[From the June 2025 issue: The mother who never stopped believing her son was still there]
My stroke forced me to admit that I had spent the beginning of my adulthood basing my self-worth not on my intelligence or my resilience, but on the desire of strangers. Sick, I had to learn what I was to myself. This specific pain—this body’s miraculous failure—was unique, and that uniqueness had meaning. I had treated my body as if it existed to perform youth and beauty. Now my body does not signify anything. When I eat, or dance, or wear a bathing suit, I remind myself that my body has value beyond how it’s perceived—that its value lies in what it can do. This is what I wish I could tell those 13-year-old girls, but I’m not a bar-mitzvah motivator anymore.
Growing up is an asymmetrical story. It doesn’t really have an ending. Becoming goes on forever. I was sick, and now I am better, and I know that youth and beauty are unreliable narrators. When I’m tempted to punish myself for my body’s failures, for its refusal to be exactly what I want it to be, I try to remember that my job is not to be a body, and that my self-worth lies in the specificity and complexity of—if I may be so lucky—my long and healthy life.
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