Ironically, even though I became a professional ballerina, I wasn’t ever one of those little girls who dreamt about ballet with stars in my eyes. I didn’t prance around in tutus and tiaras fantasizing about a glamorous life on stage. Just the opposite. When the hour of ballet class rolled around, I’d find somewhere to hide, hoping that my mom would forget about me. The old out-of-sight, out-of-mind trick. I’d pick an outside hiding spot, at the furthest corner of our property, and pray that the whole idea of bringing me to ballet class would slip out of her mind, unnoticed.

It never did work.

Not even the time when Michelle Roscoe spilled an entire can of fuchsia paint in my hair that just wouldn’t come out no matter how hard my mom scrubbed away and willed things to be otherwise. No. She still made me go to class. I had endure a roomful of stares while practicing plies with a screaming neon-pink hairdo. On that day, even run-run-jump, which was my favorite thing to do in ballet class (split legged jumps, pretending to fly over puddles) failed to be fun.

So how did the girl who spent so much time trying to avoid ballet class end up choosing ballet as a career, you may ask. While I’m the first to admit that my career decision was a complete 180 from where I began, it obviously didn’t happen overnight. Quite the opposite.

I endured ballet for the first few years, but by the time I reached third grade I’d had enough. Swimming was all I could think about. I’d been winning ribbons at competitive swim meets and collecting all sorts of cool patches to iron onto the back of my warmup jacket. Ballet certainly didn’t offer any tangible rewards like these, so swimming won out. I quit ballet and devoted myself to swimming.

A year later I went back to ballet class and picked up where I left off. However, I don’t think my ballet teacher ever did completely forgive me for my traitorous behavior. Every so often she’d slip in a snide remark when giving me a correction in class like, “Your arm position is all wrong there. This isn’t swimming, you know.”

But I kept going to class. It was predictable when so many other parts of my life were not. The music made my heart grow wings and my body want to fly. Eventually, I realized that if I stuck with it long enough my future held the promise of pointe shoes. The allure of spinning on the pink satin tips of my toes was exciting to the point of twitterpation. Whenever my mind flew off into that daydream, the vision was lined with glittery-edged fervor like none I had ever experienced.

I could hardly wait.

From then on, ballet class took on a whole new shiny magic in my eager little mind.

I was hooked.

All right, I’ll come clean: I’m not ashamed to admit that I have a huge problem with plastic. Anything made of plastic. Therefore, I’m doing whatever I can to eliminate it from my life… and I certainly don’t want it touching my lips. However, the average human is supposed to drink at 64 ounces of water each day, which means bringing it with you so you have it on hand. The only type of water bottle that is truly trustworthy is one that is made of glass, like my new favorite, LifeFactory’s 22-ouncer (with protective silicon sleeve… dishwasher-safe, virtually indestructible, highly attractive).

So why am I so rabid about plastic? What is problem with plastic? After all, it’s so handy, convenient, and disposable. No, actually it’s not. It takes several hundreds of years for the stuff to biodegrade and even then it never truly does biodegrade; it simply breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, which litter our planet and often get eaten by animals. Several hundred years to biodegrade. I’ll give you a moment to digest that simple fact. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

It’s that important.

Plastic kills other creatures. Birds and sealife find it very attractive… and edible. Some have been found with entire stomach loads of the stuff. Other animals are being choked and strangled by plastic bags.

There’s also the question of the impact that plastic has on our health; many types of plastic are known to be unstable. Over time, the chemical compounds break down, leaching toxic chemicals into our food and water. Hence my reticence about putting my lips around plastic bottles. I don’t want to subject anyone else (especially my young daughter) to the same potential dangers, either. Given what we know about the dangers of plastic and its longterm repercussions for the planet, I’m not even sure why it’s still being used at all.

However, as one friend likes to say, we got ourselves into our current environmental predicament one step at time; we’ll get ourselves out of it the same way. The simple step of choosing to use a glass water bottle keeps hundreds of plastic bottles out of the landfill (and our oceans) and… our bodies. Isn’t that worth it?