PART 1
Today I want to tell you the story of how this cognitive neuroscientist eventually became a dance and movement facilitator. This is only going to be Part 1; a part 2 will follow next week.
I am sharing it for anyone who has ever looked at their life from the outside and thought: “Everything seems right, so why does something feel off?” For anyone who has worked hard, achieved their goals, and still felt a quiet restlessness underneath it all.
This is not advice. It is simply my story. What worked, what didn’t, and what I only understood years later.
My journey starts with language.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
As an undergraduate student, I chose to study linguistics because I was fascinated by communication. Not only by the words people use, but by everything happening around them: context, culture, relationships, intentions. I was interested in what allows us to understand far more than what is explicitly said.
Language felt like an elegant system governed by rules, and my mission was to understand these rules.
I loved categorising things, creating frameworks, organising complexity into something I could grasp. My bachelor thesis explored a theoretical framework called FrameNet, a way of organising meaning into conceptual structures. At the time, I spent months thinking about what makes someone capable of causing change in the world. In linguistics we call this an “agent”. Why is a human a better candidate for causing something than a stone? What conditions need to be met?
I found these questions endlessly fascinating.
During that period, I often called my father to share my latest discoveries. Whenever I thought I had found a new way of understanding something, I would pick up the phone and explain my ideas. He would listen patiently, ask questions, and think along with me. Looking back, these conversations were among the happiest moments of my studies.
My thesis received a perfect grade.
I felt I had found my path.
After my bachelor’s degree, I moved to Germany for a master’s in Language Science and Technology. During the first semester, I seriously considered quitting. The level felt so much higher than anything I had done before. I remember calling my father and telling him that I didn’t think I would make it.
His answer was simple.
“Successful people are 10% talent and 90% hard work.”
So we made a deal. I would stay until the first exam period and give it an honest try. If I failed, I could return home. I studied hard, I gave it my best.
Photo by Dan Dimmock on Unsplash
I passed.
Some of the grades were even surprisingly good.
And that experience taught me something that would shape the next decade of my life: if I worked hard enough, I could succeed.
At the time, this felt empowering. I had no idea that the same belief would later become a trap.
I continued with the master’s, found mentors who inspired me, and immersed myself in research. My master’s thesis used eye-tracking technology to investigate language processing. Again, I loved the work. Again, the results were excellent.
By then, I could not imagine doing anything other than research.
So I applied for PhD positions and joined a project at the University of Marburg investigating prediction in language. There is a theory suggesting that humans are constantly predicting what comes next: the next sound, the next word, the next sentence. My PhD explored exactly that.
Those years were intense and demanding, but they were also deeply creative. I was becoming a cognitive neuroscientist. I was learning about the brain, neuroanatomy, experimental methods, and human cognition. Every year opened new doors into understanding how people function.
I had this poster on my office wall during PhD years. Photo by Conor Samuel on Unsplash
At the same time, another important thread was developing quietly in the background.
Dance.
I started dancing more seriously during my PhD, initially as a way to manage the pressure. I danced four evenings per week and sang in a choir. In retrospect, those activities were not hobbies in the casual sense. They were survival strategies.
I had discovered that if I left my evenings empty, I would simply stay at work.
So I filled them with movement, music, and people.
At the time, I saw dance as something separate from my professional life. Research was my identity. Dance was simply what helped me stay balanced.
Or at least that is what I believed.
Looking back, my PhD years were among the happiest of my life. I genuinely loved what I was doing. I often felt like I was somehow cheating the system: spending my days researching fascinating questions and getting paid for it. This is the life, I thought.
My work was successful. I published well. My thesis received the highest distinction.
When Imperial College London offered me a postdoctoral position, I was ecstatic.
A small-town researcher from Germany moving to one of the world’s leading universities. It felt like everything I had worked towards. I still remember the soundtrack of that period: “London Calling” by The Clash.
I was excited. Ambitious. Ready.
And London delivered exactly what I had hoped for. The environment was stimulating and intellectually rich. Everyone was brilliant. Everyone was driven. The standards were high.
I loved it.
At the same time, I could feel a new pressure emerging. Not because anyone imposed it on me, but because I absorbed it from the environment around me.
There was always another skill to develop.
Another publication to write.
Another grant to apply for.
Another way to improve.
I responded the way I always had.
By working harder.
And by dancing.
The pattern had become familiar by then. Push forward professionally, then use movement to recover enough to continue.
I also trained as a teacher in Margaret Morris Movement (MMM) during those years, simply because I loved it and wanted to deepen my understanding.
This is me in 2016 training MMM at my teacher’s garden. I have wonderful memories of those Saturdays with Ann Flower.
Yet even then, something was beginning to shift.
In hindsight, I can see that my body had already started speaking.
The first signal came through my knee.
During my second year in London, I suffered an injury that eventually required surgery. At the time, I saw it as an unfortunate mechanical problem. Something to fix and move on from.
I never asked whether it might be connected to the way I was living. I never considered that possibility.
Interestingly, around the same time, my boss told me about a colleague who had left academia to become a full-time tango teacher. I remember smiling and saying, “That’s great for him.” The idea felt completely unrelated to my own life.
I was a scientist.
Dance was my hobby.
Or so I thought.
Photo taken in 2019 at Tate Modern, at the exhibition of Olafur Eliasson.
In the second year of my post doc in London I was mostly using my time to secure the next position. I applied for several post doc positions and two fellowships. I succeeded in securing a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and moved to Maastricht in the Netherlands.
Another country. Another ambitious project. Another fresh start.
I was now in my early thirties and had moved five times as an adult in pursuit of my academic career.
What strikes me now is how little I questioned any of it. I simply assumed this was what success required. And I continued to develop my own dance practice as a balance to all of it.
This photo is from a dance workshop I gave in my first year in Maastricht, 2018.
The research itself was exciting. I was investigating whether the rhythm training of musicians influences how they process rhythm in speech. It was innovative, technically challenging, and intellectually stimulating.
Everything looked good from the outside.
But beneath the surface, something was continuing to change.
I had become very good at functioning under pressure. So good that I no longer recognised it as pressure.
Then, in early 2020, I traveled to France to dance with the company Les Impromptues. For a few days, I experienced a different rhythm of life. More movement. More spontaneity. More creativity. A version of adulthood that felt lighter and somehow more aligned.
In Nantes early 2020 when preparing for an impromptu performance on the streets with Les Impromptues. So happy and fulfilled, I still remember the feeling vividly.
I returned to Maastricht carrying that feeling with me. Shortly afterwards, my relationship ended. I came back to an empty apartment. That was shattering.
At the same time, I developed severe tooth pain. When I visited the dentist, he examined my teeth and found nothing wrong.
The problem wasn’t my teeth, but my jaw. I was apparently clenching my jaw at night in my sleep. Again, my body was speaking. And again, I wasn’t listening.
I was too busy trying to finish data collection, manage logistics, supervise students, and keep everything moving forward.
I still believed that once I reached the next milestone, things would settle down.
They never did.
Then the pandemic arrived.
On a Thursday, I decided not to run the experiments I had planned for Friday. By Monday, the country was in lockdown.
For the first time in almost fifteen years, there was nowhere to rush to. No experiment to run, no grant application to write, no next step to secure.
Just me, my body, and a silence I had been avoiding for a very long time.
At the time, I thought the pandemic had interrupted my career. I can now recognise that it did something much more important. It gave me enough space to finally hear myself.
And what I heard changed everything.
(Part 2 next week.)
— Dr. Katerina Kandylaki