Years later, Chloé Lukasiak can still remember the moment she decided to stop living on the dance floor.
It wasn't when her four tumultuous seasons as one of Abby Lee Miller's oft-chastised pupils came to a sudden end with an ugly argument that saw the studio owner bellow that the then-13-year-old was "finished." Nor was it when she exited Dance Moms for a second time in 2017.
Instead, in the fall of 2019, just months before she was set to begin her freshman year at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., "I took my last class and I was like, 'I'm done, I'm walking away,'" Chloé recalled in an exclusive interview with E! News. "I needed that space and that independence from something that had consumed my whole life."
Just 2 years old when she signed on as one of Abby's skilled competition dancers tasked with nabbing the top prize (because second place is the first loser), "It was a sport I really loved," she said, "but it was often infected by toxicity."
And as much as Abby wasn't winning any congeniality prizes thanks to her "everyone's replaceable" reminders and penchant for pitting her elementary-aged students against one another, she was hardly an anomaly in the industry. "I know a lot of dancers have that experience," said Chloé. "They were kind of let down by how negative the dance world can be."
Which is why a little more than a year ago, it dawned on the 22-year-old soon-to-be college grad exactly what she wanted to do with her life.
"I was chatting with some friends and I was really wondering the point of my experience on Dance Moms," she recalled. "And I don't mean just in life, because obviously, it gave me the life I have now and I'm very grateful for it. But I meant in terms of dance. I was like, 'What's my full circle moment with dance? What does that mean for me now as an adult?'"
The answer was both obvious and fairly ingenious. "I realized, oh, maybe I experienced everything I did on the show and everything I did growing up dancing because I was meant to lead this new generation of dance into a more positive environment," she said of the basis for Elevé, the national dance competition she's launching with mom Christi Lukasiak and fellow mother-daughter duo Diane and Brittany Pent.
With a focus on "uplifting each other," she continued, her hope is that each dancer "walks away feeling like, I had a great time and I feel so inspired."
So basically a complete 180 from her save-the-tears-for-your-pillow days.
Asked if her experience under Abby's tutelage was worse than it appeared on screen, Chloé responded, "Absolutely. It was a very difficult situation. But I always say this—and I really mean this from the bottom of my heart—I wouldn't change a thing about it."
While she certainly would have appreciated the tough love to be a little, well, loving, "I feel like everything we go through shapes who we are as people," she noted. "Even though it was difficult, at the end of the day anyone who's in a really difficult sport like that goes through some degree of what we went through as well."
Not that she's condoning the time Abby called her "a little sneak" or spent an entire episode pretending not to remember her name.
"I've just heard lots of stories from other people who are in sports like that and they say it's similar," she stressed. "But that's why I started this competition to change the atmosphere. We can improve and grow, but we don't have to do it in a way where we feel awful about ourselves."
Kicking off in Indianapolis this January, every aspect of Elevé is designed with their overarching goal in mind. "Just reminding ourselves constantly of why we created this is the most important," she explained, "and making sure we hire people who align with that vision. We're taking our goal and implementing it into every single decision we make from the awards to the merchandise to the whole experience of the weekend."
As for whether Dance Moms fans could see the series OG take the stage, she might dip a perfectly pointed foot back into that world.
"I'm interested to see how I feel as the weekends go by," admitted the creative writing student, who slipped back into her leotard for an intro to ballet class last semester.
The session fulfilling her need for an art class credit, "It was the first time I danced in four years," she said. "And I was like, okay, I'm not quite ready to jump back into it fully, but I think being surrounded by dancers and seeing them cheer each other on will probably foster that passion in me again. But I'm not pushing it. I'm just going to wait and see what happens."
Should she decide to reclaim her centerstage spot, she'll have quite the cheering section.
Set to mark their third anniversary this November, she and skateboarder Brooklinn Khoury, "really balance each other out in a great way," noted Chloé. "She brings out my spontaneous extroverted side and I bring out her introverted side."
Along with just "enjoying each other's presence," she and the YouTube content creator, 24, are "really supportive of one another," said Chloé, who is also at work on her first fiction book. "She is really starting to take off with her career and I'm starting to focus on Elevé and life after school. It was just a natural fit right when we met."
As for their future together, "We're figuring it out," she said. "We'll just see where the wind takes us."
It's already amazing for Chloé to look back on how far a bit of determination has carried her. And not just in the literal sense, with the Pennsylvania native moving 3,000 miles away to Los Angeles "as soon as I turned 18."
When she was in the middle of the Dance Moms chaos tornado, "I didn't even think about getting through it, I just pushed through," she reflected. "Only now, looking back, do I realize, wow, that was really crazy. In the moment, though, you kind of just put your head down and tried to get through each day for four years."
There was a little bit of leaning onto her castmates ("We're always cheering each other on from the sidelines") and, of course, her mom. But mostly, she said, "I just kind of blocked it out for a while. And it wasn't until the last couple of years that I really was like, 'Oh, that had an impact on me.' It took me a while to face it and be like, 'That was difficult. But that doesn't have to define who I am anymore.'"
And she's not the only Dance Moms alum to jeté her way into something bigger. Here's how each of the standouts from Abby's Junior Elite competition team are handling their lives as soloists.