Dancing With Myself
How I lost my groove and found it again
Like so many other little girls, I used to fancy myself a ballerina. I began taking ballet classes when I was about 3 years old, one of those adorable, roly-poly pre-schoolers in tights and a tiny leotard and pink, elastic-strapped flats. I took great joy in slicking my long, blonde hair into a neat bun once a week to make the short trip to the next town over, where my dance studio was located. It was underground, behind a fancy bread bakery, and entering into the building always felt like walking into a secret club — one you had to be good enough for, committed enough to.
And I was. I was never the best in the class, but I was good enough. I’ve long been a bit of an accidental perfectionist, even then, and I don’t think I would’ve kept going if I had ever become the worst in the class, either. I knew I’d never be a prima ballerina, and I never even dreamed as big as the local performance of The Nutcracker, but I liked dancing, and I was a solidly middle-of-the-road ballet dancer, so I stuck with it all through elementary school. Even when my dad was sick with cancer, I continued to make it to my dance classes, eventually transitioning from ballet to jazz, because I wanted faster music that matched the frenetic mental energy I couldn’t otherwise express.
God, I loved dancing.
But I was self-conscious about it sometimes. I wasn’t overweight as a kid, but I was never stick-thin, either, always a little soft around the middle, and at some point, I began to notice: The best ballerinas were the skinniest girls, the littlest girls, somehow the prettiest girls, too. As we got older, I grew taller and softer, and they stayed slender and small, and I started to stand out.
It started to matter more, whether you were a good dancer or not. They were getting better, and I wasn’t.
The other girls, the girls built like me, started to drop out of dance class. Maybe they recognized sooner than I did that they’d never be good enough at it, or maybe they cared more about not being quite good enough, and soon I found myself at the bottom of the pile.
I still loved dancing. I kept dancing. But over time, it had started to matter more that maybe I wasn’t very good at dancing.
*****
I had a close friend who lived down the street from me, and I spent a lot of time at her house when my dad was sick — playing with Pogs, jumping on her trampoline, eating Kraft mac and cheese. One day when we were probably 9 years old, we put in her dad’s B-52s tape and danced like crazy around her basement to “Love Shack” and other such classic rock hits, the sort of carefreeness that kids have before anyone tells them there are things to be afraid of, to worry about, to hate about themselves.
But suddenly, in the middle of our dance session, my friend stopped and broke down laughing. Confused, I stopped too: “What’s so funny?”
“You look so funny when you dance!” she told me, doubled over with laughter. And when I got upset, as people are wont to do when they’ve been told that they’re humiliating themselves by doing something they love, she back-pedaled. “I mean… it’s just because you’re wearing a Power Rangers shirt! You know, and just, like, dancing really hard.”
A double insult: bad at dancing and bad at dressing myself! While I hadn’t been operating under any illusions that my Yellow Ranger tee was the height of fashion, I’d never felt so embarrassed by my dancing before.
“Let’s do something else,” I suggested, and the dancing came to an end.
Eventually, the dancing came to an end in the rest of my life, too. That day, I grew more self-conscious of my dancing — and, as a direct result, more self-conscious of my body on the whole.
By middle school, I begged my mom to let me quit my dance classes, and she begrudgingly allowed me to give up the hobby which I’d dedicated my entire childhood to. The other girls in my class — girls I’d known my whole life — went on to dance in the Nutcracker and to compete in traveling dance troupes. In high school, they channeled their childhood dance training and naturally lithe bodies into cheerleading, morphing from agile tween ballerinas to stomach-baring, hair-flipping popular girls.
And me? I began to actively loathe dancing. In tenth grade, I wasn’t selected to be one of the chorus members — read: dancers — in our school play, State Fair; instead, I was named a “townsperson,” the human equivalent of a painted prop. During my senior year, as a member of a competitive showchoir, I was always placed in the back row, hidden from view, because my dancing just wasn’t good enough to warrant a more visible position, no matter how good my singing voice was.
Soon, I felt perpetually clumsy and ashamed of the way I moved, an all-consuming self-consciousness that would carry on into adulthood and permeate other aspects of my life, too.
“I don’t dance,” I started to tell people, and I made up any excuse not to. That was that.
*****
My body doesn’t move the way that dancers’ bodies move — not anymore, if it ever did. My friends, the ones who have only known me in adulthood, laugh when they learn of my childhood hobby. I can hear the surprise in their voices — “You used to be a dancer?” — as they try to reconcile this new information with the ungraceful, clunky version of me they know.
But I’ve begun dancing again anyway.
It started slowly and quietly at first, so slowly and quietly that I almost didn’t notice it. At a St. Vincent show with friends, I spaced out, and alone in a crowded room, I lost myself in music — the swaying, the head-bopping, the “Oh, am I moving?” I might not have given much credence to it had it not been for a friend of a friend who, at the end of the night, declared, “I want to go dancing!” Never one to go to clubs or the sort of bars that featured dance floors, they were words I’d never uttered in my adult life — but high on live music and the burst of movement it inspired in me, I found that I wanted to go dancing, too.
We found a crowded bar with loud music and a small dance floor, packed full of sweaty strangers moving to hipster/Top 40 mash-ups. The bar was closing soon, and the dance floor would be clearing out, but we danced anyway. For 15 minutes, arms up, hair wild, eyes closed, I danced like nobody was watching — because nobody was.
It was such a relief, that night, to remember what it felt like to give way to motion. Later that week, I got home from work late one night and started dancing at home alone in front of my mirror to Beyoncé’s “Drunk In Love,” set on repeat with a glass of wine nearby. I watched myself carefully: “Do I look funny when I dance?”
I started to do this nearly every night. I danced alone in my apartment, usually in various states of undress, sometimes in front of a mirror and sometimes not. I danced until I sweated, danced until my legs hurt, and, perhaps most importantly, danced until the body reflected back at me looked familiar and comfortable and almost beautiful, even if it wasn’t good enough for The Nutcracker or the cheerleading team or the chorus line of the high school musical. And I danced until I didn’t think I looked funny anymore, or at least not funny enough to swear off dancing in public forever.
Finally — slowly and quietly at first, and then louder and with vigor — my moratorium on dancing lifted. The curse was broken.
*****
Last weekend I went to a birthday party, just a small gathering of friends in a not-very-big apartment. As the crowd thinned, only five of us were left — the birthday girl and her husband, my best friend and her fiancé, and me, alone — and we collectively decided, without discussing it, that it was time to dance. For an hour and a half, Yuenglings in hand, we danced in the living room to every song we could think of that would lend itself well to moving — MGMT’s “Kids,” Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” Tokyo Police’s Club’s “Hot Tonight.”
My history of not dancing in public told me that I should’ve been self-conscious. The fact that, in that moment, I recognized as much told me that maybe I still was — about the fact that I was the only person at the party without a significant other, that I was physically larger than everyone else in attendance, that I still don’t really know how to dance. But whenever one of those concerns entered my mind, I danced it out. With each song, I found that the more I moved, the less I thought.
We danced and danced and danced. We danced until we sweated, danced until our legs hurt. I wasn’t good at it, but neither were they, really, and it didn’t matter anyway. I knew what I looked like because I’d watched myself do it in the mirror for the past five weeks, and while I knew it wasn’t the prettiest sight in the world, it just didn’t matter anymore. For the first time since I was 9 years old, dancing felt like something you do because you’re happy and crazy and in love with the world and because it’s the only way to cope with all that energy, to put your body in motion and just let yourself move.
The last song we danced to was Bastille’s “Pompeii,” and as I listened to the lyrics, I closed my eyes to blink back tears: “If you close your eyes, does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?” As the hot surge of emotion subsided, I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and I kept dancing.
God, I love dancing.
