Finding My Rhythm
As long as I can remember, I’ve always told myself that I can’t dance. In fact, I haven’t just told myself, I’ve believed it.
When I was five, my parents enrolled me in a ballet class at our local community centre. The centre was old, even then, and a musty smell floated through the building, seeping into every corner and crevasse. But the ballet studio was upstairs and had somehow been inoculated against the putrid odor. It felt different than the rest of the community centre, which was a place I frequented with my family.
I don’t recall much from my ballet classes. My mum says I was anxious. She and my brothers had to sit at the side of the studio for the entire thirty-minute class. And I can only imagine how hard it would have been to keep my three brothers relatively quiet. The final class was a recital and there was lots of anticipation leading up to it. I was progressively more and more anxious as the day approached and when it finally did arrive, I froze. It wasn’t pretty. Suffice it to say, my relationship with dance was over.
In high school, my friends joked that I was a stiff person. Not emotionally, but physically. They laughed at the realisation that I waved much like the late Queen Elizabeth. Stiff arm, cupped hand, minimal movement. This stiffness intensified if there was even a hinted suggestion of dance. Hip hop in gym class? No way. School dance? Ok, well, mostly no way, but the appeal of dancing with a boy (or boys plural!!) served to cajol me into participating.
At nineteen, I became enamoured with yoga. A friend and I went daily. We bought the mat and the blocks and the stretchy pants and tops that were de rigueur, and after several months of hatha and flow, we discovered a class called ‘kundalini.’ We decided to give it a whirl. The class was in a small-ish room in an older building above a vegetarian buffet we used to visit once we’d finished bending and folding. As we walked into the room, we noticed the configuration was much different from the usual classes. The mats were in a circle around the teacher. The teacher was already there, seated in padmasana. Picture Hulk Hogan in stretchy pants. His hair was white and mullet-like. He wore a banana, a white undershirt and wide-legged yoga pants.
Stiff Hilary entered that room. Hulk Hogan the Yogi (hereafter HHY) was kind and welcoming, but I was already beyond salvation. I expected the class to start with breathing, gentle movements, but no. “Dance!” HHY cried. “Move your body and be free!” An unfortunate conundrum presented. When HHY proclaimed we should feel “free”, I froze. I watched my friend dance. I watched the other participants let loose. And I just stood there. I used every ounce of strength I had to keep myself from rolling up my mat and marching out of there. To my relief, the remainder of the class resembled the yoga classes I was more used to. Still. My bends were not quite as bendy.
My twenties included many more stiff and frozen dancing moments. The self-proclaimed message that I was not a good dancer was so drilled into my psyche that I had no interest in showcasing my miserable rhythm or drawing attention to my stilted and stiff self. In my early twenties, a breakup that felt utterly catastrophic at the time catapulted me into a frenzy of Eat, Pray, Love experiences. A friend convinced me that what I really needed was to dance. Broken hearted and ridden of any semblance of confidence I’d had, I begrudgingly agreed to join her in salsa lessons. In the days leading up to the first class, my internal monologue was predominantly pep talks: You can do it, Hilary. It can’t be that hard. You’ll learn. It will be great. And so on. My friend and I arrived early on the first day. We watched our classmates trickle in and I’m ashamed to admit that I sized them up as they walked through the doors. If *he* can do it, so can I. Perhaps it was karma, but *he* (and all the rest of them) could most certainly do it better than I could. The entire ordeal was painful. I confessed to my friend that I just could not do it. It made me too anxious. I never went back, and my friend, angel that she was, didn’t hold it against me.
I could go on and on and on. I could list all the times I went out with friends and couldn’t quite loosen up enough to have fun on the dance floor. Or the times C and I went out and his moves were so smooth, so confident, so natural. Or the times I cringed at the very thought of doing the freeze dance or ‘Just Dance’ (etc.) with the kids at the school I work at who really, and I mean really don’t care about or even notice my dance moves. But the list would be endless.
Last weekend, after a workout – sweat dripping and endorphins released – I played a song I love. It’s a feel-good song. A song that makes me want to dance. I can feel the rhythm inside me bubbling up like it wants to come out. Like a flame has been ignited and it’s going to take over my whole body. Like it is the puppeteer, and I am the puppet and will dance against my will. Ordinarily, my will not to dance is strong enough. Any urge coming from within is stifled. But this time, I let it out. It burst out. I’m not sure I could call it dancing but it was full body movements complete with shaking and jumping and it felt amazing. I kept going. I turned the volume up. Way up. Sweat dripped right off me and pooled on the floor. I beamed. A smile was plastered on my face for the rest of the day.
Every day this week, I’ve allowed myself to move in that way. No one is watching, Hilary, I tell myself and I just let it out. I can’t say I’ll be joining a dance troupe or even that I’ll feel more comfortable doing the freeze dance with the kids at school, but it’s a start.
When I moved north, I let go of a lot of ‘shoulds’. I should put my career first. I should follow a traditional route. I should prioritize making money. The list goes on. The move was a risk. There were many unknowns but, in those unknowns, I discovered a new version of myself. A version that is stronger than I expected, braver than I imagined possible, and absolutely loves this way of life.
Maybe the move north is a metaphor for my body’s movement? What felt like a risk became joy. To move my body in an uninhibited way. To set aside the fear of judgement or of ridicule. To just be. It’s hard to explain just how euphoric it felt to let out 33 years of trapped movement. It wasn’t just liberating or exciting or wonderful. It was an ah-ha moment. A full circle moment. A moment of realizing that growth can feel good.