Crying on the dance floor

I’ve signed up for dance classes. There was nothing cool about it. I, a 34-year-old white woman, saw an Instagram ad of some women dancing to Beyoncé in leggings and immediately bought a membership, showed up on a freezing night, and learned one minute of choreography to CUFF IT. I’m not, like, becoming a dancer. It’s not a cardio workout, or a “fitness journey.” We’re talking all-levels, do-your-best classes for adults. It’s an hour of staring at myself amid a crowd of women in a mirror, filling my brain with the full-out effort it takes to learn a mere 60 seconds of dance moves. 

Normally I cringe when people are like “therapy?! My dog/running addiction/girls night/wine is my therapy!” I think it goes without saying that only therapy is therapy. But I have to admit, there is something these dance classes shake loose in me that I simply have not found (yet) when talking to a psychiatric professional. 

The very first class I went to, after flinging myself about in service of Beyoncé for an hour, I walked out onto the dark sidewalk and promptly burst into tears. I had forgotten what it felt like to lose yourself in something like joy. It was like my body remembered something, or was capable of something, that my mind had locked out as a possibility — essentially, being carefree. Light. 

Dance class demands so much of my concentration in so many new ways that it effectively shuts off all the anxious, despairing, questioning, nit-picking voices that are usually blaring on my mind radio–but it’s more than that. It’s specifically something about moving and maybe specifically moving to music, to a choreography I didn’t invent. If anxiety and depression keep you stuck in a false reality where everything looks bleak no matter what and you’re all alone (you think), then there’s something about moving my real-life body that brings me back to reality, in its simplest form, and something about choreography that focuses my mind and body to a single point outside of myself.

I took (pretty casual) ballet classes in high school, at a local studio on Saturday mornings. I wasn’t harboring any dreams of performing or even getting very good, but the instructor had once said something that was intriguing enough to get me out of bed early on a weekend, for months after. She said, “When I come into class, it doesn’t matter what happened out there. Even if my boyfriend just broke up with me, I come in here and I’m just dancing for an hour. Nothing else matters.” (More recently, in an important update to this philosophy, one of the instructors at this new place—a true legend—told us “You got trauma, shake ass.”)

I’ve heard people say some version of that first thing over the years — that running “takes their mind off things,” or that they can lose themselves in beach volleyball or whatever— and it’s always been so hard for me to believe. Maybe some of that is brain chemistry — I do think some of us are just born with dopamine and serotonin deficiencies that are always going to make that a little harder for us than for others.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if it’s this: if part of me wants to believe my special pain is too complex to be overridden by mere endorphins or distraction. 

I think it’s interesting to me that at times I’ve been more embarrassed to tell people I’m taking dance classes than I have been to tell them about my grief and depression. As though the latter might suck, but at least they make me a serious person. 

A serious person!

Why would I want to be that?

I think life would be better if I could just be a clown, honestly. A clown on a spiritual level.

In that spirit — I, a clown (aspiring), went out of my way to email the dance studio and recommend that they teach choreo to this song, a profoundly unserious Kidz Bop sort of jam. Then when they did, I showed up at class and discovered that none of the other people there had even heard the song, and I was its only superfan.

I was almost too embarrassed to confess that I’d requested it, but then the class started and look – maybe you had to be there, but we were transformed. We did the silliest little choreography that included quite literally acting out lyrics (I’ve been training my whole life for this), and by the time we hit the big lead-up to the chorus, we were belly-laughing and leaping like buffoons. That’s the freedom of being a clown. A mere clown with one life and one body on this earth and a brain that’s just trying its best and the capacity to keep breathing. I’ll see where she leads me.