Happy New Year!
This year I chose to avoid resolutions. This year I hope to be silly, be goofy, dance more, let go, let myself enjoy the moment, let go of the pressure and figure out exactly who I am. I am someone who tried to follow the “American Dream” thing and it ended up breaking me to my core. Getting a 9-5 and moving into my own place and getting pets did not give me the fulfillment I thought it would. To my horror I was languishing. Of course, the wake up call included finding something to bring more joy into my life because maybe if I could find a hobby I liked then I wouldn’t be such a cranky bitch.
One modality of joy, very close to my heart, is dance. I used to dance when I was younger. I danced at a competitive level for about 10 years of my life. For a few years after my dance career ended, I danced for fun, on and off. This was mostly done in my living room. I attended a few masterclasses, learned tutorials from YouTube and even went back and started relearning choreography from my dance career. I know what some of you may be thinking, “it must be easy for you to pick it up if you did it for that long.”
After gaining roughly 60 pounds and losing all stamina it was not as easy as I would’ve hoped. I still did it, terribly, in the back of the class, hiding my face in shame, remembering not to mention that I had any dance background. I knew the look up and down that people gave me after I mentioned I liked to dance. I perceived it as, “you? You used to dance? What the hell happened?” The body image shame was one of the major reasons I kept stopping.
Looking back, any time a stressful event or situation presented itself, the first thing I would do is stop dancing. Like a switch I turned dance off and eating on. I would start eating my feelings and eventually become a miserable mess. I kept trying to fill the void with food. I felt less and less like myself. I felt lethargic, I started losing friends, I was failing at life. At one point it had gotten so bad sitting in my own bed didn’t feel okay. I felt so utterly lost and empty. I had lost the joy.
It became second nature for my to paint a smile on my face and go out into the world. I was the goofball, constantly making jokes, usually at my own expense. As long as no one could actually see how miserable I was it would all work out right?
The fulfillment that I was so desperately looking for in my grades in college, my job title, my salary, romantic relationships, and friendships, was nowhere to be found. No matter how hard I tried it seemed I just couldn’t find that happiness, that I craved, anywhere. Nothing was necessarily wrong I just didn’t feel content with my life. I continued down a path of destruction because I was close to empty on the inside. I was filled with good intention and yet I was hurting people around me as well as myself.
Upon some reflection I realized, every single time I pick up dancing, whether it was dancing in my living room to my favorite songs or taking a class, dance seemed to give me a joy and fulfillment that nothing else could. As I took time to understand what this meant, I realized that fulfillment did not necessarily come from the dance form or the clothes or the music.
Most of that joy came from either nailing a routine that I had worked on for a while or letting loose and enjoying the moment. They both had to do with me as a person. It was honing my skill set, letting go of physically manifested stress, letting go of expectation and letting myself drift into another world. I wanted that feeling to be present in everyday life without having to dance constantly. Yes, I love dancing but I do not always have 30-60 minutes. How could I incorporate more joy into my life? That is what I spent the last year doing. Cultivating moments of joy and fulfillment every single day to feel, at least similarly, to how I felt when I was dancing.
This year I want more time for joy and pleasure. What the hell was the point of going to college, spending tons of money, getting a job and paying bills if I don’t actually ENJOY my life? Why was joy not higher on my list of priorities? Losing weight was up there, getting a promotion and a raise was up there, living in a fun town was up there, finding the man of my dreams was up there. Joy was not only left unacknowledged but it was put in the corner. As we all know, nobody puts baby in the corner. Let’s dance shall we?