5 hours ago
2
I am in my early 30s and happily married with two young children. I have never been an amazing dancer. It has always been painfully awkward. I feel mortified whenever there’s a requirement to dance, even if it’s as silly as when the grownups join in during a kid’s party! I’ve had strangers offer well-intentioned help; people try to teach me to dance while on the dancefloor (clearly they decided I needed help). I’ve had a friend comment that my dancing is “cute” and strangers mock my dancing by mimicking it in front of me.
When I was in my 20s, I made up for this in the only way I knew how – by drinking a lot and losing all inhibition. I loved letting go and just losing myself on the dancefloor, enjoying the music and not caring what people thought. I’m now at a stage in my life where I’ve got young kids, I work a million hours a week in an intense job and I like making the most of my weekends with my family, so getting extremely drunk to enjoy a night of dancing isn’t an option. Even when the option has presented itself, I feel so saddled emotionally with responsibility and physically with my larger, squidgier mum body that I just avoid dancing altogether.
I would love to be able to get up there and enjoy the music with my friends, but how?
Eleanor says: I’m so serious about this: do it in the dark.
I went to a dance night in the dark close to 10 years ago, intending to just oblige the person who took me, but smash cut to me an hour later looking like I’d walked through a car wash, drenched in sweat, beaming. Since then it’s the silliest, most fun thing I do on a regular basis and I’m now the person who drags others. “You’ll feel like a nincompoop for the first three songs but by the last one you’ll think ‘It’s over already?!’” and they always do.
Obviously the darkness means nobody else is watching. That frees up a lot of people. You can try stuff or change your mind without having any effect on anyone. Maybe this is a pogo dance kind of song. Maybe I’m sexy now. I wonder if I can do that thing – never mind. Nobody can tell.
But it’s also that you’re not watching yourself. In the dark you feel a bit like you recede until you’re just a pair of eyes, and the only feedback you get from your body is how it feels instead of how it looks.
We’re so used to seeing our bodies in a limited set of roles. Is it attractive, is it physically fit, can it perform the tasks I need it to? Even when you’re dancing in front of people, you’re evaluating it. But there’s a whole spectrum of physical fun out there we don’t play around in much as adults. Never mind successful dancing, I mean just fun – reminding yourself that you can be silly and big and spontaneous and energetic the way kids are.
Feelings often follow behaviour, not the other way around. It might be that asking yourself to stand up and dance at a wedding is asking to take too many big leaps at once. You have to put together the physical coordination with the past feelings of embarrassment and the present ambivalence towards your body and it winds up like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time.
It might be useful to do one bit at a time. “Restore a sense of fun in my body” is one thing you can accomplish by dancing in the dark, even if it’s by yourself, even if it’s in your bathroom with the headphones up loud. Once physical fun and looseness stops feeling silly or impossible, then you could think about what might make it fun to do with other people or with the lights on. There will be halfway transition points (just goof and lip-sync on the dancefloor with someone you like? Request and then dance to songs with pre-made dances such as the Macarena?). Trying to change one thing at a time might help change the whole package over time.
You’re not too awkward or too sober or too “mum” to get to enjoy this part of life. Trust Deee-Lite on this one: groove is in the heart.
