warning to immediate family: the words below have to do with sex and sexuality.

i do a lot of it alone, in my apartment. ain’t no shame. hawksley workman sings,

dancing is about sexual confidence,
so shake up your stuff if you feel good enough to let the moment just hit you,
if the music befits you.

and man alive, sometimes it hits me and befits me, and i crank up my shitty computer speakers to whatever song of the month gives me the most getupandgo, makes my hips want to keep time with the bass line, makes my feet get all twinkle toed and my arms fly up and snap and clap and hold above my head for long beats, and i dance my fool self into oblivion in my little bachelor’s suite.

i have also often reveled in the dancing-power of some of my nearest and dearest, former and immediate. i have half-fallen in love on many a dance floor, my hips impossibly close, impossibly well-fitted to another’s. the music swollen and magnificent, the sound at just the right level for frenzy, the crowd all pounding together to some insatiable rhythm. i have also watched with ill-concealed disdain as other people sully the good name of dancing as an expression of something, good, pure, natural. those flailers, those jerkers, those that use any open space at a bar with music playing as a platform for their drunken, thrusting sexuality; off-time, no rhythm, no soul behind it, only mindless movement set to any innocuous timbre.

still, dance and let dance, i say.

because for me, my ability to dance—however well or shabbily i might do it, and whether alone in my apartment or out at a crowded bar—is in direct correlation to the state of the union in my brain chemicals. that is to say, when my serotonin is wonky, the levels askew, so my steps are unsure, my lifeblood depleted, my limbs heavy and marbleized in immobility, and the notion of dancing is utterly unfathomable.

depression is the ultimate mojo-killer. in my own personal black hole, i am ugly, unattractive, stupid, wasteful, irrelevant, incapable of positive contribution to anything and completely lacking in natural rhythm. even my gait seems forced or troubled, my feet can’t land normally, everything about me has changed, and the memory of myself as a competent, confident, dynamic mover-about-the-universe is a gap-toothed, straggling bit of fluff in my mind, and i can hardly remember her at all.

in these times, there is no dancing.
there is none of the hopefulness or joy, or the flaming raging joie de vivre necessary for dancing. for me there is a lot of sitting, a lot of thinking, a lot of eating and drinking, a lot of smoking, not a lot of sex, some writing, some walking, zero dancing. there is agonizing self-doubt, visceral physical pain, and an all-dwarfing blackness of sadness and fear and loss and insecurity. in those times i can barely breathe the words, dance.



but always, always, the chemicals right themselves again—stop dropping and rising against my will, stop churning and fiddling with my everyday. my eyes open up, truly open up, without the clammy film of the black hole. i can speak and be spoken to and enjoy the words again. i can walk down the street and thank the universe for all that is good and plenty and all that is dark and shadowy because the grim doubt is mostly gone.

and always the way i know that the cloud has rolled on past, that i have been returned to my real self again, is when i find myself alone in my apartment, cranking up those tinny little speakers, pointing my fingers and waggling my hips, strutting and spinning, until i am breathless from it. when not only can i dance with wild abandon and fluidity, also i can again imagine my hips against another’s hips, rolling in time to some hot preternatural rhythm.

it's a glorious time.