15. Doing without thinking

Reflections on a reel dance

Hello from this side of the new year. I hope you had gentle holidays. Despite the title of this essay, I spent way too much time overthinking it, overdoing it, and then redoing it. I have been feeling blocked and uninspired the last few weeks, kind of lukewarm about everything I write. On these days, victory is just producing a thing anyway. Thanks as always for reading and being here.

A month ago, before the Omicron winter was truly upon us, I went reel dancing on a Saturday night. 

My roommate knows an elegant British couple who periodically rents out a lofted room in a gorgeous church in Brookline for the express purpose of dancing. They invite their family and friends, then allow those regulars to extend invites to plebs like me, which is how I came to find myself in a room bedecked with lanterns and candles, twirling around to the tune of Scottish folk music on a frigid December evening. 

I entered the room as an anxious guest. Someone took my coat, handed me a glass of champagne, and invited me into an effervescent community. These dancers knew the reels well, but they were gentle and generous with us newcomers. The steps that compose the reels are not complex; still, those of us dancing for the first time focused more on getting our bodies to designated spots on the floor rather than making any move look practiced, let alone embellished. We erred often, but then jumped back into the sequence and whirled away into the music.

Throughout the evening, I partnered with my sister, but by the reel’s design, I danced with everyone. Many times over, we set to, or greeted, our partners, then hooked arms and turned. We made figure eights: three dancers continuously braiding through each other’s paths, tracing infinite eights on the floor. Energy was bright and buoyant; we were lifted into the church’s rafters, a world above the terrible news that kept coursing somewhere far beneath our feet. 

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I do not come from a dancing family. I have never seen either of my parents dance, even in jest. I’ve always imagined they danced at their wedding, but then again, it’s also not so hard to imagine that the dancing part of the ceremony was simply elided. Maybe for them, for myself, for many people, we arrive at the decision not to dance out of fear of looking stupid. Of course, the more self-conscious we are, the stupider we look; failure to commit to the dance moves leaves us looking half-hearted, half-animated.

Avoiding dancing can also be a way of staying disconnected from one’s body. Dancing requires us to connect with our bodies on a visceral level: telling our limbs where to go and synchronizing our movements to the beat. When I’m already self-conscious, that corporeal, physical awareness is doubly uncomfortable. 

I remember when we started having dances in our high school auxiliary gym, decorated with streamers and string lights by the student council. Dim lighting did little to conceal my awkwardness, and I felt that somehow everyone else had learned how to move their bodies in a way that looked cool and sexy, and I had completely missed that part of my education. Had I been absent from school that day? (I never missed school.) Was it because I hadn’t watched music videos and American Idol? Because my mom hadn’t wanted me to listen to Britney Spears? Every girl in my grade seemed to know how to swivel her hips in a way that I genuinely believed my body could not imitate. So I avoided having to try. 

As a result, I never became a proficient dancer—something a former boyfriend pointed out, following with, “I mean, I still love you” (as if I thought for a second that my being a bad dancer would render me unworthy of love; reader, I have many anxieties but this is not one of them).

Over time, I’ve become less embarrassed of my own dancing. Sometimes a lack of embarrassment is aided by a substance—it’s easier to care less (and remain less connected to my body) in an altered state of consciousness—drunk or high, or just an exuberant mood will work in a pinch. It alleviates the awareness that I am doing the dance, because I feel less like myself and more like a looser, funner version of me. 

But I needed that altered state much less throughout my night of reel dancing. It was an exercise in quieting my brain and doing without thinking. The prescribed steps and the fact that we were all doing the same thing relieved some of the self-consciousness of not knowing how to move. Someone called each step of the dance sequence from the stage, but on the floor, if I listened to that call and then tried to execute it, I’d already missed the cue. Reel dancing required trust in my body to complete the next step—there wasn't time for thought.

The night of dancing was familiar and physical, the whole room jumping and spinning and sweating in synchrony. We were doing the dance. We are.