Every Dance

It is 10:30 at night, and the house is finally quiet. Not even the dogs are awake; they have a strict bedtime and stick to it like clockwork. It’s just me. I am a night owl.

You’ll find me tinkering around the house. Maybe I’m watching a tv show on my iPad, or I’m putting on a mask. On my days where everything feels off, I’ll be eating at this late hour because 7-9 PM was filled with exhaustion and defeat, and I lay unmoving in my bed for two hours until I found the energy to nourish myself.

Slowly, when I know everyone is asleep and all is still, I’ll change my clothes and go to the kitchen. My laptop sits on a granite counter. The volume is set to 50%. And I will dance.

I jump, kick, shake, and spin. My body moves and twirls as I do my best to imitate the tiny people on my screen. Sometimes, I don’t even look, and I do whatever my body says feels good. My heartbeat soars, and so does my spirit. One song ends, and I take a moment to catch my breath, before moving onto the next.

It took me so long to get to this point, where I could find joy in moving my body. Years of depression and chronic pain rendered me weak. My body held onto more weight than I liked, and though depression finally loosened its grip on my mind after eight years, it was quickly replaced with self-hatred for the body I now lived in.

I hated the roles and the lines that seemed to etch their way into my skin. I hated that I wasn’t petite and delicate, like so many of the other Asian women I know and love. I hated feeling uncomfortable in the skin I was given, so much so that shirts touching my stomach would make me feel anxious and nauseous. I wanted to be thin, to be delicate, to be beautiful, to be wanted.

I hated my body in a way I would never hate someone else’s. Cruel and venomous thoughts crawled into my mind as I stared at myself in the mirror. But somewhere, along that long and arduous path where I felt even more disconnected from myself than I had in the height of my depression, I began to discover ways to exist aside from focusing on this physical self.

In my experience with depression, I felt physically trapped inside my body. Some days, it felt like I was locked inside of a heavy and uncomfortable shell that I wanted to claw, rip, or bite off. Just breathing felt unbearable, and my dark thoughts clouded the way I saw the world and myself. As my depression lifted (it is still present, but has lessened in its severity), I gave myself permission to just exist. I timidly looked out on a world that seemed just a tiny bit brighter, a bit more hopeful than the hues of gray I had been locked into for a third of my life and tried to find reasons to continue living.

I decided that I wanted to travel extensively once it was safe to do so, and I knew that if I wanted to make the most of my time traveling, I would need to have better endurance. I started small: some squats here, some lunges there. I read a quote on Facebook or Instagram that boiled down to, 10% is more than 0%. Anything is better than something, and I began to apply that to movement. I had tried to lose weight in the past, and I had always plunged headfirst into miserable patterns that had me severely restricting food or exercising hardcore in ways that ended up hurting more than helping. But now, weight be damned, I did not care. This was the body I was stuck with, and I better make the most of it. I experimented with movement, and I listened to myself. If it hurt, I stopped. It was a minimal lifestyle change. Sometimes I would move, and sometimes I wouldn’t.

But something changed when I began to dance. Not just in my body, though my energy and stamina increased, and my body composition shifted. Dancing was fun. I didn’t need to be talented. After all, no one was watching me at midnight inside of my kitchen. My skills are lacking, but I make up for it with enthusiasm that finds me prancing around in ratty sweatpants and oversized t shirts almost every night.

My body has changed, but more importantly, I changed. Something about my terrible moves make me feel sexy and confident. I feel in touch with myself and what I need. I feel as though I am honoring my body with every move I make, a body that fought hard and fought long to carry me through my depression. When I dance, my mind quiets. I try my best to keep up, huffing and puffing through every chorus, and I am grounded within myself as I remember that I am not broken.

This body, that I have put through so much, has brought me so far. I have finally learned that caring for it is a gift, not a punishment. I have learned to trust that it knows its limits and its abilities. It can do so much more than I ever thought. And every minute I dance, I am reminded that its value lies in what it can do rather than how it appears.

Love is a choice. An action. And I found that when I made the choice to love myself, through movement, through boundaries, through the pursuit of healing, that love would eventually find its way into my heart.

To my body:

Thank you for all you have done for me. Thank you for keeping me alive when I did not want to live. Thank you for carrying me through hard times and good times. I will continue to care for you and honor you as a gift, rather than a burden.

Thank you.