Just Dance

I love to dance, always have.  As a little kid I was always dancing around the house, making up dance routines and performing for my parents, making my dad dance with me to a song I liked on the radio or at the end of a movie, jamming with my mom in the kitchen, etc.  When I reached high school I started going swing dancing every Tuesday night with a group of friends.  We went for close to five years and I got pretty good at it.  At my senior prom they had a swing dance competition and my boyfriend and I, who had been my main dance partner since I'd started dancing, ended up getting second place.  Once we broke up though, I found myself without a dance partner or a group to go dancing with.  I finally started going with one of my guy friends which was a blast, but eventually he had to quit due to other commitments on Tuesday nights.  So I stopped going for a while until I managed to convince a few of my girl friends to go out several times.  However, it was much harder to find any guy friends and if you don't have at least one guy friend along who will for sure dance with you or if you're not drop dead gorgeous, chances are you're going to be sitting on the sidelines for most of the night.  That fizzled out pretty quick and when they stopped wanting to go, I stopped going as well.

The last time I was dancing was when I took a ballroom dance class when I was at UNM.  Ballroom dance is something that I really discovered when my family started watching Dancing with the Stars and I fell in love with it.  The beauty, the grace, the elegance of some dances, the fun, the speed, the precision of others captivated me.  I wanted to be able to move like that, to put art into motion.  So when I had the opportunity to take the class, I was over the moon.  And it was a fantastic class.  Yes, I was the biggest girl there but I felt like I learned fast and I certainly wasn't being left behind by the skinny girls in the class, I was right up there with them and I was better than a number of them.  I was devastated when class ended because there was no more dance to look forward to.

For a while after class ended I tried to find people to go dancing with again, but had no luck, and as I gained weight I didn't want people to see me dancing so I stopped going.  I was ashamed of myself and anytime I went to a party or get together and there was dancing or a dance game, I was always left in a corner by myself.  No one asked me to dance and no one wanted to see me dance.  If I ever asked if I could join, most of the time it was, sure after this dance, and then after that dance was done it was, oh, wait let us just do this one more, on and on until I gave up.  So I would finally go home and play one of the dance games that I had for the Xbox and tell myself that I was just as good as those skinny girls who looked at me with such disgust whenever a few of the friendlier people occasionally pitied me enough to convince me to dance or convinced them to let me join one of the dances.  And I hated the fact that they pitied me, because that was so obviously what it was.  "Let her dance one time so we don't look like complete jerks and we can feel good about ourselves because we included her for five minutes."  Eventually I removed myself from that environment and stopped going out.  Which pretty much led me to where I am today, a social hermit who works for nine hours a day, goes home, and then repeats.  Its a very boring, rather lonely life occasionally interspersed with acting if I actually get a part in the play I auditioned for.

And then going on a year and a half ago, everything changed.  I met the people who are now my closest friends and we started hanging out together on a weekly basis as I've mentioned before.  And one of the things we eventually started doing on our hang out night was playing one of the dance games I have.  And it was so much fun.  We would dance for several hours, switching partners, dancing until we were lying on the ground gasping for breath.  And I had the time of my life.  Because they didn't judge me.  It didn't matter that I was twice the size of them, that I couldn't perform all the moves exactly because of my weight, and for the first time in years I felt free because I didn't have to be someone I wasn't.  They accepted me for who I was.  They saw me and they still loved me.  That was huge for me.  But while I was happy to spend those hours dancing around with them, there was no way I was going to be dancing in public because I was far too ashamed of myself and far too scared of what people would think and say if they ever saw me dancing.

Despite being asked a few times by one of my friends to go swing dancing on Tuesday nights, I simply can't bring myself to do it.  So instead I dance around my room, down the hall, in the kitchen.  Dancing is freedom.  When I'm dancing by myself, I can feel beautiful and if I get a bit out of breath, there's no one there to judge me.  Much as I like to put my feelings into words, to describe how I feel, dancing is expressing how I feel.  Fierce, sad, angry, happy, lonely.  Each has their own dance, their rhythm and feel.  And I love that.  I love that even though I probably don't look elegant or graceful, I can feel it.  But no one sees that, not even my parents really.  I honestly would probably freak if anyone ever saw me dancing around.

But then a couple days ago I found something amazing on YouTube.  I found a large woman who works for a radio station who posts videos of herself dancing, much like I dance myself.  And watching her was amazing, because she's not ashamed of herself.  She's a good dancer, she's got some moves, and I just enjoyed watching her.  You watch her dancing and she's smiling and having the time of her life.  And I think that is beautiful, she is beautiful.  And I was so proud of her, proud of this woman who doesn't let the world tell her what to do, who loves herself and dancing and shares that love.  And I was amazed at her strength and her bravery, because whether you believe it or not, it takes a huge amount of courage to do that because below the video was comment after comment insulting her, making fun of her, and abusing her.  And for me, I know if I had seen even one of those comments said about me, I would have broken down crying.  But this woman keeps posting the occasional video and I think that is the coolest thing.

But seeing those comments made me also realize how much I hate our society.  If it had been some skinny girl dancing, 99% of those comments would have been about what a great dancer she was, how sexy she was, etc.  But if a fat girl tries to do something like that, no matter how good she is, the insults come flying, telling you to go hide in the corner because you are disgusting and worthless.  And that makes me very angry, because how dare they judge someone based on their size.  So I admire this young woman because despite all the cruel things people post, she keeps filming and uploading those videos.  I wish more big girls would do this kind of thing, but I think like me, most are too scared of the backlash and judgment to even  really consider it.  So maybe I'm not going to start posting videos of me dancing on YouTube, but maybe, just maybe, I might consider going out dancing again.