Bad Dancing, and Other Things I Hope My Kids Will Understand About Feelings, But Will Likely Find Out the Hard Way

In high school, a boy told me I was an awful dancer.

I feel certain everyone has a physiological response to their feelings getting hurt. I hate it. Who doesn’t? The lump in the throat. The red hot flush creeping like a tide up our neck. We all know this feeling, right?  Personally, when my feelings get hurt or I’m wounded or humiliated, my whole body literally hurts. It wants to curl up into a ball. My chest feels like a heavy weight is pushing down on it. My fingers hurt. My toes hurt. I curl them up, like that will protect them. It never does.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about emotions, and I discovered not everyone’s hands hurt when they are sad (whaaat?). How interesting! In pondering this…. When meditating -which I don’t do nearly as often as I should- my hands usually rest on my knees, facing upward and open, chest high, deep breaths. If I really get in the zen zone (is that a thing? It should be a thing, yes?), it often feels like gold light and energy is coming in or going out of my palms and sometimes another beam, wrapping my heart in light.  One time recently, when feeling a personal gut punch from the outside world, I wondered if my hands hurt because perhaps, they are a portal to my inner shell. As though they curl in, attempting to keep negative, painful energy out. Like if my fingernails dig into my palms, the hurt won’t. Like a door is closed to the cold. My husband thinks I’m granola, but I’ve decided it’s my own specific current of energy. Also, I love granola.

I didn’t always realize what it was when I felt this. I just knew I felt both emotionally and physically in pain, and it was because of something I did or didn’t do. Usually that someone else pointed out. And we’ve all been there.

Back in our day, as my kids call the “1900’s” and the turn of the millennium, school dances were very boy/girl. And if, at said dances, you were dancing, it was what we eloquently referred to as grinding. I don’t know why the chaperones were so concerned about it, with a name that by definition refers to two things rubbing together quite hard. But it was totally cool, unlike dancing styles before us. For example, I remember Marly’s and my mom in the basketball bleachers during warmups one game, and Shout! came on, during which our parents started way too enthusiastically throwing their hands up to shout, kicking their heels up to shout, a little bit louder, you know the deal. We just about died.

So embarrassing, am I right? Obviously, the only socially acceptable way to dance was to a) not be a mom or a dad and b) either back your booty up into the dude behind you in the sexiest way possible, or face each other, legs between legs, basically dry humping in formal clothes or impossibly low-rise jeans and a sweet halter from American Eagle. It was a moment in time, folks. One that has fortunately passed. Footnote: Seriously. It’s passed. We recently went to a club during a rare  grown-ups weekend in DC, and were dancing to some of the sweet 00’s music like Yeah! that was coming on, and the married couples in our group started jubilantly matching up without thinking and dancing like we were raised to dance! Lova to lova. You know who else was doing that? Literally no one. All these young kids either don’t dance, or they have an entirely predetermined posh tik tok routine I suppose? They sure as heck don’t grind. I might as well have been my mom in the bleachers dancing to Shout. How the tables (/dance floors) turn.

Anyway, for dances back in the day, we also dressed up. None of these short sparkly cocktail Swiftie dresses with cool converse and tube socks. Nah, we had up do’s and long-ass gowns – most of the girls with a solid orange fake-tan topped with glitter, and clear or silver high heel sandals which we kicked off to dance. You’d dance with the guy who asked you, but if you were lucky, other hotties would grab your hand and lead you out to the crowded dance floor, where you’d set up said grinding situation around the other super hormonal teenagers thinking we were cool shit. (Spoiler alert: we were not, in fact, cool shit.)

I am very white. My dance moves are very white. Rhythm is rejected regularly by my body, like white blood cells attacking a virus and kicking it out. No place here for you, sorry!

But I still did my best to wiggle and move, to the windows *and* to the walls, getting down to Snoop, Biggie, and JLo. Third Eye Blind and the Spin Doctors. Mirah Carrey and Spice Girls and TLC. Blink 182, Lenny Kravitz, Nelly, and 50 Cent. Jay-Z and Britney and Eminem. Slow songs by Boys II Men and Nsync and other glorious boy bands. Crossing the room silently and very dramatically to your boyfriend or girlfriend when your song came on.

Anyway, while grinding and booty-dancing our little hearts out, a boyfriend, who was a bit of douche, laughed and said “You’re actually a pretty bad dancer.” Like, in the middle of a song, the middle of a dance. While I was smiling and grooving and feeling beautiful.

I went from feeling fantastic to wanting to crawl under one of those old crappy cafeteria chairs and hide until everyone left.

I remember. My fingers and toes hurt. The lump pushed all the tears up.  I felt two inches tall.

I really hated dancing for the rest of high school. I dreaded it every Homecoming and Prom and occasion for music where the hot girls got down, and I felt like an awkward giraffe bumbling beside them. I knew everyone else must think what that boy did. Someone had told me I was terrible and I believed it.

The thing is ….. honestly, I am pretty bad at dancing.

But when I was 17, I went to college, made friends with a bunch of fabulous nerds and hippies who had Zero interest in grinding, and I realized dancing is awesome. My mind was blown. We likely looked like the Charlie Brown bunch – some wiggling side to side, a few with a simple head bop, some with smooth moves, some bouncing like they were in a mosh pit. My free-spirited friend Brittany and I would twirl and hop around the room in our spinning thrift-store skirts. We danced to Springsteen’s Rosilita and Neil Diamond and Ray Charles and anything else someone pulled up on a mix CD or whatever was in at the time. My husband – who is a Hitch-side-to-side-only dancer – is used to my goofy yet joyful grooving that I never hold back now. He has never told me I suck at dancing.

All that to say…..my oldest is on the cusp of middle school. Where she will begin to unravel her own stories and lessons and experiences.

Dances aside, there’s a lot in life…. tragedies and heart aches and misunderstandings that hurt, even as an adult. I still feel it when my hands clench together and my heart hurts, and the world feels like it’s closing in. In real life, hard things happen all the time. Loved ones get cancer. Babies don’t survive. Good people lose their homes. The bad guys win. Friends change. Married couples split after decades. Those bumps still hurt deeply, and I’m still learning how to live with those.

I’m three years from 40, so I’m pretty sure I probably don’t know much.

But something I do know is that life is hard enough to waste time caring about looking stupid in the realm of joy. Dancing and beyond.

I hope my kids learn about hurt in ways gentle enough not to break them. That the things that feel huge as teenagers won’t always. That the ways you feel small as a young person disappear with newfound freedom when you grow up. That douchey-dudes aren’t worth your time or energy, and certainly not your self-worth. That it’s okay to experience those pains, because they prepare you to move through the big stuff. That you’ll have or find your people to hold you, no matter the significance of pain. That life and perspective and experiences will broaden, year after year after year.

I wish I could go back to 15-year-old me and tell her not to shrink back, not to feel less. To merrily give that guy the finger, and find her own place on the dance floor where she can rock out completely out of rhythm, however and with whomever she wants.  

To know that the chapters of life will turn constantly.  

That she will be a hundred different versions of herself with a hundred different scars and that’s okay.

I want my kids to know those things, so they won’t have to feel small or doubtful or less than. To avoid the pain.

But. [sigh]

I suppose….they’ll have to learn that themselves.

Damnit.

That’s going to hurt.