Wednesday, 03 June 2009

• The "there's nothing wrong with me" dance

  Go ahead, ask me how I'm feeling...
  GREAT!
  That's right, I'm feeling great.
  Well, I'm sore, a little dehydrated, and I have a strange sharp splinter-like pain in my right big toe that actually was waking me up last night, but, I'm great, and here's why:
  
  Last night, at my dance class, I did my "There's Nothing Wrong With Me" dance.
  
  It was spectacular.
  
  Everyone thought so, but most importantly, I thought so.
  
  The instructor said something at one point in class about dancing our thoughts rather than thinking them, and I turned a corner right then. We were doing all sorts of exercises with partners to explore this. We talked about when someone doesn't want to dance with us, how does the rejection feel? Who is it about? And when it came time for us to dance in "chaos" (one of the five rhythms) I stumbled on the "there's nothing wrong with me" thought and committed to dancing to it.
  
  Wow.
  
  There was jumping and whirling and lots of energy and love and wow. It felt like flying.
  
  I was also able to think of not only my fat being filled with love while I was dancing, but everything that I had come to think of as being wrong with me as filled with love. This is going to sound really, really weird, but because as a kid I was teased, tormented, abused by my peers from kindergarten through 6th grade and the content of the teasing was based on the idea that I "smelled" -- I decided that I actually smelled of love. That the scent that I emit is the scent of love. Weird, I know, but very, very healing. If I had a time machine, and I could go back to kindergarten, I would turn around the very first time that I was made fun of, when a boy who thought he was being clever said "(my first name) smells" I would say, "yeah, I smell of love."*
  
  It might not change the outcome, but I would have at least have responded. In the moment, I froze, and from that point on, nothing I did, not ignoring or telling an adult or trying to stay home from school or wearing perfume or anything at all changed the outcome, not until the things changed on their own a bit in the 6th grade, and I went to a different school in 7th grade, and by then, the damage had been done. In combination with some very unhappy family stuff, and my personality, you find the wounded part of my soul I bare before you today.**
  
  There are many things I have thought over the years that might have made a difference***, and there were, thankfully, people who cherished me in those years that helped me through. I have tried to deny lasting effects of the teasing but right now, PhD Coachy is pushing me to explore this because I still have very big issues with trust, with acceptance and with fear. Oh, yeah, and anger, rage and fury.
  
  The thing is, in a way, it's true. My dog, when she smells me, smells love. (Her dad is the one who smells of love AND food.) My suddenly tall and gangly superhero princess smells love when she smells me. Much of the time, Mr. Rounded smells love when he smells me (although last night he also smelled anger because he was driving me crazy with some totally unreasonable expectations of miss princess and me.)
  
  So, the thing that I'm in my core the most afraid of, being teased or made fun of or rejected or ostracized -- so. totally. wrong.
  
  I'm going to keep doing my "There's Nothing Wrong With Me Dance" as often and as much as I can as I move through my day. The aches and pains I'm feeling today are a testament to the freedom I allowed by body last night.
  
  I hope you all can enjoy your dances, whatever they may be. And I hope you smell plenty of love today.
  
  * For the record, and for the part of me that is horrified that I'm disclosing this, I don't think I actually smelled bad as a kid. I think it was an experiment with alliteration that went horribly, horribly wrong.
  
  ** I'm discovering there are many other people out there similarly wounded and trying to hide it.
  
  *** Such as getting on top of a table at school and losing my shit and yelling "who wants a piece of me, fuckers" but, considering that my parents were teachers and pacifists and that I hated getting in any kind of trouble, that didn't seem like a viable option at the time, however effective it might have been.

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