dancing with loss

on (literally) moving through pain

Window display (from a store I forget) in Montréal

I’ve been reminiscing as of late on the first time my family and I stayed at a hotel. This was a big moment for us — more noteworthy than the first time we went to the movies together. Having grown up in precarious living situations, one of the first trips I remember taking as a family was our visit to Niagara Falls. My dad had received a hefty discount from his place of work which was how we were able to pay for accommodation — and not just any accommodation, we were staying at a hotel of all places. This was a big deal.

We spent the day exploring the mayhem that is Clifton Hill (if you know, you know) and let mist spray our bodies while we stood next to rails occupying the best viewpoint of the falls, waiting for my dad to realize his camera wasn’t broken, he just had to turn it on.

Before setting back out on our explorations for the evening, my dad left to get more ice for our room from the machine in the hallway. My mother took this as an opportune time to put her Michael Jackson tape in the cassette player, turn up the volume, and begin to flail her hands and dance around our small shared space. She grabbed hold of my sister and I’s hands to join her. I laughed, embarrassed and curious about the movements my body assembled to synchronize itself with the music.

I remember my mom staring up at the ceiling. She spun around with her eyes shut, and arms out in the air. I ran over to grab hold of her legs, hoping to shock her out of her dream state, which I did. She burst out into laughter, and grabbed hold of my body, squeezing it closer to hers, swaying both of our hips back and forth, so that we could dance together.

When my dad came back into the room with a full ice bucket in hand, he took a moment to watch all of us celebrate how far we had come. My dad has never been one to display emotion, but I could almost swear I saw him wipe a tear from his eye as he stared out at us. When I look back at my childhood, this moment was one of the happiest shared memories my family and I had. Over time, however, it became more and more clear that I might have been the only one who held on to it.

My mom and I have always found healing and a middle ground through music and dance. In some of the tense or turbulent moments she and I shared, I would put a CD in the car player and we would sing and dance for the remainder of the ride to Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, Prince, or Tina Turner. When the drive was over, the tension had dissipated. Melody and movement diluted the volume of any anger, resentment, and frustration we held towards one another, bridging us back to some semblance of connection.

In my teens and early 20s, dance became a nighttime endeavour. It was an experience shared with vodka, depression, friends with unprocessed trauma, and typically anxiety over some guy who didn’t text me back in time.

“Let’s go dancing” or “We’ll just dance it out!” were suggestions tossed around anywhere between Thursday and Saturday night. Even then, before I began therapy, before any of us (myself and my friends) began to learn how to process the layers of pain we’d been carrying around with us and understand what tools we needed to heal, there was some deep knowing that movement — particularly dance — would, in fact, transform or release something inside of us. (I can’t say the same for vodka, though.)

I was 21 when I moved to Vancouver, and it was the first time I would be living alone. That studio apartment quickly became my sanctuary. Without roommates and the freedom to arrange plates in the order I wanted and place furniture in angles that didn’t make sense, it was the first time I also realized I could dance whenever I wanted, without interruption or fear that a roommate would come in my room unannounced, see me, and then I would have no choice but to either evaporate or hide in shame from them for the next seven years. Now I could dance freely, anytime I wanted.

So I did — until I got a boyfriend who liked to sleep in and my fluttering around was no longer an ideal morning ritual to preserve, mainly when he stayed over.

In 2020 during lockdown and the start of the pandemic, a close friend of mine passed away and a short while later, I decided to end the relationship I was in. I recall walking out of the grocery store, realizing that it had been the first time in a long while that I didn’t have my partner next to me to help carry the heavier bags of food. The weight of the bags coupled with the emptiness I felt from both of those great losses didn’t exactly even themselves out to create the balance I was desperately longing for.

I just need to get home and dance, I thought to myself. I placed a vinyl on my record player and pranced around my apartment, angrily, painfully, and hopingly for the remainder of the evening.

Last fall, I enrolled in beginner ballet lessons that I’ve since continued once a week.

I have no ballet experience. Truthfully I have no dance experience whatsoever, outside of the dancing I do around my apartment — if that even counts as anything. But there was something about ballet and taking lessons that lit me up. That made me feel beautiful despite going through a rather ugly experience, even though I am painfully bad at it. It was also 1) the first time I felt I could afford to do this, and 2) a way to carve out intentional space for dance, which has always brought me healing and connection.

On the phone with my friend a few days ago, I spoke to her about the heartbreak of a friendship lost that I’ve slowly and excruciatingly been moving through.

“Do you have any advice or a process for how to move through grief?” she asked me while in the midst of working through her own layers of it.

“I don’t know, I guess a lot of little things help.” I went over my laundry list, trying to identify whether there might in fact be some hidden healing potion that even I had been looking past. “Therapy helps, journaling helps, exercising and eating well and taking care of myself,” I went on. This isn’t helpful, I thought to myself. This is a Google search response.

I wish I knew if there was a thing — any one thing — that helped the most over the years as I worked to heal myself from these losses. I didn’t think to mention dance at the moment because it has felt so habitual at this point, that I nearly forgot I do it at all.

The next day, I wrote out a message I knew I had to send but that left me paralyzed, yet again, by the pain of it all. After staring out at a wall for half an hour (or maybe longer, who knows) and a fair chunk of time spent sobbing, I put my earphones on and danced until the rest of the pain left my body. And then I sat down here to write this because I was finally able to sit down and write this. Because movement and dance have helped me process enough to come here and finally make space for what I’m carrying.