A Dance of Hesitancy
The space between no longer and not yet isn't waiting, it's living.
Maybe it was sixth or seventh grade, but it was definitely my first Junior High School dance and I was terrified. Wooden chairs were situated around the perimeter of the gym. Girls were sitting in them. Boys were standing in groups milling about the floor. Teachers were encouraging all of us to pair up and dance. Yeah, right.
I wanted to dance, but no one else was and back then I wasn’t confident enough to dance on my own nor had I acquired the vocabulary yet to just say “Fuck it” and do what I really wanted and not care what others thought. My self-confidence grew towards the end of my Sophomore year of high school and then a few years later, I learned how well-timed swear words could be delivered like a gut punch, and then a few years after that, dance became more than just the weekly three hour sweat-fest until 2am on a Thursday night at The Lotus in downtown Portland, Oregon.
In 1999, dance became my medicine.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the early 80’s and that awkward dance for a moment…
As soon as the music took a turn toward slower beats, the boys made their moves. I don’t know if this was the song (click on the link if you want to time-travel forty years ago 😊) I was dancing to, but it’s always remained a sappy personal favorite of mine.
Back then, we girls waited for the boys to ask us to dance. We didn’t ask them and we didn’t dance amongst ourselves yet. We just sat on those ass-numbing chairs until some pimply-faced boy either had the bravado or found enough courage to come over and ask one of us to dance. We waited until we were chosen.
Let me say that differently. Let me own it. I waited until I was chosen.
I hesitated to act on my desire to dance not only because I worried I’d be seen as weird or uncool dancing by myself (which was the equivalent to DEATH in Junior High School, right?), but I also worried if I were to choose someone to dance with me and he said no, that rejection would also feel like DEATH so…I waited.
When it came to dance and it came to boys, I hesitated because I allowed my own doubts to diminish my desire for what I really wanted. This dance of hesitancy radically changed when I was in college (1989) and changed again when I first discovered ecstatic dance/conscious movement ten years later.
When have you experienced a dance of hesitancy in your own life? When has your desires and doubts about something kept you in an in-between place?
Fast forward a few decades of dancing and several years of deeply grieving…
Some days I have felt like I’m back in Junior High School - sitting on the sidelines, waiting to be chosen, wishing the dance I wasn’t having would just have me disappear. The space between no longer and not yet, this in-between place, has been a dance of many things and hesitancy has been one of them. I’ve wondered and also worried about who is going to show up now on the dance floor, now that I’m no longer a wife, a facilitator, a business owner, and the woman I used to be. And if I’m not yet the writer, the alchemist, the grief-tender, the woman I know I am becoming, who am I now?
I want to remember that ‘Note to Self’ at the beginning of this essay whenever doubts about my desires and new dreams come rumbling through my head.
I am not waiting for the next part of my life to begin. I am living this part.
Nowadays, girls ask boys to dance, yet so many of us are still waiting to do what we really want, waiting to speak our truths, waiting to step back onto the dance floor of life after being knocked down. Maybe a dance of hesitancy isn’t one of waiting, but one where we’re living into the next thing that finds us.
I’m dancing/living into the next thing that has found me while I’m still making room for grief and grace. I look forward to sharing more about what that next thing is here soon.
If you are in that space between no longer and not yet, how are you dancing with it? I’d love to hear.
A tune from the early 90’s that speaks to the space that is always present between no longer and not yet.
Ohhh geez, as always you speak my language. All of them. From Journey to Jones to that junior high gym. I’m only a few years behind you.
I’m absolutely in this place right now. But I am the control freak about it. Since I am not yet *There,* I race around trying to prevent and plan against the occurrence of all the horrible ways things could go sideways. I scramble to prevent the worst possible futures, and make battle plans just in case they come down the pipe. Then I can quickly pull the trigger and blow the pre-laid charges with calm and determination, instead of freaking out because I don’t know what to do. I mean, the plans WILL have monkey wrenches already--duh, I’m still breathing. So having thought through options for as many scenarios as possible gives me a wider range of solutions and stronger problem solving muscles for when I need to dance on the fly.
And if the good stuff comes instead? Well, cool. This is the only thing I’ve found that gets me able to actually LIVE in this in between moment of not knowing. Ticking the boxes and laying out fire escape plans, running drills, and after that...
Chill. Play. Relax. Enjoy what I can. And enjoy the work of that curiosity and exploration you’re talking about. Because Anxious Monkey Brain has been calmed and thrown its puzzle to solve in the background, leaving me to be Curious George in the driver’s seat. 🙈🙉🙊
Of course, I was also that Weirdo who danced my soul out on an empty gym floor because I had one weirdo friend to do it with me--to stand together against the gale of everybody gawking and ridiculing (but a bunch of them secretly wishing they had the guts to dance with us).
I was also that Intrepid Idjit who asked boys to dance--sometimes ignorantly in written girlie scrawls, which got my lurve-letters posted for the whole school to ridicule. And yes. It felt like Death every time. Good thing I’m highly feline. Hmmmm...maybe this is why I write about living half my life in the Underworld with Haides & Persephone. 🤣☠️🌸🤪
I love that you dance the In Between now. You always remind me to set down the graphs, charts, spreadsheets, cauldrons of boiling oil, catapult stones and dynamite fuses to just...
DANCE.
All it takes is one brave friend to go out on that empty gym floor with you. Thank you for requesting the tunes of our age from the DJ, and braving this Dance.
The liminal space… I know it well.
It is a dance that feels like two steps forward, one step back. Funny tho’ if you add a couple extra steps it can become the cha cha cha🤗