Dancing and Demons

Most evenings, I love to have a puff, put on music, and dance my ass off for a while.  I hold one pound hand weights so that the activity feels sort of like a workout, but really, it's just the greatest fun.  (Lately I've been dancing to the Beatles, and discovering anew how talented those men were, even when they were still moving from bubble gum through pop to rock 'n' roll and beyond.)

When I'm dancing, I often get strong ideas for plays I'm writing, or sometimes I'll have a spontaneous insight about something, political or domestic or social, whatever.  Sometimes I lose myself in the music and movement and seem not to be thinking at all, but just being, a rare time of being in the moment.  When I'm dancing is when I'm happiest.

It's also usually when I'm saddest and most depressed, because these are often the times when I'm visited by the demons of insecurity, awareness, and loss.  I become aware of how much I'm aging, because I can feel every place in my body that hurts, feel how much weaker and less flexible I am than I used to be.  There is a photo collage of Mom in the living room that I see when I'm dancing, and missing Mom often hits me sharply and painfully.  I also miss my little girl cat Stachie, who used to be my audience when I first took up the dancing habit. She would glare at me for a while, waiting for me to sit so she could be in my lap, and then finally she would resign herself to my antics and curl up to nap until I came to my senses.

I will sometimes condemn myself as a worthless shit, and then feel even worse than that because I know that seeing how worthless I am will not inspire me to better myself, but is simply part of the cycle of the perpetuation of all that worthlessness.  I become starkly aware of the glowing promise and possibility of the plays I'm writing, and how far the actual quality of my writing falls from that promise.  I see all the places in my life where I let myself down, don't keep my word, make looking good more important than truth.

Through it all, I just keep dancing.  I know those demons will never disappear, so may as well dance.