Dance Class

I’ve been joining a dance class online, and my feelings about it move like a sine wave. There is an in-person option, but I’ve been sticking to the online stream for now despite the people projected on the screen dancing about a mile away. I wanted to make sure I was good enough to join them.

So, for the first part of the wave: I found a local dance class! And then the drop: What if I’m not good anymore? And then the crest: I am so glad technology exists and can join from my living room. And the drop — I don’t remember any of these moves. Up and down. Up and down. I stopped trying to copy the steps and just moved around, doing my own thing because no one could see me. I felt horrible about myself because I was out of shape, and nothing felt familiar.

I sat on the living room floor and watched the tiny figures on the screen all twirling around, the choreography as muscle memory.

I was going to drop the idea, but I discovered that the head of the dance troupe posted the dance list earlier in the day. I could grab the songs, look up the dance steps on YouTube, and learn them before the session. That was the crest of the wave. The drop came when I went to learn the first dance and realized that while I picked up choreography pretty quickly as a teenager, it was a lot harder to remember the steps when my brain was half on the dance and half on the fact that I needed to make dinner, do work, schedule stuff for the twins. Or maybe I was better as a teen about compartmentalizing and not worrying about schoolwork until it was time to worry about schoolwork.

Baby steps: I decided to learn one dance. One set of choreography per week. Not to push myself to learn more even if I had the time because one dance was sustainable. The class is off this week, so we’ll see if my new plan works next week. Who knows — maybe I’ll feel confident enough to go in person soon.