No one person is a human, just as a raindrop is not a storm.
I wish I could say I was losing touch with reality, but I’m afraid I’m seeing it clearly for the first time. Every step away feels like I get closer; like a dance with eternity I’ve done a thousand times, but still manage to only stumble my way through.
I wonder if I’m alone in my delusion, or if this type of folly can only be shared. All I can understand is that my relationship with my emotional self has been Sisyphusian. The pain of vulnerability and connection has felt too much for so long that I can only feel relief to have unburdened myself from doubt. I know myself – I know what I’m feeling. I’m so tired of shutting myself down to feel understood.
Maybe I am an agent of chaos in this world. Maybe every drop of my blood spilled to this point has created a trail, and others might be inspired to push through their suffering. Maybe I am meant to be an arsonist, and set ablaze any boundary unbecoming of our future.
But perhaps I am an artist.
——
When I was a young child, I used to attend the local “Boys and Girls Club” after school. There had been a dance for middle-school aged kids, and I had been incited by the prospect. I had a passion for music from a young age, and felt sensory bliss within waves of sound. The only thing I hadn’t been excited for was the social aspect.
Dancing had always been a foreign language to me. My mom had always been athletic, and would often dance to work out in the living room. I remember confiding in her my nervousness about the dance, and she gave me one of her rare parenting moments to teach me to dance. In retrospect, it feels now more like the dynamic between siblings with a large age gap; I say that because she spent the better part of the Madonna track explaining how good she was at dancing, and how all the boys loved her when she was young. It felt less like the encouragement a parent might give, and more like yet another way we were positioned to compete.
I tried following her movements, but felt stiff. The music felt natural to me, but my body felt like some sort of badly-strung marionette, bending and pulling in all the wrong ways. My hips were helpless, my balance off-center, and my arms frozen in a semi-defensive position. I did have swaying to the beat pretty solidly down, but aside from that, I was in trouble and I knew it.
The night of the dance came, and I joined my friend after school so her step-mom could drop us off after we were ready. When we arrived, the building looked like what I imagined a nightclub must look like; the basketball court had been completely redecorated, including a small DJ booth and accenting blue and magenta lighting. My friend and I went inside and spent the first several minutes as wallflowers, assessing the cultural standards of this new environment and hoping we would find a way to blend in. The crowd was a mix of classmates and strangers, which added to the excitement and apprehension.
As the music progressed, I started to feel a sense of confidence in myself. I wanted to be a part of the movement. I wanted to embrace expressing myself like other kids seemed to. When the song transitioned to one that had a familiar beat, I decided to take my chances and step forward onto the dance floor. With a moment of delay, my friend followed behind.
I only remember things in snapshots, which may be an unfortunate spoiler for how this plays out next. As I moved my body, I tried to coordinate some type of rhythm between my hips, my back, and my arms, while remaining largely rigid in the legs and face. I can confess that any sense of confidence projected was entirely false, but I did feel the fear of the crowd as soon as I began to dance. Within a few moments, I heard someone behind me start laughing, and turned in time to see a girl from my school. She was athletic, aggressive, and known as a “tomboy” in much the same way I was. She was already close to me, and had a big grin on her face as she made a lewd, mocking thrust against my leg. Behind her, the source of the laugh erupted again until it spread across the crowd. The girl continued to shove herself against me, mocking my stoic facial expression and exaggerated arm movements. I remember shoving her away and screaming:
“I’m going to fucking kill you for that!”
The laughter seemed to double, and before I could take the swing I so desperately felt I’d earned, an adult stepped forward and pulled me from the crowd and out of the gym.
In the hallway, the adult leaned over me and said, in a booming voice: “You’re done! We have a no tolerance policy for threats of violence.”
“But she—“ I started to plead above the bass of the music on the other side of the wall.
“There is no excuse for threatening to kill another child. You need to call your parents and go home, now, end of discussion.” She pointed a hand to the phone on the counter and ignored my protests. Eventually, I called my mom, asked her to come get me, and went to wait in the parking lot.
I remember screaming on the sidewalk while I waited in the dark. As badly as I wanted to cry the tears wouldn’t come, so instead I wailed in rage. Eventually, my mom pulled up in her car and picked me up, and we drove home in silence. I went to my room, closed my door, and told myself that I had made a terrible mistake. I had invited that mockery; I deserved it. I took my punishment eagerly, pulled myself under a blanket on my sheetless mattress and started at the dark creases of fabric draped over me.
I wished I could be dead.
Dead people get a lot better treatment than living ones. You can’t speak ill of the dead, you can’t judge them, they deserve your pity, no one deserves to die, blah blah blah. There is such a pedestal for dead children in America that we can’t even regulate the industries that propagate their slaughter. That night was not the first time I wished I could be dead, but it was a time where I embraced my responsibility as arbiter of my fate. Perhaps, I thought, perfect control of my own body and environment will reduce the instances in which I experience social humiliation, double standards, and subsequent isolation. Maybe that is a better option than becoming a corpse – some type of juvenile harm reduction.
I suppose it worked. I stopped dancing; I stopped trying to stand out. In time, I learned I could operate with more efficiency by reducing my overall vulnerability. I became meaner; I warned people proactively with a deimatic display so they knew to respect me before they could love me.
—
My birthday is this weekend. I think I want to dance again. Admittedly, I’m afraid to. I know I’m asking a lot of myself to try, but I have to believe that my movement will bring something exciting and spontaneous to my life. I want to reconnect; I feel like I finally have been. In resynchronizing, maybe I will find a piece inside myself that I have been missing.
After all, what else would I find?
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