Dance Like No One's Looking

I woke up this morning feeling so bleh.

Do you know what I mean? No true rhyme or reason for it. A slight edge without actually being pissed at anyone or anything in particular. Just…bleh.

So naturally I thought to myself: caffeine. That should perk me up.

On my way to grab my morning Celsius, I took in the general state of my home and thought, Okay, maybe I need to tidy up. I’ve had a big purge on my brain for weeks now. Minimize some of this clutter, maybe it’ll help me minimize some of the clutter in my head too.

I reached for my headphones because I cannot possibly make my way through household chores without music. But when I finally landed on the perfect song, the chores never happened. It turned into a dance party instead.

And I realized that’s actually what I needed.

A private dance party in my living room.

Does anyone else do this?

Sure, regularly scheduled dance parties were a staple of adolescence. The cliché microphone hairbrush, the risqué dance moves in the mirror no one else would ever see. But as an adult, I genuinely wonder if I’m the only weirdo still fully giving myself over to music in this way.

My kids are used to it at this point and toggle back and forth between ignoring me or joining me. I’ll either hand them an earbud or switch the music over to my kitchen Echo. It doesn’t quite hit the same way or engulf the senses as readily as sound literally pouring into my ears, but hey, the things we do for our kids.

I hope I’m showing them how vital it is to continue letting your body sync up with music well into adulthood.

Fuck that polite foot tapping.

Really let your body enjoy the music as much as you’re feeling it internally.

I’ve noticed that in public settings people almost need permission from each other to truly let loose in this capacity, and I think that’s a shame.

My history with dance is kind of a fractured one.

As a kid, I yearned for proper dance classes my parents couldn’t afford and settled for making the middle school dance team in eighth grade. But I was incredibly self-conscious growing up, and my parents viewed school dances as opportunities to get into trouble. In all that time, I was allowed to attend exactly two: homecoming and prom.

I danced at neither.

Can you imagine? What a waste.

By the time I got to college, I leaned on alcohol to free up my body enough to dance in public, and that was great because, obviously, I’d been missing out on something all along.

Physically connecting with music offers another modality for cleansing the soul of all the bullshit and other bits of nonsense floating around inside our bodies.

My truest dance awakening, however, started with a girl, as most beautiful things do.

I had two kids when a granola-crunching, free-flowing hippie of a nanny came into my life to help me juggle it all. She was a beautiful young twenty-something who had experienced enough trauma to force her to grow up quickly.

You know how that goes.

She often offered nuggets of wisdom, though not necessarily through anything she said. Most of the time, our conversations made me feel like a typical mom talking to a much older daughter seeking guidance.

It was the way she carried herself. She was a bright shining light. She was love in great abundance. She was confidence that felt pure.

And she loved to dance.

She’d come over to watch my daughter, and we’d spend most of our time chit-chatting about life, love, music, and inevitably, a dance party would blossom from it.

She introduced me to this thing called ecstatic dance. I joked that it was a way for white people who couldn’t dance to do it without shame. Maybe there’s some truth to that.

And sure, ecstatic dance isn’t entirely my scene, but she showed me something important: it’s not enough to simply listen to and love music. You have to let your body connect, too.

I had already entered this chapter of life where I had very few fucks left to give. I was too busy trying to keep little humans alive to worry much about surrounding noise.

But closing your eyes and allowing yourself to embody the music—without substances, without a dance floor, without an audience—has proven to be another critical piece of the puzzle I’m continually assembling toward evolution and transcendence.

So fucking dance like no one’s looking.

Because the truth is, most people are so wrapped up in their own shit that no one actually is.

Let it be an exercise in becoming the most unabashed version of yourself.

Do it for you.

Let it flood your senses with light and love.

Then go spread that shit around.