The Emotionally Distressed Person’s Guide to Dancing Perfectly

1- Stand alone, in front of a mirror or a wall.

2- Play some music. It can be any kind- songs that fly in the face of your despair, or confirm it, or rage against it. It’s up to you.

3- Allow yourself to respond to the sound. It can start anywhere in your body, and it can be as small and subtle as you wish. The aim is not to think about what it looks like- it is to feel what it feels like.

4- Get tired. This can be from the dancing, or maybe from the exhausting weight of society’s expectations, or a fatiguing dissatisfaction with an identity you didn’t choose for yourself, or perhaps just the devastatingly draining effects of trying to do something Right.

5- Peer inside of yourself for a moment, and invite any and all neglected selves and emotions to arise. This may sound complex, but it isn’t. Chances are, such an emotion is calling for your attention right now, and you are reading this instead of listening to it. But it’s cool, I’m writing this guide for the same reason.

6- If you perceive your body as a vehicle, where would your engine be? Your torso, that’s right. Take that neglected self or emotion- it can be anything as old and specific as cant-find-mom-in-grocery-store to something as vague and lonely as no-one-understands-me or angry and urgent as I-FUCKING-HATE-MY-JOB. Place it into your torso fuel tank.

7- Combust that shit into kinetic energy- keep dancing, but, instead of the fuel being your desire to dance well, it is finally that lonely emotion or self’s chance to shine. If you are too tired to make the next move, let your anger/grief/madness make it for you. Express to the universe how real and loud and gigantic your emotions are by gesticulating wildly with the body it grew for you.

8- Let it all bleed together. Mix right with wrong, fun with suffering, fury and stillness, inside with outside. Playfully lean into uncertainty, and you will start to surprise yourself. Dance in that space.

9- Allow your endorphins to mix with the emotional release. Moonwalk through your despair. Twerk in the face of your sadness. Move like a wounded swan. Move like a skydiving bear. Move like its the 20’s and there was only ever one world war. Do it with, not despite your pain.

10- You are doing perfectly.