“Sitting is Worse Than Dancing,” I Said

I danced.

I know every time I dance I can’t expect the world to lightly gasp and clasp their hands with the sort of quiet reverence we reserve for those taking their first steps after surgery in movies (something I’ll admit I’ve never once experienced in all the dozens on dozens on dozens of operations I’ve had, ‘cheaper by the decade’, no matter how speedy my steps become). Do I covet the Clasp & Gasp? Maybe. Apparently. It seems yes, I do.

I would often return to work and be dancing within weeks, a month, sometimes days of major things and I take my own self for granted more readily than anyone else. ‘What’s a girl got to do to be a Walk to Remember around here?’ would be a funny satire but I’m worried the playfulness of the fake jealousy thing I’m jotting down isn’t going to read so, let’s leave the “Is she joking or not?” as an unsung whisper at the end of ‘Lost In Translation’.

But I don’t expect you to be excited every time I “dance”.

I’m trying not to bend or twist much (hence the ‘draft’ of it all), but I DID feel like this was so much more than just my “second time trying to dance since all the fusions and pelvic cages and stuff”.

“Well,” I said, after my daughter’s boyfriend finished recording (the cameraman worth thanking for said footage), “That just gave me a couple more weeks’ reason to live”.

The second I said it: I regretted it. (Not enough to NOT lambast myself publicly, of course, as most writers and lyricists and J.Hos must do. We share. We wish we weren’t that way. But then we create things to share some more.) I shouldn’t have said it… but I definitely shouldn’t have meant it.

“Do I need to explain why I can barely sit but I’m dancing right now?” I asked him, knowing that if you don’t know-know me, it’s all rather odd. [How does one explain crying in the bath the night before because right angles are Beelzebub’s work, or that the pressure on my hip when driving that morning made me consider an Ethan Hunt tuck and roll.]

“Sitting is worse than dancing,” I said, not able to take back what I said earlier. I want to explain to anyone who will listen that feeling like myself can light the candle in my psyche. A darkness eating me alive for months. A freedom from my form so fleeting that it seems trivial, but SO necessary when you’re in pain all the time.

“I can feel it,” my daughter said after a playful combo made up by my stilted brain in a few minutes time- something, anything, to make us feel like “us” again. The first thing I’ve made since being frozen in time months ago (Why was THIS the thing? Cannot defend.)

“The drug?” I asked, knowing what she meant. The high of steps that always feel - at least to us - like a gateway to something more. Friends. Falling.

A match to strike against a cold hard surface.

“Yeah,” she said, her eyes slightly changing: “I haven’t danced in so long.”

It’s the start of a new week which means I’ll always start once by saying: THANK YOU to those kind enough to pay for my work at Catching Breaths.

(Okay, technically it’s Tuesday. Oops)

I do not look at this as a newsletter or a social media front, but rather, an unfolding memoir of essays to leave a breadcrumbs of legacy for my daughters and friends one day (including you!).

Thank you for reclaiming words for many of us, and supporting my hope for a “website” that I wish existed in the world to show that “success” can be defined even amid sickness, and that we can be chronically jacked up and still aim to make ‘meaning’.

I am fighting hard within myself to teach myself that work matters (as long as you also give a lot most of the time, because I’m never going to be able to change that viewpoint), and that we can be generous with our time AND (occasionally) also show ourselves as women that we are not expendable.

I know that $5 a month matters and should not be taken lightly: I will hustle every weekday with gratitude and honesty in my heart… and YOU are giving me the impalpable gift of feeling I have agency and accomplishment despite the fact I am mostly trapped at home right now. (Words can’t explain what that kind of sovranty and abrecation means)

And if you’re like me and do not have $5 to spare month to month, sharing someone’s words really DOES help.

If I can fight to stop underestimating my own worth, I can fight to show YOU the power in simply saying, “Hey, I really dig this broad’s moody paragraph” sometimes and sending a link or recommending a piece if you feel I’ve earned it.

To those who give, I thank you from the bottom of my verbose, bionic little heart.

Now, let’s live another week together, shall we?