Dancing into 27

(and maybe sometimes crying)

There are many things.

One is that it’s the second last day of this calendar year, and so a new year is upon us, but also that the new year must actually begin with Spring, like Navroz, or when the Sun enters Aries. This does make more sense to me, because reflecting on the end of the year and making plans that don’t make much sense for the one ahead in the middle of winter while barely staying afloat in the sensory stimulation brought on by everyone you know getting married at the same time just feels like a recipe for ungrounded confusion.

It’s also my birthday on the 3rd. So it really is a new year for me personally. That’s one of the other things.

One of my closest friends got married a few days ago. I was unsure at first how I felt about going into it, because I knew it would mean a lot of socializing and being thrown off my usual center, but once it kicked off with dance practices and hanging out and getting myself ready for something everyday, I started to have so much fun. I knew from the first practice that I’d miss it when it was over.

I also think I yearn for connection. So when I connect with somebody who’s only around for a short time, or maybe I am that person, I feel deeply sad very soon after we part, or after the connection feels like a memory you aren’t even sure happened at all. There were a few people like that this season, from different places on Earth, people it felt like I've known for a long time. So the day after it was all over, for reasons I can’t properly articulate, I felt a deep sadness. Like I very quickly started to come down from a high high.

But the high high wasn’t all high either. I got sick right in the middle of all the activity, unsurprisingly, and I pushed through and sprinted my way through self-care rituals, making myself pots of ginger tea and taking the vitamin C and steaming and taking the Chinese throat medicine my friend’s father gave me in the cutest tiny bottle. I still don’t have much of a voice.

I’m thinking about the things that cause me some kind of pain, and wondering why it is that they do that. What part of me feels a pang from a fleeting connection, from the slow and gradual loss of a friend or the momentness of a conversation, from the things that trigger me back into a past self that felt like my life wasn’t enough just as it was, as it is. I woke up the morning after a lot of dancing having forgotten who I am. So I went through my own Instagram to remember.

It took another day for me to start remembering. The yoga has returned to my mornings, and the mess that had become my bedroom has begun to demand sorting. These things brought me back. I went through the videos I took during the week, I started writing this, I did some journal reflections. I wonder if I went back too soon, if I couldn’t just dwell in the clouds for a little while. Perhaps it was because really I just felt cloudy and in need of clearing, and perhaps even grief-stricken for reasons I do not know.

That’s another thing I learned this year, or at least grew accustomed to practicing. Which has been feeling my feelings without a need for why. I’m able to acknowledge, with some difficulty, but still accepting a feeling that I may not necessarily feel too proud about feeling - because I’m supposed to be over it, because it’s not that big of a deal, because they don’t matter enough to make me feel so sad, because this or because that. The point is that it is. So there’s a growing inner kindness there that I’m happy to keep inviting in.

Last year on the 31st of December, I received a letter from myself via email from the year before. I wrote myself another that day which I should be receiving soon. I know I wasn’t in a good emotional place then in many ways, and I made it known to my future self, my now self, but I also offered hope and wishes that weren’t as outcome-oriented as I may have done previously. I wonder exactly what it says. But I also know what I have moved through and that I’m not the same and that’s about enough.

I’m turning 27 in a few days and I’m less afraid and more excited to be getting older. I’m committed to taking good care of my inner world, and I trust myself to find my compass when I’ve lost it, and all I know is that everything is always changing. It’s tragic and heartbreaking and it is also gorgeous and fantastic and wonderful. And so we keep moving, and fumbling, and another thing I started doing more of this year: dancing.