Alopecia

In my last post, I referenced that I had been going through some minor health issues, and that they were clearing up.

Well, it’s not really, and I’m finally ready to tell the story. Four months ago, just as I was gearing up for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival and a week or so before Davin and I got engaged, I noticed a small bald spot on the top of my head. But I was preoccupied with the Fringe and didn’t really take time to notice that it was weird that there was a bald spot on top of my head. Then the next weekend Davin proposed and that further took my mind off it (even though I did feel sad a little that I was getting engaged with this gross bald spot. It was about an inch behind my hairline, so it was definitely visible with my hair down. But it was small enough to be easily hid with a braid.)

A week or so after the Fringe, I noticed the bald spot had grown and started worrying about it. One morning, I was so worried about it that I forgot my entire purse inside my house and was locked out of work, so I decided it was time to go to the doctor. I did, and he told me I had ringworm, which was rare for an adult, and that I should take some medicine and it would all go away.

Three weeks later, it was worse. Much worse. The bald spot had opened up an inch of the front of my hairline and extended about three inches back from my face. I felt hideous. I called the doctor, and he realized he’d given me the pediatric dose of the medicine, prescribed me the proper dose, and assured me that I would have new growth in 4-6 weeks.

Six weeks later, it was not only worse, but I also had five new bald spots. So I called a dermatologist and went to see her. This was about three weeks ago. When I started telling her the story, she looked at me like “What kind of idiot told you you have ringworm?” And she said that it isn’t ringworm, it’s Alopecia Areata, which is an autoimmune disorder whose only physical symptom is hair loss. She gave me some steroid shots in the big one on top, and said that they should help, but that even if my hair grows back, it could fall out again at any point in the future. Maybe even all of it.

It is growing back a little, but not a lot. And I’m worried. I now have the eight big spots as well as a bunch of tiny ones, bringing the grand total number of spots to 22.

I’m worried that I’m going to end up bald, and that I’ll either have to be bald forever or wear a wig. I’m worried that I’ll be hideous or bald at my wedding. I’m worried that if I have to wear a wig, it will fall off all the time while I’m dancing. And I’m sad. And scared.

Ya’ll have probably gathered by this point that I LOVE my hair. I grew it out so long that it reached my tailbone and I made a dance for it. So losing it has definitely been difficult, to say the least. I’m kind of obsessive about it, and it doesn’t help that I could lose all of it in two weeks or have it grow back and never have another bald spot again. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to prepare myself for the potentials of it.

Thinking of Sif has helped. She had beautiful hair and lost it all, and knows what it’s like to lose precious hair. On the other hand, she got new hair that grew of gold, and the best I’ll get is a really nice wig, but there is still comfort in her.

So anyway, that’s what’s been going on in my life. It sucks.

And here it is, the dance that may turn out to be the funeral for my hair. The piece is called Runoff, and was a section of a larger work I choreographed called “The Water Cycle.”

On Dance, Story, Myth, and Humanity

The dances I make have a more than usual emphasis on story. Dance is a directly human art form; it is body language ritualized. But modern and postmodern dance have become so interested in exploring the possibilities of the body, in abstracted movement, that audiences today are often left after shows feeling as if they’ve missed something. There is little worse than leaving a show and feeling like you’ve missed the point.

There is, of course, a lot of value to a choreographer in these abstract studies. The problem, I think, is that many choreographers these days fail to bring their human subject matter full circle–they fail to make the humanity in their dances apparent. Humans experience the world through story, and our nonverbal communication should be furthering the plot. Or the character development. Or at least the descriptions of the setting.

Our culture lacks a Unified Mythic Story. I am sure that most pagans will agree. And all the conflicting mythic stories aren’t getting along. They’re fracturing into fundamentalisms–some religions take their mythic stories so seriously that they lose track of the truth, and some atheisms take their truth so seriously they lose the story. And they’re shouting out loud over all the people who want to see the story in the truth, or who want to learn the truth by learning the story.

If you want to know about a person, you ask them or someone else for their story. So why, in trying to learn about humanity or about the planet or the universe are we asking for objective facts and not for the story? It’s basically impossible to learn any kind of meaning out of dry objective facts just on their own, but make them a story, and suddenly you’ll never forget.

During the late seventies, as the modern dance movement shifted into the post-modern, choeographers became suddenly interested in exploring the body as an object.

Personally, I take retroactive offense. The human body as dancer is not an object to be explored, it is a whole universe of stories to tell. Find a new shape or movement that the human body can make, and there you are finding the climax to an undiscovered story.

All stories are mythic stories. All stories tell something about the universe. And I want my dances to teach people the story of the universe. I want my dances to help people hear the world as I hear it, not as human bodies moving through an inanimate space, but as stories weaving in and out of bodies and minds and spaces and matter and thought. I want to give a mini-mythology to parts of the “inanimate” world by telling its story through dance.

The last dance I made was the story of The Water Cycle. I told the story of the clouds floating awkwardly in the sky, becoming Santas riding T-Rexes and toasters making popcorn and people who turn into fish. I told the story of the rain, writing a lonely letter to the lonely people of the world, the sky crying. I told the story of the water in runoff that hides its clear blue surface in the mud and flows relentlessly downward. I told the story of a lake holding a woman’s history and reflecting it back to another woman. And I told the story of evaporation, of molecules dancing with one another back and forth between liquid and gas as they rise to return to the clouds.

These are the stories the Water Cycle has to tell me. They are far from the only stories the Water Cycle has to tell. It also tells of snowfalls so serene and beautiful on a winter’s day, of hail that destroys homes, of glaciers that move an inch a year, or that melt despairingly in the growing heat of the Earth. The world is made of water. It’s also made of stories.

 

Out of Darkness into Light

There is a snippet of writing about Freyja that I have seen in various places around the internet. It is attributed to Idunna magazine, though I unfortunately have been unable to find the name of its actual author. This writing is a bit about what it’s like to live a life full of Freyja, and I have always found that it resonates deeply with me and my experiences of her.

“She is the core of fire at the center of my being. She is the storm that washes over me in sleep. She is the heart of the dream. She is the lover of my soul. She is darkness unspeakable and light beyond bearing…I am moved into places of resistance I do not understand and then into the twin-flames of pain and transformation. She does not ask me for my leave. It is as though the world shifts around me and I find I once more face the burning. Yet she brings an unfathomable beauty to my days. She pours out joy like mead. Peace flows through my heart like water. I would never willingly be parted from her.”

These past few months–the world shifted and I faced the burning. But yesterday, I came out the other side. The sun came up and sparkled on the remnants of our unseasonable October snowstorm. And again, the joy! The joy that I could not know were it not for the burning.

Things have changed for me these past few months. I burned away some things I needed, new ties have been formed, and old ties have been strengthened.

I left my job. It has been filling me with so much negativity for the past few months that I have been unable to approach my altar. I could not face Freyja and her love of joy when I was so angry and resentful that all I could do was talk about how angry and resentful I was. And just when I couldn’t stand the resentment anymore, the first bucket of water on the fires: I got a new job out of the strangest coincidence. My sister walked past a building we walk past all the time, and the owner asked if she knew anyone he could hire to be his secretary. They hired me a couple days later. It’s not my dream job, sure. But there’s no resentment, either. I go in and I do what I’m paid to do, and I come home to my family and my life and my love of life.

The world shifted around my health as well. I’ve been having a health problem the past few months. Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious at all, but it did make some temporary aesthetic issues. And theses aesthetic issues have been killing me. As much as I hate to admit it, a very large part of my self-identity is wrapped up in my appearance, and all of a sudden I felt hideous and disgusting. Kassandra and Davin kept assuring me that it would be alright. The problem got far worse than it should have because my doctor accidentally prescribed me a pediatric dosage for my medicine, and only a week ago when I couldn’t stand to be hideous anymore and called to ask and plead with him about how it wasn’t working, he called in the right prescription. I could not face Freyja because all I could do was sob hopelessly about my appearance and how I was sure I’d be hideous forever and ever. I have not been to a single dance class in a month and a half because I am too embarrassed that people will see. I am now seeing improvement on the proper dose of my medicine, and I’ve moved on and remembered how to take joy in my body, even when it isn’t perfect. I’m sure I’ll have another freakout or two as it continues to heal, of course. But I’m working on it.

The third major part of the burning has been the engagement. Let’s begin by noting that my family has far more than its share of drama and people who won’t speak to each other. I was terrified that my wedding would be ruined by everyone hating each other. But everyone in the family is offering to pitch in and help, and I got the nicest card with so many signatures that I just felt bathed in familial love as I never have before. I thought this engagement would weaken my familial bonds, but it has only strengthened them. Sure there will be drama in the next year as we continue to plan, but I am reminded that my family, too, has been through fires together, and come out strengthened like steel.

Davin and I had this conversation about my family yesterday afternoon, and the talk of going through fires reminded me of Freyja and how dearly I’ve missed her. My fear and anger and resentment and self-loathing have kept me so afraid to face my own shadows by sitting down to talk to her. So last night, I finished moving my altars.

Since we moved into our house a year ago, my altars have been in a temple in the basement under the stairs. It seemed a convenient place to put them. It was out of the way and easy to hide should I need to. But the easiness to hide it translated into making it easy to ignore that part of myself. My experience with paganism has taught me nothing if not that symbols have power, even unintended symbols. Having my altars in the room under the stairs, a room with no windows, no outlets, and no natural light of any kind meant to me symbolically that my religion was something to be hidden, something that would cause disaster if uncovered. And I’ve slowly pulled away. It was so easy not to go down the basement stairs into the darkness, to push my spirituality aside and just go about my day. But my body is my temple, and my temple in the basement was built to feed my spirit. My spirit darkened while my temple was darkened. I did not tend to it with light or time, and I became angry and resentful and self-loathing.

So I finished bringing my temple up into the light. Davin had an office in the brightest room in the house, but never used it because he had too many things for the small space. So he’s taken the little room under the basement stairs and my temple has been moved into the brightest room in the house. I set up my altars and I blessed the room and I sat down and I talked to Freyja about everything I’ve been going through. By letting the sun shine into my temple, it shone into me. I was able to look at the shadows that have been burning inside me for the past few months and face them. They are not gone, but I can identify them now. And then I came downstairs and had a drawing of a flower from a friend in my email box, sent while I was pouring my heart out to Freyja.

And Freyja’s Halloween gift–she poured out joy like mead and today, peace flows through my heart like water.

I would never willingly be parted from her.

How to Watch a Modern Dance Concert

Today I am building a new temple in my house. I haven’t had one since Hurricane Irene due to basement flooding/mold issues. My fiance has an office in our house that he basically uses as a storage room, so we’ve decided to put all that stuff in the basement where storage belongs so I can use the room for a temple. I’ve been getting cranky not having one. So hopefully soon I will have new altar pictures to share and maybe some insights about moving my temple from a dark and hidden basement to the room in the house that probably has the most natural light, but no heat.

In the meantime, enjoy this hilarious educational video about modern dance.

More good news

I got that other job. Which means that in the last few weeks, I’ve shed a toxic work environment, gotten a new fiance, had an awesome performance, gotten to visit with my parents, and gotten a new job. Yay!

Busy, busy, busy on getting a new life

Sorry I haven’t been posting. I’ve been altogether busy building a new life for myself. Sort of on accident really.

First off, I’m trying to get a new job because the one I have right now is making me miserable. I had a really interesting interview at the Library that didn’t pan out so I’m still looking. I have an interview for another one tomorrow that will work out, fingers crossed. Especially since my boss told me today that she wants me to pick an end date of my employment because I’m miserable.

So, moving on from the depressing part into the happy part, of which there is VERY much. My show went up in the Philly Fringe, and everyone loved it. We sold out both of our performances. My parents came up to visit. Everyone I talked to said that it made them feel really strongly and that it clearly conveyed something.

Now that it’s autumn, I’m starting to get back into the swing of the religious stuff. It’s fallen away a bit lately due to all the stress of doing the show and having my parents come to visit, but it’s coming back.

And in the best news of all, Davin and I got engaged a few weeks ago!! I’m extremely excited about it, and now we’re planning an awesome forest wedding in the round! It’s going to be next October. And he picked out the most beautiful ring ever, and I love it.

So now that the show is over and I have a smidge of free time again, I will attempt to get back to making posts of substance. Until then, I’m off creating a brand new life for myself with my fiance, my sister, and hopefully a new job.

On Facing Myself

I realize I haven’t been posting much. It’s just…I’ve been afraid.

I’m currently in the middle of looking for a new job. I need one, badly. I’m barely making ends meet and it seems every day my boss has a new way of aggravating me. But, of course, as everyone says, with the economy the way it is…

So far I’ve had two phone interviews, but that’s it. A lot of emails trying to scam me.

I haven’t had anything to post here because I’m being bad, I’m being afraid of myself. I haven’t gone down to my little basement temple in months now because I know that if I go there, I’m going to have to face all these fears that are building up about myself–what if I have no future at all? What if the economy crumbles and I can never make a decent living and can’t pay off my student loans? How could I have made the stupid financial decision of getting a degree in dance? Have I ruined my life?

You know, stuff like that. It’s hard, too, because all the other young people I know (except my sister, her boyfriend, and my boyfriend) are having these problems. The kinds of jobs young recent college graduates usually get are easy to replace with unpaid interns, or to get rid of altogether. And we’re on uneasy footing, just figuring out how to walk on our own in the world, and we don’t have enough experience for any jobs. It’s very frustrating to see all of my friends floundering around, too. And that makes me feel like there’s no hope for my future–if even my friends who I think of as so strong and capable can’t find decent jobs, how could I hope to?

To make it worse, my housemates, my twin sister and boyfriend, are doing awesome. My sister’s company is paying for her to get an MBA that she’s starting in a few weeks, and Davin is fulfilling his dream of being an architect. And it makes me feel inferior as a result.

I try to make myself feel better about it by pointing out that I have my first professional performance of my own choreography coming up in a month. I’m doing pretty much everything to get the show up, and I think it’s going to be a success. I love the work I’ve made. I’m living my dream.

But somehow it’s not enough. Because this show is costing me far more money than we’re going to make in ticket sales even if we sell out. Because dance isn’t really a viable career choice. Because I’m afraid people won’t like my show.

To top it all off, I’ve realized that I haven’t much felt Freyja around since moving to Philadelphia two years ago. I don’t think she likes it here–it’s ugly and people are cruel and violent. There isn’t very much beauty and few flowers, especially in my neighborhood that is quite industrial and concrete.

And so I can’t go down into my temple. I know if I go down there I’m going to have to deal with my insecurities and my fears about losing Freyja, and I just don’t want to. Soon, hopefully, I will have the strength to do it, and hopefully I will come out happier on the other side like I always do. But I’m not ready to face it yet.

On Truth and Reality

One of the Frequently Asked Questions I get when I tell people I’m pagan is “Do you really believe Odin rides a horse around the skies and Thor’s hammer really does make the thunder and lightning?”

The answer I always give is as follows: “Yes and no. But the point is that it doesn’t really matter if the myths are literally true, does it? The fact that I treat them as real makes them real because my belief in the gods causes me to act in the world as if they are real. I am influenced by them, thus making them active forces in the Universe. Whether or not Jesus is real doesn’t really matter. Jesus is real and hugely influential simply because, whether he’s objectively real or not, his millions of followers push his ideals onto the world.”

I’ve talked before here about reality and imagination, and how imagination is a tangible force in the world, and how I wish people would respect that about our own imaginations.

So yes, on the one hand, I suppose that answer means that I don’t literally believe in the gods. Or at least it probably sounds that way to some people. But I find that it’s a much better answer than a simple “yes” or “no.” If I say “yes,” then my viewpoint is often ignored because people think I’m crazy. It’s not exactly culturally approved to literally believe in Freyja and Thor. If I say “no,” then people are confused as to why I consider myself a pagan. The answer I give usually gives my audience a quick window into the fact that I am thoughtful about my faith, and that I have reasons for believing as I do. It makes them listen to me as if I have a valid viewpoint, which is refreshing.

But anyway, back to whether I believe the gods are literally real. It still comes down to “yes.” and “no.” I believe that they act in my life–I have seen it more than once. I believe that when I see a particularly beautiful bunch of flowers, or a falcon flying freely in the sky, or even a strange cat that comes up to me to snuggle, that I am literally interacting with my Lady. I believe I can literally hear her speak to me in my dreams.

On the other hand, I don’t think these deities exist in any kind of literal, objective way. Asgard will never be found no matter how deeply we look into the heavens across wormholes to the Rainbow Bridge from the recent Thor movie. It’s not a real place in the physical universe. It exists in a parallel and immeasurable world to the physical world–the world of the imagination. Until you (and I mean the general you, not necessarily you, reader friend) understand how powerful and important the imagination is, you will never understand that gods who live in the world of the collective imagination (for as  a pagan I am a bit of a Jungian) can be real and true and immediate even if their bodies occupy no physical space beyond the brief moments they inhabit cats and pigs and trees and sunsets. If I only ever see them in my mind’s eye or the world of the dream, they are nonetheless real.

The other part of the issue, that I don’t get into with people who ask me this question, is animism/pantheism. I am a lot of a pantheist and a bit of an animist, too. Well…maybe I’m just a big animist, which means the universe herself in her infinite grandness has a spirit just as much as the shamrock plant sitting on my desk at work. A philosophy of animism does mean that I literally believe in the spirits living inside everything. But it’s not really like there’s a little elf living inside them. It’s more like I respect their agency in the world. I don’t think the shamrock is an object sitting on my desk just to make it prettier. It’s more like my desk is the habitat for a plant who I have to help because it keeps knocking itself over reaching for the sun. I watch that plant grow long toward the sun, and I keep rotating it and it keeps getting away from me in its endless search for its beloved sun. And it falls over and some of the leaves die because it has become too consumed, or because I have forgotten to temper its passion by turning it away from the window. This plant has a spirit, and it has desires.

the highs and lows of a performance ending

I had a performance this weekend with the company I dance for. And we kicked ass. Look how much ass we kicked. I’m the girl in that picture. And I’ve had so many people telling me how amazing I was, and I impressed myself with my performance.

But the company is now on hiatus until September because the choreographer is more than 8 months pregnant, so we’re not doing anything until after my fringe show is over. But when we get back, the boy in that picture won’t be in the company anymore because he is going away to school. And I’m really sad about it.

We had a hard time rehearsing that duet because we weren’t connecting. It was admittedly more difficult than usual for me to feel intimate with my partner–he’s only 17. He’s a great dancer for his age, but still a little young. Whenever we were in rehearsal and had to make oogly eyes at each other, he goofied them up, or made silly faces or whatever, so it was difficult to achieve the level of intimacy we needed to feel with each other to make the dance successful.

I don’t know what happened, but the day of that performance, he showed up to tech rehearsal and wowed me. All of a sudden, there was passion in his eyes and it was much easier to give it back. All of a sudden we were performing convincingly that we wanted each other.

And then it was over and we’re never going to be able to perform that piece again, which makes me feel so sad. There is always something shocking about our ability to transcend what we think are our upper limits right at the very last possible moment. But then, it’s over and you’re left riding on past successes and worrying you’ll never be that good again. I’ll find new ways. But I really, really liked that duet and I’m sad that it’s over and I’ll never get to do it again.

Having this hiatus until September is really a good thing in my life–it gives me a chance to focus on the show I’m putting on myself. But I miss this company. I know for a fact that it will be very successful because everything she’s made on us has wowed every audience we’ve performed for. But I want to be working toward that dream, and I’m a little worried that new motherhood will distract her or that she and her husband will decide to move to New York like they have talked about and the company will move to and leave me behind. I really don’t want that to happen–this company makes me feel like I’ve achieved my dreams and I don’t want to lose that.

My changing relationships with dance and paganism

So I haven’t posted in a while. And there are a lot of reasons for that. One of those reasons is that I’ve been super busy. I haven’t had a normal weekend in over a month–not that I’m complaining. I’ve had two long-term friends come to visit, gone to Jamaica to visit another one for a week, gone back to my college to see another one, and had a weekend that included three different performances that were all kick-ass and a photoshoot in a creek. So I’ve been really busy, but in a good way.

The other main reason I haven’t been posting, really, is that I’ve been thinking more about what it means to be a dancer who happens to be a pagan more than what it means to be a pagan who happens to be a dancer, if that makes any sense. I feel like, in general, this blog has been a platform for me to share what dancing has for paganism, but very little for what paganism has for dancing. I feel my posts on paganism are much better received than my posts that focus more on dance, if only because the bulk of my readership are pagans (with the exception of my post “A Modern and Indigenous Dance,” which apparently shows up when people google “indigenous dance.” And in the last few years since I graduated college, my relationship with both dancing and paganism have evolved.

In college, I was really focused on my paganism, and that paganism helped my dancing considerably. I was in a beautiful and inspiring place, doing beautiful, inspiring, and challenging things with my time, and paganism was a huge part of that. I was thinking about my religion for a large part of every day, and that directly affected my dancing and choreography.

But now that I’ve graduated and have a boring pay-the-bills kind of job that I find completely unsatisfying, dance maybe three or four days a week only for a few hours, and finally (OH YES FINALLY-I still feel this way a year after he moved in) have Davin to come home to, paganism has a bit fallen to the wayside. My thoughts focus more on my family and my dancing. My choreography is still inspired by my relationship with the earth, but it’s much more subtle of a thing–I have a new relationship with the earth that has colored who I am to the extent that my art couldn’t avoid being influenced by it. In the past, I was purposefully making art with a pagan theme.

So it’s different. I think about dance now far more often than I think about paganism. I think I’ve integrated the paganism into my selfhood, and I’m not meant to be pagan clergy or anything. I’m a dancer who happens to be a pagan, and I’m much closer to pagan laity than anything else.

Last weekend at my first rehearsal for my piece about water, in a sort of getting-to-know-you way, I asked my dancers each to share a story about a time when they had an important experience with water. I talked about the time when the raindrops wrote me a letter about loneliness on the road’s pavement when I was alone. Two of them told stories about their baptism, and it was disconcerting and surprising to me. I hadn’t thought about the fact that for most people, and especially most city people, the main experiences with water would be in a planned sort of way, and I certainly hadn’t really expected that Christianity, with it’s fake and distanced relationship to the earth, would come up in a discussion of one of the four elements. (And yes, I am aware that I just made a really loaded assertion about Christians and the earth, and that it will piss people off, but it’s something that has been bothering my very Christian boyfriend for quite some time now, and which was the main reason I left Christianity in the first place). That experience–of having a Christian ritual bear itself into my choreographic process, my pagan ritual to the creativity of the universe and of water and our bodies which are sacks of water–got me to thinking about what it means to be a dancer who happens to be a pagan. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that we can’t insulate ourselves against people who disagree with us the way Christians can. There aren’t enough of us to surround ourselves only with those who agree (and besides, there aren’t any of us who agree on anything in the first place). We are, by social necessity and by polytheology, required to interact with people who don’t share our viewpoints. Which is good, even if it is occasionally jarring and surprising.

I think I’m going to make an effort to post more about dance without feeling like I have to make it about paganism. Because I am a pagan, and so my thoughts on dance will be pagan even if not explicitly so. My relationship with dance has changed because of paganism.

Here are a couple examples:

1) Since becoming pagan, my relationship with dance has become more embodied. If that sounds weird, considering that dance is an embodied art form, remember please that ballet was originally an art form designed to transcend the confines of the body,  to lift ourselves above our baser natures, to be released from gravity and fat and all the kinds of things that make it so living is possible. I was trained originally in ballet, and didn’t even try another dance form until I was 16 or so. Dance was never about my body when I was young–it was about perfecting the steps, wearing pointe shoes and tutus, and getting to perform in front of people. Now, I see that dance is about the body, not about using the body as a tool to get outside of it. I see that our bodies are ourselves and that by changing our relationship with our body by using and accepting its expressive language, we can change the way we feel about ourselves.

2. I see that dance is an experiential art form, not a performative one. This one has been really difficult for me to come to terms with as a professional performer. A small part of me has always felt annoyed with the fact that, on a certain level, I never thought dance was important. I loved dancing, but I saw people trying to argue that dance performances will change the world, and in a way I never really believed that, partially because of how much bad dance there is out there meaning that so few people actually see dance that is thought-provoking or paradigm-shifting, and partially because so few people ever get to see dance performed anyway. Outside of music videos, dance audiences are pretty much limited to wealthy philanthropists and friends and families of dancers and choreographers. But I see now that that’s not really why I felt that way. I don’t think dance performances will change the world because I believe dancing itself will change the world. Dancing changes us because the act of dancing is important to our psyches and our emotional well-being. The only people who are passionate about dance are the dancers whose own lives and relationships with their bodies have been changed by the act of dancing. And that is because dance is, at its core, an experiential art form.

With these two changes in mind, I think I might have figured out what I want to do with my life. This is probably a bit early to be making this statement, since I only discovered it the day before yesterday. But in some sense, I feel as sure about this as I did about finding paganism. I want to go to school do become a dance/movement therapist. Fortunately, one of the six programs in the US in this field is in Philadelphia. But the two reasons above are largely why I want to do it.

First, a little mini explanation of what it is. Dance therapy is a psychotherapeutic technique in which people use their own expressive movement to heal their psychological issues, ranging from autism to bad self-esteem to dementia.

The prerequisites for the program were my three favorite types of classes in college-anatomy, psychology, and dance. As I’ve gone through the past several years thinking about what I could do to make a living (professional dancing is so far from a living that it pisses me off now how much of an industry there is around training people to be professional dancers) besides the crappy secretarial work that’s supposedly all I’m qualified for, I’ve thought of several different kinds of therapy: the regular talking kind, physical therapy, massage therapy. All of them are wrong for some reason or another, mainly boiling down to my problems with Cartesian mind/body dualism. Massage therapy gets the closest to breaking it down, but regular psychotherapy focuses on the mind instead of the body, and physical therapy and massage therapy in general focus on fixing the body so the mind can get back to its work. Dance therapy, on the other hand, does exactly what my paganism and my dance training have taught me: that the body and the mind are inseparable, and that we can change our minds by changing our bodies. Even when I was teaching dance, there were elements of this in my class–I was helping my students work with their own anatomy instead of against it, which I could tell helped with their self-esteem.

Anyway, this dance therapy thing is something I’m going to continue exploring and looking into in the future, so I can decide if I want to go back to school for it. But I’m sure I would be good at it, and I’m sure that it would make me feel like I was doing something useful, productive, and challenging with my life.