LAST NIGHT A DJ SAVED MY LIFE
For 10 years, a sense of shame about her body kept writer Melissa Febos off the dance floor, and only when high on drugs did she give herself to the music. But would getting clean mean giving up the heart-thumping, hip-swivelling joy of dancing that had b
It’s a balmy Thursday night and the DJ is playing my song. She’s actually been on a streak of my favourite songs and, as a result, my face is slicked with sweat, stray hair from my ponytail is stuck to my cheeks and the back of my T-shirt is drenched. My jacket is in a pile in the corner and I lost an earring earlier, but I don’t care about either. When the last beats of Drake’s “One Dance” blur into the opening ones of Beenie Man’s “King Of The Dancehall”, I fling both arms into the air and swivel my hips, looking for Tara, my friend and fellow dance enthusiast. She’s my partner tonight, along with the other 50 people crammed into the small, dark club. Tara is grinning, too, face flushed and damp, arms raised as she works her way towards me through the crush of jubilant bodies.
We’re into our third hour of dancing and my thighs are on fire. It’s about four hours past my regular bedtime and, when I drop it low, nearly sweeping the floor with my 36-year-old university-professor ass, I wonder for a moment if I’ll make it back up. But I do and, side by side, we bounce to the bass, shoulders rolling, booties popping, eyes closed, hearts pumping.
I didn’t always love to dance. It’s such a constant source of joy in my life now that it would be difficult to believe if my former inhibition wasn’t so painfully vivid. The comfort in one’s body that dancing requires has been hard-earned. When I was growing up, I was a baseball player, not a ballet dancer. I was a tree climber, a pond swimmer, an avid reader, with perpetually skinned knees. My body was strong and resilient, and I felt confident inside it. For the first decade of my life, my feminist mother protected me from our culture’s darker lessons in what it means to have a female body, and I knew mine only as a source of strength.
Then my body changed. By age 12, I was a C cup. Suddenly, my body became a liability. Grown men whistled at me from passing cars. Boys leered at me in the school hallways. Girls whispered. My precocious body earned me a reputation for promiscuity before I’d even had my first kiss. To suddenly transform from a kid into something both
“BEFORE MOST OF MY PEERS HAD BOUGHT THEIR FIRST BRA, I HAD ROUNDED THIRD BASE”
desired and reviled was confounding. There’s no instruction manual for how to navigate that unscathed.
My brand-new body had depreciated all my strengths and replaced them with a single power: to attract men. It was a fickle power, though. They were compelled, yes. But if I said no to them, I became worthless and risked humiliation. So I said yes, let older boys burrow their hands under my clothes, and found the same result. Before most of my peers had bought their first bra, I had rounded third base a few times. The punishment for this acquiescence was a year of relentless harassment that included prank calls to my family’s home, crude gestures and strangers grabbing my body in the school hallways. It was a clear lesson: for a thousand reasons, and despite relentless encouragement from every kind of media, giving my body away was disastrous.
The only time I remember dancing as an adolescent was at a school disco, aged about 13. One moment, I was dancing freely with a friend, and the next, I was surrounded by boys with hungry eyes, moving closer. It filled me with shame. What had I done? I stopped dancing and spent the rest of the night sitting on the chairs at the side of the dance floor. I didn’t dance again for 10 years.
Dancing, it seemed to me then, was another way of giving your body away. I needed to be in control of my body. So I learned to cultivate a stoic persona, though inside I was conflicted. By nature, I was a person who naturally delighted in physicality – I was strong and spirited, sexual and extroverted. But experience had taught me a different story about my body: it was vulnerable, oversized, humiliating.
In the years that followed, I developed a love of watching other people dance – from Dirty Dancing,
Flashdance and Footloose to their noughties counterparts like Stomp The Yard, Honey, the Step Up franchise and David Lachapelle’s documentary Rize. These films fall into distinctly gendered camps: either allegories of female sexual awakening through dance, or of streetgang rivalry and athletic triumph of good over evil. It’s no wonder I loved them all. Throughout my teens and university years, the body in motion mesmerised me.
It didn’t occur to me that if I’d inhabited my body – loosened my grip so I could finally enjoy it again – then it might have been the revelation I needed. It might have freed me. After all, I wasn’t a vulnerable adolescent anymore; I was a successful university student who’d been living on my own since age 17. But my body insecurity was so deeply ingrained, I didn’t even consider it. Instead, I continued to distance myself from my physical form, and drugs proved the most effective tool. Sure, they risk your life and ruin your health, but they allow you to control how you feel. And, amazingly, they let me dance.
In the clubs in the early noughties, I danced for the first time, with strangers and friends, and with pinprick pupils. It was the closest thing to happiness I knew back then. Substance abuse can often be preceded by low levels of the feelgood hormone serotonin. But during dancing, serotonin levels increase and there’s also a release of endorphins (connected to feelings of euphoria). What’s more, dancing bonds people, and MRI scans have shown that watching others dance can activate the same neurons in the observer’s brain. This means that dancing promotes empathy and helps us connect to each other.
Dancing definitely helped me feel better during that dark time, but it couldn’t fix me. I had to surrender my stoic persona and ask for help. Three months into my new sober life, I went to a dry dance. “Isn’t this an oxymoron?” I asked my friend as we paid the door fee. But as I wandered through the balloon-strewn room and felt the bass thumping through my feet, something happened. I realised I was alive. The upside of lifethreatening experiences, such as drug addiction, is that surviving them changes your perspective. My body was my own. I wanted to dance to everything, so I did: from David Bowie and Michael Jackson to musicians who reminded me of being young. It felt like a redemption and, once I started, I never wanted to stop.
When I collapsed into bed that night, exhausted and stone-cold sober, I understood that dancing wasn’t about giving myself to someone else – it was about giving something to myself. It wasn’t about abandoning my body, but finding it. It offered a better high than I’d ever found on drugs. There aren’t a lot of true behavioural changes that we can make overnight. Wilful change is a slow, arduous process that requires courage, commitment and the help of other people. I can count the overnight changes I’ve made on one hand. One is kicking my heroin addiction. I stopped one day and haven’t picked it up again for 13 years. Another is starting to dance again. I just did it.
It is my medicine and my hobby, the thing I do for love, not mastery. I have decent rhythm, but I don’t dance to look good. I dance because it’s fun. I don’t twerk for men, I twerk for my friends, because it makes me laugh and gives me joy. I can inhabit my sexuality and still keep it for myself. Dancing makes me feel how I did as a kid: powerful and not self-conscious. It has brought me back to my body, which turns out to be even stronger and more resilient than I knew.
“DANCING OFFERED A BETTER HIGH THAN I’D EVER FOUND ON DRUGS”