The Journey Begins

I have hobby ADD.  I've started many kinds of hobbies through the years and would eventually get bored or frustrated and move on to the next thing.  My sewing room is a junkyard full of ideas and half-finished projects.  Calligraphy, ceramics, pressed flowers, silk ribbon embroidery, knitting, cross-stitch, beading ... you name it, I tried it and eventually lost interest.  But dancing is different- I was hooked on belly dancing before I ever took the first lesson.  

It was 18 years after watching Jaclyn Smith’s dance in Charlie’s Angels before I’d set foot in a studio.   It didn't matter that she wasn't a trained belly dancer- I was intrigued by the idea itself.  But, I figured like all of my other hobbies, dancing would just be another thing I’d get bored with or worse, that I’d take a few classes, find out that I was no good at it and get discouraged and quit; adding a hip sash and finger cymbals to the growing mountain of stuff in the hobby junkyard.   I was 33 before I gathered the courage to look for a dance studio.   In the early 90s, the Internet was in its infancy, so there was no YouTube, no Facebook or Google to guide my search.   But there was the Yellow Pages, and that’s how I found my school.  

 Habeeba’s studio was in the basement of a small shopping plaza.  The boom years of the 70s and 80s were gone.  Women had moved on from belly dance to Jazzercise, aerobics and spinning for exercise and my first class was small, with only 6 or 7 students.  We were all novices, but as women usually do, I compared myself to everyone else in the class.   It’s impossible not to compare when you’re standing side by side in black body-hugging leotards and tights in front of a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors.   Body image?  What body image?  Pear shaped, apple shaped, straight or hourglass, most women, even those with the most perfect figures, can be intimidated by studio mirrors. 

Every awkward move was reflected back for self critique.  Every move felt unnatural and I was certain it felt that way because something was wrong with me.   It didn’t help that I was taller than all but one other student in my class and outweighed most of the other women by at least 30 pounds.  I did my best to imitate the movements as my instructor demonstrated them, and in spite of that, every week I felt defeated.   But every week I went back and fought through the self doubt and uncertainty and poor self image because the music spoke to my heart and told me I was a dancer.  

The music and movement transported me and eventually I learned to anticipate changes in the music.  Habeeba taught us how to improvise and build on the basic technique we were learning, layering movements for more complicated combinations of isolated movements and traveling steps.   It actually was fun to go to class and for the first time in my adult life, I had female friends; women who shared an interest in the dance, music and culture of the countries where this dance originated:  Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries.

Somewhere along the line, something amazing happened.  I stopped comparing myself to the women in the classroom and started appreciating the control I had over my body.  For someone who had only been body-aware in the sense that I was critical of myself no matter what size I was, this was a new and very cool thing.  I actually liked my plus size body because in spite of the fact that I was a bigger girl, I could move in ways that other women couldn’t.  Ok, so maybe that competitive/comparative thing didn’t entirely go away, but the dance gave me confidence not only in the dance studio, but in real life also.  My journey had begun.