Pau Ponders is a free newsletter. If you would like to support my work, I invite you to become a paid subscriber. This is a reader-supported offering and I am so grateful for your presence here. Please feel free to share parts of this newsletter that resonate with you on social media or send to someone you love. Thank you for being here.
This week I took my inner child on a date to a pole dancing class. To preface this, I must tell you about the many dreams, both waking and sleepy, I have had of myself spinning on a shiny silver pillar. For years, I have visualized myself in my mind’s eye, eventually having a pole dancing arc. One where I spin for days and days.
Me, a wee fairy catapulting forwards and backwards around and beyond the staircase made of delicate atoms that twinkle just before my toes.
I was flipping through an old journal the other day when I found the words pole dancing in big bold capital letters, underlined and circled.
I was living in LA at the time when I had been scribbling onto this piece of paper. A time of my life when I was facing the question what was I made for? most every day. I would find myself, many a time, more often than not — sitting, staring, meditating, trying to better understand what I could do, what I might like, what may lead me to something that deeply nourishes my spirit.
When I tell you I have visions of myself flying vertically on a regular basis, I’m not kidding, as silly as it may seem to be honest in this way. There's always been a certain kind of je ne sais quoi about the visual I have of wearing 8 inch heels, with barely anything on my skin – my body taking different shapes in the air. I imagine what it would be like to spin around like a dove, toes pointed in sparkly stilettos.
I can’t be totally certain about why this is such an empowering visual for me, but it’s always been an authentic one of my very own imagination. One I return to, often. I found a video of my seven year old self in pigtails dancing rather seductively to my red Nikon CoolPix camera in the kitchen at 8:00 pm on some probably Thursday evening.
Since I can remember, I’ve always been a saucy little dramatic thing, with an inkling for expression through movement. I can also tell you about the time when I was 8 or so, my parents brought me to a ballet in Mexico City, where I would get up on stage during intermission to twirl around in my colorful patchwork dress. The orchestra began to play just for me, so I danced.
I felt, in that moment, that I was most aligned with my truth, my imagination, my alchemy.
When I was 12, a delicate time for any young girl, I was in a jazz and hip hop class at a traditional dance studio. One day, at class time, our instructor (his name is Peter) told us that we would perform the choreography one by one on our own in front of our peers. Naturally, I was reasonably mortified at the idea.
Being a 12 year old girl is a time of great vulnerability and transition. Self concept takes flight followed by our stark awareness of the perceived ‘self’ – a kind that can be at times stifling and rude. During this time, we are so malleable, so innocent and open, we are gravely powerful, in such a way that, given the wrong impression, we may fall for falsehoods such as the idea that our worth or value can be found or counted outside of ourselves, or even, taken away.
That afternoon at the studio I had to muster every ounce of courage that I could find within myself to perform and remember the steps, hopefully, gracefully and impressively. I remember I wanted to be seen as beautiful and remarkable by my teacher and peers, those who would witness me and the movement I found in my body.
I watched and admired the girls performing, one by one. I was in simple awe and admiration of each and every one of them. How they each brought their own magic to the story they were telling with their bodies. I remember feeling brittle with impending acceleration. Once it was my turn, a nervous pureness in the shape of a smile found my young face as I geared up to be right with my timing and steps. I was last to go. Calling upon confidence to meet me here. Be gentle, I said to my inner critic. Palms clammy, I began the dance.
When I was finished, my instructor stared almost blankly at me, with a smidge of what could have been translated as disgust on his face. At least, that is how I internalized it. I stood there, holding each elbow with the opposite hand behind my back. Blinking slowly, waiting for something. After what felt like a resounding lifetime of silence, he looked at me simply to say,
You dance like a cheerleader, and cheerleaders can’t dance.
I can still call upon the same lump in my throat that gathered at the pit of my stomach first, traveling in an upwards spiral, almost coming out of my eyes. A burning sensation that would cloud my vision as I slowly made my way back to my seat on the floor by the other girls.
I remember hoping, wishing, praying someone would say something to counter the puncture that Peter had just pierced my girlish beginning with. But no one said anything. Instead, they looked at me with embarrassment and pity. My childlike tenacity to perform and be seen and fully expressed retracted into the hole I wanted to sink into. Please let me disappear to never be found again, I thought to myself.
A part of me wishes I could tell you that I persevered in the face of ridicule and disrespect, but I actually quit. And I am grateful to my mother who reaffirmed to me that it was okay to quit. If it weren’t for her, I might have gone on thinking that people like that were worth listening to and learning from.
Peter if you’re out there, I am better because of you and I owe it totally and completely to myself and you. Thank you for being a shining example of what I do not believe in, so that I could go on to be an example of what I do believe in.
Since that day, everything has changed. I decided I would abandon any form of traditional dance. I radicalized my need to express myself through dance by choosing to be my own teacher and way shower. I would continue to dance, but I would not continue to be taught or shown how. I needed to be unbound and unconventional in my pursuit to experience myself wholly.
My queerness has found me here. In the evolution of the way I take up space. In the way I dance naked in the mirror, on an elevated surface, on the beach surrounded by other strangers who dance ecstatically with me and beside me, in my absolute inclusion and acceptance of all bodies and movements that surround me, in my need to uplift and encourage anyone who is brave enough to let themselves be seen. In my goosebumps when I see another person fully expressed. In my profound necessity to shine a light on them as they occupy the room with their rise and fall, as they remember and reclaim their truth as someone who is intrinsically loved.
In the way that it has become part of my life’s calling to create a safe space for people to feel themselves and liberate themselves in the process by first feeling and liberating myself.
I will always be the person who invites the people who sit on the couch to come dance. I will always grab the hand that is most reluctant to say I want to dance too and spin them around. It’s the only way I know how.
As I grew, I became empowered in my own way, and I also noticed a wound that said as long as I don’t have to follow a specific way, then I can’t be wrong or embarrassed because there is no right way the way I do it, there is only one way, and it is all my own. I am safe here.
My curiosity is taller now. It nudges me to ask about how much that one interaction changed the trajectory of my life. And if in some way, it has limited me from being as fully expressed as I can and want to be.
That was the last dance class that I was ever in. That was a choice, even if subconscious.
Up until a few days ago.
I can see the pieces that beg to be better seen by me in this re-telling and I am listening. I am listening and I signed up for a Pole 1 dance class this week. I got ready by applying some shimmer to my cheekbones and dressing in layers that could be taken off. Filled up my water bottle and gave myself plenty of time to get lost on the way to the studio so that I could still be early. To get scared and be able to take slower steps and bigger breaths as I approached the front door.
There is something so unguarded about choosing to show up to a room full of strangers, alone, as a twenty something, wearing very little clothing, wrapping yourself around a small vertical pole and trying to fly in front of many mirrors. It takes a great deal of audacity, and it has been healing to do so.
When I came together with the pole for the first time, it was as if I had already been there many times before. It felt familiar. Not literally. And not because it came naturally. But because I recognized the part of my being that remembered what it was like to exist in a room full of humans who wanted to learn how to move their bodies— before I had tasted shame in my mouth for the first time as a girl becoming a woman.
There were four poles and 7 women in class that day, including myself. Everybody had a partner, except for me. I had a great stroke of luck with a pole in the front row all to myself, and in front of the largest mirror where I could truly see myself.
I experienced a sense of odd belonging despite having become a stranger to the practice of exposing myself to be perceived in my body in a classroom setting.
I suppose it is in my untaught belonging where I remember who I am, even if I stray.
We were warming up with pliés and high kicks when my teacher who was observing my movement asked me, are you a dancer?
Not traditionally, I replied.
Consider sharing this post to bring Pau’s words across worlds among your own.