A few days ago at Milk Bar, someone came up to me and said they liked watching me dance. It was the second time in a week. And even though neither time involved large bills and a pole, I chose to interpret them as compliments anyway.

Dance is a big part of my life. For that, I blame a girl. Tiffany stood me up on a fateful Wednesday 18 years ago. I can’t remember the name of bar, but they had alternative nights on Wednesdays. I waited 30 minutes and was just about to leave when Blister in the Sun started playing.

I liked Tiffany. It had taken months to work up the nerve to ask her out. When she didn’t show, it was just another let down in a long line of disappointments. I didn’t want to be alone and so I went to the crowded dance floor. I had nothing to lose so I danced.

Before that night, I had danced only once, in junior high, when a friend asked me at the last school dance. The deejay was playing Bryan Adams. Yes, my first dance was to Bryan Adam’s Heaven and I’ve since learned to live with it.

Seven years later, I found myself doing who knows what to the Violent Femmes. I have these horrible images of me doing some version of the Elaine dance from Seinfeld. I’ve blacked out that part. However, I remember a feeling of release once I started dancing. Of letting all the crap in my life melt out of my body as music filled it. There wasn’t room for both.

From that moment I was a club kid. For a period of four years, I was dancing 4-6 night a week often driving to Denver and Boulder to get my dance fix. When I say I went dancing, I mean I went to dance. Often as soon as I walked in, I would put my coat on the nearest empty chair and go immediately to the dance floor and stay there the entire night, all three plus hours, leaving maybe once or twice to get a drink of water.

Dance means different things to different people. Some people dance to impress. Some dance for release. But for some, dance is expression. It’s a way to let go of the thoughts and doubts bouncing through the synapses. Dance is a way of saying this is me–the good, bad, ugly, cheesy, strange, bent, broken, needy, giving, oxymoronic, dichotomous me.

You have to be willing to accept certain amount vulnerability when you let dance express the real you. In that vulnerability, there’s a joy that opens inside of you. People react positively to that openness and are more willing to give you a compliment because in giving that compliment they become vulnerable too.

Not everyone dances to express, but I’m starting to notice the ones who do. Somewhere I had lost this part of my dancing. I’m finding it again in myself and others. So when I come up to you and say, I think you’re a great dancer, I’m also saying thanks for sharing.

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