Yesterday I went to a Gaga dance class. It was my first time. There’s always tension when I go to something for the first time. I question myself a lot.
Can I do this?
Will everybody be better than me?
Will I stand out for being so bad?
Those thoughts often follow me into new and unknown experiences. In the past, they prevented me from moving toward trying something new. Now I expect these thoughts to arise but they no longer hold me back.
Still, it does create a stiffness in my body, a certain level of vigilance and uncertainty about whether I am safe or accepted here.
Early into the class, the teacher called us to welcome our weaknesses, “your weakness is your greatest beauty, allow it to be displayed.”
This invitation quickly melted the tension within me. It allowed me to accept the awkward feelings when I felt uncoordinated and less free than those who danced around me.
I did not always have this relationship with my weaknesses.
For most of my life, I treated the parts of myself that I didn’t like as something that needed to be fixed and the experiences that felt awkward were something to be avoided.
Eight years ago I moved to New York as a 22-year-old. There were many things I wanted to experience in this city, high on the list was learning how to Salsa dance.
I felt awkward and clumsy in my body. My balance wasn’t very good and I didn’t have much rhythm or coordination. During my Erasmus year studying in France, I saw some friends dancing Salsa and I wanted to be able to move like them. It looked so fluid and erotic, I wanted to experience what that felt like.
At that time I was too shy to even try to dance. I watched from the side and admired, never daring to step onto the dancefloor.
Two years later I was living in New York and felt ready to take some classes. I went to the Ailey Studios in Midtown and with their floor-to-ceiling mirrors I got to see my uncoordinated, stiff, and awkward body on full display.
I felt this great shame inside. I thought I was going to be much better. My ideal was that I would show up and learn quickly and move my body just like the people at the salsa parties in France. But no, it wasn’t going to be as easy as that and I was unwilling to accept it.
I shut down that part of me. I’m uncoordinated. I don’t have it. I can’t dance.
I didn’t want to think about it or reflect on it. This simple experience became viewed as a failure because my performance did not match the expectations I had in my head.
What a shame. I missed out on so much. If I only I could have accepted myself as I was and laughed at my incompetencies.
It took me five years to take my second salsa class. This time I arrived accepting my uncoordinated awkwardness. I didn’t apologize to my dance partner when I missed a step, I accepted it as part of the learning experience. I didn’t judge myself when I danced in front of the mirror and saw how uncoordinated I was, instead, I thanked myself for coming.
Five days after that class, Covid swept across the world and shut everything down. There would be no more salsa classes to come, and I haven’t tried to dance salsa since.
I didn’t need to become a salsa dancer, that second class gave me what I needed. By showing up with a smile on my face it allowed me to take a whole new approach toward self-discovery.
I became far less concerned with being interesting and much more interested.
In attempting to be interesting to others I was showcasing what I knew and what I was able to do, often hiding my flaws and weaknesses from them. I would read about things so that I was in the know. I would exercise to develop how my body looked. My internal dialogue was fueled by comparing myself to those around me, looking for where was I better or worse.
Now I know much less about what’s happening in the world and I feel as though I have little to prove to others. I am far less plugged into what's happening in sports, current affairs, or entertainment stories. There are many things that I am unable to comment on.
But I am much more interested in myself. Interested in where my faults and weaknesses are. Where I lie to myself. Where I’m stiff and unable to be at ease.
These are not things to fix. They are paths to explore.
I won’t ever really be able to talk to people in great depth about these experiences because they aren’t happening at a verbal level, it’s a felt experience.
In childhood and early adulthood, we are moving through phases of constant growth. I used to feel that at each birthday I was a completely different person than the one who celebrated the year prior. I saw myself very differently and my view of the world had dramatically changed.
But on my 23rd and 24th birthday, I didn’t feel that. I felt stagnant, like something was hardening inside of me.
Before then it felt as if there was momentum pushing me out into the world and exploring new parts of myself, but then the force began to slow.
I was beginning to become more solid and attached to what I liked and didn’t like. My life had become more habitual and unconscious.
The way I broke that up and brought this momentum back into my life was by moving toward my weaknesses. The places I had been avoiding were where I needed to go. The parts of myself that I didn’t know, were the parts I needed to meet.
Yesterday’s message was a powerful reminder of this.
Your weakness is your beauty.
By moving toward your weaknesses you move closer toward who you really are and further away from a deluded idealized self.
Your truth is to be found in your weaknesses.