Portrait of me dancing Five Rhythms (also - ironically - wearing a green dress) by artist Brian Pinkney
Feeling one’s feelings is so 2019. I like to dance them out instead.
I’ve been doing “the Five Rhythms” for a few years now. Essentially it’s dancing but also a meditation of sorts because you’re really encouraged to follow the cues of your body (e.g. oh look, my head wants to move up and down repeatedly and my legs are doing a strange jig, etc). The room was packed that week and as I arrived seventy or so people were already attempting all kinds of weird shit with their bodies. Slipping into the back corner, I found an empty space, sank to the floor and for the next hour loyally followed the needs of my body.
At the half time pause, the man who was our DJ/teacher stepped forward and announced that tonight was the full moon and that this particular moon’s energy was that of the mother. It was right around then that I started to cry, slowly at first but then with increasing gusto. As the music recommenced I began to move about the room - gliding, bopping and occasionally flinging myself with abandon - allowing myself full force ugly-crying; the kind where your face contorts and snot occasionally shoots out of your nostrils. People’s reaction to public displays of grief vary but in a Five Rhythms class, anything goes, and I was mainly ignored. Until he stepped forward.
We know each other from way back - enough to give each other a friendly nod as we pass - and I always enjoy knowing he’s there. We don’t usually dance together but this evening as he passed me, he hesitated and then, without intrusion, stopped, and for the next half hour or so danced next to me. Not with me, just next to me, and I felt so taken-care-of that my tears of grief began to transform into tears of both grief and gratitude. I have no idea what his intentions were of course, but what I experienced was a kind of gentle, non-invasive offering of himself and his protective, loving energy. Just as it was with my friend who listened me out of suffering, the act itself was an act of non-doing. He simply stood next to me and through his simple act of witnessing, I healed.
In his presence visions began to come; a movie of my not-to-be baby’s life began to play inside me, the highlight reel so to speak. It wasn’t just her birth, the first day of school and her wedding day, this movie included the first time she was groped by a stranger, the day she got fired from her job after lying to her boss, the nights she got stoned with her friends and all the heartbreak she would have experienced in her romantic partnerships. Little strawberry had missed out on a life of love and belonging, of suffering and isolation of beginnings and endings and of pain, glory and all the mess that comes with being a human.
After a while my friend turned to me and bowed, hand on heart and eyes offering love. I did the same and he left - no words exchanged, no need for a hug. The healing had occurred.
A few minutes later I was back in the tears when a woman shimmied over. She was in her twenties with a wild shock of curly dark hair and a green slinky dress that said “I don’t give a fuck what you think”. Her general countenance might be called gleeful and, as she moved in my direction, parking herself right in my face, my mind began to complain.
“What does she think she’s doing? Can’t she see I’m upset? What’s with all the smiley crap? How inconsiderate.”
Apparently she wasn’t a mind reader because rather than skulking away, feeling thoroughly ashamed of herself, she got closer and grinned at me, shaking her big hair and her tight green dress right in my direction.
Seriously, she fucking grinned. At a woman who was crying ugly tears.
I could have moved, could have turned my back on her or sidled off, but I stood my ground. I’m not sure if it was because I knew I needed her energy or because I just didn’t want to be the one who gave in first, but I stayed put and kept on looking at her stoopid smiley face. She was clearly having a good time, writhing to the music, flinging herself around and paying no heed to my dark thoughts because occasionally she’d catch my eye and sling me another smile. Then she’d just keep on having a good time.
The argument that then transpired in my head went as follows:
“I need to grieve and I can’t do it around that kind of energy.”
“Uh huh. Too happy? Misery likes company I suppose.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m just noticing that you were crying before and it felt healing and now you’re crying as proof that you are sad, so she will leave you alone.”
“That’s not true.”
“Really? Isn’t there a part of you that believes that in order to be true to this experience and to the baby you lost, you must continue to publicly display your grief and hold onto it at all costs? Don’t you believe that unless you outwardly display only the emotion of sadness, nobody will take your pain seriously?”
“Uhhh, yes. Kind of.”
“Honey, you can be both. You can feel pain fully and then grin the very next moment. That’s the human experience. That’s how you know you’re awake. Emotions aren’t like rocks, their like water, continuously flowing, moving, dancing, changing. If we try to hold onto them, that’s when they become like sand that sticks inside us and gets stuck in all our crevices. Let the emotions flow honey. Happy, sad, happy, silly, grieving, angry, happy, sad. That’s how they go, isn’t it?”
And so, it would seem that giving oneself permission to dance, to giggle and to have fun after a miscarriage is just as crucial to my healing as giving myself permission to weep in public. It works the other way around too; as a birth doula, I spend a lot of time telling new mummas that they don’t have to pretend to be happy and utterly in love with their new little baby. Being sad and grief-stricken just after becoming a mother (or when we achieve whatever was “supposed to make us happy”) does not invalidate the gratitude we feel and the love we have, it is what makes that possible. If we restrict one emotion, we end up restricting them all. Because to be human means to be a bundle of contradictions. To put it bluntly, humans have egos and to have an ego is to be a mess. The options are either to show the mess or to keep it hidden and suffer the consequences.
This is what healing from a miscarriage looks like. For me. Not for anyone else, who I’m sure will have their own journey with it. But this is what the messy, contradictory process of putting myself back together looks like for this one human.
So, after I realised that I could be happy and sad all at the same time, I looked at the girl in the green dress, stared into her big happy face and grinned back. And with that, I guess she must’ve known that her work was done, because at that very moment, she walked the fuck away.