As of last Thursday evening it has been a whole year since I first went along to Jive+ in Witney to try a free evening’s dancing. Somehow it seems simultaneously to have been very recent and a long, long time ago. On the one hand, dancing still has a vast amount of novelty value for me. It still very much has the feeling of an exciting new discovery, thrilling merely by virtue of the fact it wasn’t there before. And I still vividly remember that evening when I first started, awkward and terrified and with very little idea of what to expect. In fact, in a way that first evening seems a more recent memory than other evenings after I had been going for a while.
At the same time, I have come so very far in the past year. Indeed, I am a noticeably better dancer than I was even two or three months ago. I have been a taxi dancer for approximately half the time I have been dancing, and am in a position to give well-thought-out opinions in taxi meetings on which variations of moves should be taught in lessons (that doesn’t men I’m necessarily right, but at least what I’m arguing isn’t uninformed nonsense). Although there is still vast room for improvement and I am in no danger of running out of things to learn and develop for a long time yet, I have got to the point where I am overall a pretty good dancer.
The latest development is that I have begun teaching the beginners’ review sessions that take place at the same time as the intermediate lessons. I taught my first review class last month and it was something of a baptism of fire: a group of nineteen people, all of whom were complete beginners who had only started that week, and some of whom were quite boisterous. Still, I think it went well overall. I’ve taught another session since, with a much more manageable ten people.
My life in general has changed over the past year, too. I am a happier and more confident person than I was twelve months ago. Although there have been other successes in the past year (most notably passing my driving test and getting a job), dancing has probably been the biggest contributing factor to that. I had been in a fairly rotten state for a few years, drifting into loneliness, despair and depression. Now I spend multiple evenings a week doing well at something that I love, meeting and interacting with people. There’s a lot still wrong with my situation and not all of it will be easy to change. But things are looking up in a way that they hadn’t been for a long time, and I’m doing OK for the moment.
Yay! That’s great to hear :)