Artist | Life Coach | Educator | Dancer | Creative Businessowner | Community Event Planner | Spiritual Practitioner

       My Relationship with Dance

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​I began dancing at a young age and with bright liveliness and spunk. I was called cheeky by my grandmother because of that liveliness. For many years, I did not connect with my physical being. As a sexual assault experiencer and a natural lover of dance, the disconnection with my body played a significant role in my trauma. 

Dance and many other forms of creativity brought loving energy of passion, pleasure, peace, balance, and imagination.

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Very young, I began dancing and loved it-- from bouncing to second lining, joining dance teams, and seeing stand dancers and majorettes dancing during Mardi Gras parades, wishing I was with them. It was our norm of celebration, beinghood, and a blessed experience for me as a New Orleans native.  

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In my childhood, I also experienced sexual abuse that became a repeated pattern in my early adulthood. These forms of abuse inadvertently created a touch-and-go relationship with my body which moved toward my emotional and mental well-being. 
Due to this, as a kid, I was often referred to as antisocial with my new changes in how I viewed the world. This path led me to a journey where I began to learn myself and explore other creative methods that held space to channel my power and voice, such as singing in the choir, stepping, visual arts, social clubs, and volunteering. 

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Those traumatic experiences led me down a path where I had the opportunity to truly get to know myself and my power from a space that created more healing in my life. That healing journey guided me back to dance and the freedom I received when I was my "cheeky" self. 

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As time continued this journey, that feeling guided me to deepen my relationship with my soul and spirit. This journey has guided space to reconnect with my emotional self, which included anger, rage, compassion, self-forgiveness, and acceptance of that hurt. I began accepting myself again after each period I experienced abuse. I began to voice those experiences and bring them to light. That light guided me to show up for other survivors, which drove me down this deep advocacy work I began in college and now through creative healing justice work. 

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Throughout the seasons in my life, God placed wonderful soft friends in my life where we taught each other care. During that time, my friends in college were the first time I experienced such a softness that helped me open up and share my emotions with others.

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With their human love and similar experiences as a Black Queer creative in an HBCU, I began to sit my emotions and received therapy, which was not a norm. Those sessions allowed me to release and forgive. During that period, I wore a sunflower every day for a year and loved how it made me and others feel. I found myself again. I began to allow the years of emotional waves and purge.

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After undergrad, I moved to New York for graduate school and started dancing again, especially for therapeutic reasons. I started teaching art to kids and did canvassing work that led to LGBTQ Youth Organizing for shelter-less and street-involved youth. When I had moments to breathe, I began attending queer parties where I would dance the night away. Those weekly rituals allowed me to recognize how I gave my power away. 

Through my reconnection with dance and working with youth, I started to reconnect with my imagination; this allowed me to release even more while I found my inner joy again. When I continued to release those emotions from the memory bank, I began to understand integration as I took my power back and forgave myself and those individuals. 

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Now, as someone who actively lives in the space of experiencing my body, soul, and spirit and with a greater understanding of their vitality, I embrace, embody, speak up, welcome, enjoy, feel, release, explore, and dance more as experiences occur. Each person has power; no one has the power over us to rob our selfhood and inner freedom. It took me a while to truly understand that; as I now understand it, I share that small token of wisdom and love with you. 

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I thank dance for setting me free.

 

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