Dancing, Voices, Young Helen Hunt
and the people who didn't deserve our hearts back then and definitely don't now
Yesterday, I mentioned to my therapist that, fortunately, I never grew up with the notion that guys wouldn’t be attracted to me because of my disability. My father’s worries about me vis-a-vis boys were not, you will not get enough of them. His acknowledgement of what I’ll sighingly call my beauty was such that his concerns were of the polar opposite nature, so when my (physically disabled) therapist asked, “Who’s voice is that?” in terms of buried negative talk about my body, I really had to think about it.
For the first time in a long time, my family gets off the hook. That voice? Belongs to my first boyfriend. A dark-eyed Roman-nosed curly-haired tech genius/poet about whom teenaged-I would not have changed a thing. He told me, though, that I would be prettier without crutches. “You don’t think I’m pretty?” I asked him.
“Of course I do,” he said. “You’re beautiful. I’m just saying you’d be prettier without them.”
About 5 years ago I reminded him that he said this to me and I told him it was fucked up. He said, “You don’t think it’s true?”
I don’t know if I think it’s true. I’d call it a moot point. Damian-not-his-real-name didn’t know me before my childhood operation so he never saw the way I used to walk, no metal, but on the tips of my toes. Probably a good thing that little girl, who was nearly brought to tears by the sight of her own reflection, never ran into his ass as a tyke. When I told this story to the person who understands me best he said, “I hope you left him right after that.”
I didn’t. We were together for 3 years. He met a boy who dazzled him in a way I never could and wanted to date both of us, which neither Dazzling Boy nor I were down with, but, knowing he was gay, I could be his friend. Then he signed up for a dance class and fell in love with a girl. “I’ve always wanted to be with someone I could be physically limitless with,” he told me. I finally left him then. Told him I would call him back when I was over it, and I did, years later.
But I’m not entirely over it, am I, or I wouldn’t have sat in my remote-therapist’s-office just yesterday saying, “Yeah, that’s his voice.”
Before I told her about the girl, she reminded me that a lot of people are uncomfortable with disabled bodies not because of hate but out of fear, the fear of their own mortality, their attachments to erroneous notions about their own unshakable physical independence or wholeness. She said something like, “They fear that one day they’ll be more limited,” and I said, “He used that word! He actually said ‘limitless."
Which is ridiculous. If I’d ever thought anyone was physically limitless it would have been my bodybuilder personal trainer, but he’s been working with a hardcore coach to get in (steroid-free) shape for bodybuilding competitions. A couple times now, I’ve seen him after his own workout, displaying a level of truly done exhaustion I did not know he was capable of. When I said something to that effect, “I didn’t know anything could do this to you,” he said, “Everyone has their limits.”
I told my therapist that if anyone else had told me I’d be prettier without crutches I would have laughed and forgotten about it, even then. The reason why it lodged itself into the same veins we used to gothly sip from is because it was Damian, who was, to my teenage mind, so utterly perfect in every way, and I would never be perfect to him. But other girls would, or so it seemed: I can still name every crush he had over the course of our relationship and tell you in some detail why she was so marvelous. I probably would’ve shared the crush, if I hadn’t been crushed myself.
For a while there, I thought of her, the limitless one, every time I heard about dancers. Which is especially infuriating because dancing had been mine. When I was laid up in recovery after my operation there was one movie I watched over and over and over again, rewind-the-tape-after-the-credits-roll style: Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
In this joyously 80’s cinematic delight, young Sarah Jessica Parker whose truly free spirit is fettered by her conservative upbringing finds liberation in her friendship with rebellious young Helen Hunt, who wears white nail polish (and, as I admired her fearlessness, I then did this too.) Parker plays a talented dancer who wants to enter a televised dance competition, but her tight-assed father is having none of it, so of course the answer is: train for the contest in secret, upend class expectations by acquiring your leather-jacketed partner in secret, train harder for the contest in secret, and enter the contest in secret. Also, a bunch of true-punks with multicolored spiked mohawks crash prom! You can see why this film offered 9-year-old me wells of hope to draw from in my darkest hour.
I never had any ambitions to win a dance contest, but dancing itself? That mattered. I reminded myself I could do it when I was 22 and at my most unfettered point, dressing (if you can call my outfit an outfit) for a Live concert, because I had a now-embarrassing semi-obsession with the lead singer of that band. I wore a see-through white dress, a black thong, and nothing else except rows and rows of red beads that symbolized heart-blood during a time that I was obsessed with personal mythology and symbols. During that concert, I danced so madly I broke the ring I was wearing. Live played for four hours. At one point, the bass player grabbed the microphone and said in what sounded like a dreamy haze, “This is fuckin’ incredible. You guys are amazing.”
We were. We all were. It was the most intensely connected I had ever then yet felt in a venue full of complete strangers.
I was right up front with my transparent get-up and unmissable movements and that lead singer I then so-adored definitely looked right at me. I swear he performed some kind of enchanted movement with his hands as we locked eyes and I staggered backwards, blissfully shaken. When they finally ended the show with an epic-length rendition of a ballad called “Dance with You,” he slowed down near the close of the song and changed the lyric — I want to dance with you — to, We all want to dance with you. And he was looking right at me when he sang it, I swear! At the time, I’d have felt no need to convince you.
That night, I wrote a crazy stream-of-consciousness poem-type-thing about the orgasmic experience that was that concert and I found him on MySpace (remember MySpace?) and sent it to him. He said,
“I love it when girls named Sarah Sunfire get their tantric groove on to my musical love transmission.”
I can’t entirely believe I’m making it public that this is the sort of line I used to go for. But part of owning who we are, I think, is owning who we used to be, and that’s who I used to be. Cringe City, as my dad might put it, were he here, though as much as he loved to embarrass me, he never actually made me feel embarrassed when it counted. He asked me what I looked like (the lead singer of Live, not my dad), but I had just been through a difficult falling out with someone I cared about and was not in a glamorous pose-y mood. I’m pretty sure I’d been crying. I took the photo anyway, though, and never heard from him again. One more instance of a dude into dancers deciding I didn’t measure up.
I know they were wrong. I think almost everyone I’ve crossed paths with since knows they were wrong. I know you know they were wrong. But it still hurts. I wish it didn’t. Pain is a sacred thing in its own way and fucks like Damian and the lead singer of Live are not worth our pain. But how to we make every facet of our complicated prismatic selves understand that those negative-talk voices were never worth listening to? Presumably, every voice that’s ever gotten under our skin is someone we love(d). If we’ve loved them, don’t we listen? Isn’t listening inextricable from love?
Maybe letting go of those negative-talk voices also means letting go of love. That’s probably why it’s so difficult. Admitting that no one who loved you would’ve talked to you that way often means admitting that no, they didn’t love you, they just thought they did and you thought they did, maybe they still think they do. Being able to say “That’s not what love is” means…
Well, I’m not sure what it means. I haven’t all the way done it yet. But I dance around the house a lot. A lot. For right now, that’s something.
