Dance Parties and Queer Peer Pressure

I have a confession to make: I don’t dance. I don’t know how — that whole “just move your body, feel the music” thing always infuriated me because I just don’t get it — and I don’t like it. I feel so self-conscious. Dance parties literally terrify me. The worst part is that the dance parties are often such a central part of the queer party scene — in a more organized sense (Chicago has Chances Dances weekly, Queerer Park and FKA monthly, and Berlin all the time, just to name a few) and in the “and then it devolves into a dance party” sense. And that’s not who I am.

People Make Me Feel Safe

I was at a self-defense training tonight, and one of the things the instructor focused on was managing our flight-or-fight responses. I realized that one of the things that I do — that I’ve always done — to center myself, to calm my nerves, to make myself less tense is to think about particular people. There have always been certain friends that have made me feel safe and happy, and for well over a decade, I’ve used the thought of them to cheer myself up or make myself less scared. Beyond that, if I’m with a group of people (family, friends, camp, organizations), I will often subconsciously choose someone to represent safety to me — as long as I know where that person is, I feel that things will all be okay. It’s mostly irrational, but it’s something I just realized that I do.