Okay. Okay, y'all. I can finally feel my legs again. That. That was hard. Whenever you get a substitute ballet teacher who starts off with, "Yeah, the stretches, I don't really do them, so if one of you could lead that part, that'd be great," you are in for pain. Don't get me wrong, this teacher was incredibly supportive, genuinely kind, and warmly attentive. I am so happy I got to work with this person, whose name is Bill, which I identify only so I can say that I did Bill-et instead of ballet. Ballet is something I'm kind of getting the hang of. Bill-et is something...different. Bill-et is swooping motions and hand-eye stuff and lots and lots of plieing. Bill-et is not for the weak. Not for the faint of heart. This is why they had us fill out that emergency contact form. It was because of Bill. I know that now. Bill is an amazing dancer. Bill is a seasoned professional. Bill is a joy to learn from and to watch. But Bill was also in Amadeus. So Bill knows more than you.
Thankfully, my old newbie friend Tom was there with me during this class, so we could at least find some company for our terrifying, 'Nam-esque misery. The work was hard, but Bill taught me that, if you've got someone encouraging you along the way, the work can be hard. You'll get through it. Sometimes, I see students of mine shrink in the shadow of hard work. They take it, sometimes, as a sign that it wasn't meant for them. That God doesn't want this for them. I don't know, but I don't think God works that way. I think God actually has no real sense of what human "hard work" is. All this sh*t we do down here has to be easy to God, right? I think what God probably really cares about is whether or not people can use difficulty as a point to come together, to empathize. I truly don't think God cares what the task is. I think God cares about reactions to tasks great or small. Obviously, I'm using "God," here, but I don't mean that to exclude my Atheist and/or Agnostic friends. I mean to suggest that, if there is anything at all greater than us controlling our paths even slightly, I just can't accept that that Anything would say to us, "Yeah...trigonometry is hard. I mean, you clearly had a passion for it, but the fact that you suck was just my way of saying, 'Hey, maybe don't aim so high.'" The Anything is at least partly responsible for trigonometry, so the idea of it being "hard" would surely be abstract to its (even partial) creator. But, since we have free will, our interactions could potentially surprise the Anything in ways trigonometry can't. When I'm falling all over myself, and a gruff, seasoned Bill-et instructor comes over and reaches out with empathy, I think that surprises the Anything, especially since we've demonstrated so many negative responses in our brief time here.
But the kicker was: I actually wasn't all bad! Bill explained that the hardest thing for ballet dancers to do in his auditions is walk and run. I liked this because it showed me that we can get so tied up in the complexity of it all that we forget the simplest tasks. We practiced running. There's a flourish you do with it, but, other than that, as Bill said, "Running is running. No need to reinvent it." Other dancers did try. They scampered across the floor in little baby steps. I don't mean to berate them. I actually thought it looked quite beautiful. But when he told me to run, I took off like I was on a treadmill. I figured, hey, I run a lot, so, yeah, I got this. And I did! Bill complemented my natural run! Now, I know that's a minor and perhaps manufactured victory, but I'm counting it as a win nonetheless.
It also provided space for my favorite thing about Bill's class. As we ran, Bill taught us that, traditionally, men keep their arm flourishes low. Women raise their arm flourishes high. High and low notes. Sopranos and baritones, metaphorically. As someone who gets very excited by subtle moments to prod my gender, I was instantly struck by this. When I ran, I flourished as high as I could. Knowing that this was the more "feminine" run provided, in my mind, a nice juxtaposition against my masculine presentation. There is no equation for non-binary-ness. It isn't a matter of adding just enough femininity and just enough masculinity. It's about something that goes beyond all that altogether. But, in that moment, it was nice to let masculinity and femininity swirl, and, in so doing, awaken something more, other nodes on the network of gender, feelings of freedom and selfhood.
I have many friends who have made physical changes to their bodies so that they better represent who they are. They are strong, they are beautiful, they are powerful. I have never had the impulse to do this through medicine or surgery, though. For me, my pleasure in being non-binary stems from what I'll call the "secrets." They're the internal knowledge that I'm doing something to feel more...me. I started my gender exploration as a cosplayer, where non-binary identities can remain a little more secret because gender-bending costumes can be viewed as just that, costumes that may in fact say nothing about someone's actual gender identity. For me, though, my gender-bending was my way of saying more about my non-binary interior. When I moved that exploration outside of cosplay, I started looking for all the other ways we costume, and all the ways, in there, that I could push and prod and question. I'm not sure if that will unfold into bigger manifestations, but right now I'm just fascinated by the details of gender that one might overlook.
So when I ran "feminine" in Bill-et, I found yet another one of those potentially liberating nooks of gender, and I was more than happy to cozy up to it, if even only for a moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment