When did you stop dancing?

Remembering the body as a site of pleasure

Desire Lines 2.0 is where I chronicle my living experiment of desire in queer midlife. Sometimes that means I talk about health issues (including hysterectomy and living with a lifelong condition), menopause, and other ‘life stuff’ as well as both the presence and absence of intimacy and desire.

I choose to write about queer, midlife sex, desire, love and lust to offer alternatives to mainstream narratives: offering perspectives and stories that might not otherwise be brought out into the light.

Thank you for joining me.

Photo by Guenifi Ouassim on Unsplash

Yesterday…

The soft, overgrown grass broke my fall. I rolled a little way down the slope until gravity beat momentum, leaving me on my side, knees drawn up in a foetal position, grateful I could still see the path above me. Heaving onto my hands and knees, I crawled back to the path. By the time I got there, my partner had reached me, offering a hand to help pull me to my feet.

“Are you okay? What happened?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” I gestured to the imprint of my body in the flattened grass below us. “It was a soft landing. There was a hole in the path. I was figuring out how to step around it when I lost my footing. I’m having a wobbly day.”

I’m having a wobbly day.

This phrase has become useful shorthand for the days when my legs are like unbendable concrete pillars attached to my waist, and I feel like I’m walking on a sea of rolling pebbles while wearing ice skates.

Yeah, those days.

Thankfully, those are the worst days. And the worst days aren’t every day.*

She held my hand for the remainder of the walk, and I agreed that, yes, I’d bring my walking poles next time, and yes, it was better to have them and not need them than the other way around.

I’d had a near miss earlier on the walk, too. If I hadn’t grabbed hold of a nearby tree, the root-studded, impacted earth would have been much more unforgiving than the gentle grass. So much for our relaxing Saturday morning outing.

Later that day, we made out.

For the first time in too many days, I felt the heavy rigidity of my body become fluid. My hips pulsed, my body writhed; I felt strong and capable. My body danced with pleasure.

I didn’t have to think about how to move; I could simply allow it to happen.

~~~

Nearly two decades ago, I went to ‘5Rhythms’ dancing. Devised by Gabrielle Roth in the late 1970s, this dance style has no choreography. Instead, it’s described as a moving meditation; structures designed to help you be in the moment, still the mind, and connect with your body and community.

I experienced 5Rhythms as liberating and non-performative, and I can just about remember how my body felt awake with pleasure afterwards.

But in the intervening years, my dancing has become limited to an occasional hand jive in the kitchen while I wait for the kettle to boil. Sometimes my partner joins me and we step and twirl together – no music required; she lets me set the pace.

~~~

In her book, Maps to Ecstasy: Teachings of an Urban Shaman, Gabrielle Roth shares this wisdom:

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: “When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?”

Gabrielle Roth

I can’t remember exactly when these things stalled for me, but I’m pretty sure it was around the time my body started to shift towards menopause.

It’s not just menopause; other ‘life’ things have happened in this last decade or so. I’ve had to relearn the landscape of my body and my emotions over and over again. Going through two major surgeries, navigating illnesses and bereavements, and simply living through the (multiple) global challenges of this time have all meant I am not the same person I was in my younger years.

Perhaps surprisingly, I’m fairly confident that my body still wants to be a site of pleasure.

Because, along with those days when everything hurts and I feel like I’m turning to stone, there are times when I experience myself in a different way. Although often fleeting, these moments are powerful.

When I’m weightless in a wild sea, tasting the salt on my tongue, and feeling the brine between my thighs.

When I strip in the middle of the day, so that I can run my palms over my breasts and belly before lubricating my fingers and casting spells on my cunt.

When the attentive touch of my lover makes my atoms vibrate at such a frequency, I become molten and free from the constraints of mere mortal flesh.

These are the times when my body stops being somewhere I want to escape from and becomes a place I want to inhabit.

~~~

In my younger years, I used to faint whenever a doctor or nurse stuck a needle in me. (I fainted with every one of my piercings, too.)

Now, after Covid jabs, blood tests, and general anaesthetics, I’ve become much more robust about being punctured.

So much so, that I’ve finally been brave enough to try acupuncture. I’m tentatively hopeful that it’s helping my back pain and mobility. Mostly, it feels like it’s freeing up something that was very, very guarded and stuck.**

As I practice my physiotherapy exercises, I use my memories of my fluidity to encourage me to keep going.

I know the health condition I live with will always be something I have to manage, but I also know that the trajectory of my transition through menopause is not set in stone. There will come a point when my hormones – and I – feel rebalanced.***

I imagine it will feel like a peaceful sigh.

I imagine I will feel my power, potency, and pleasure in new and expanded ways.

I imagine myself dancing.

~~~

*I need to acknowledge those people who have way more hard days than easy ones. The folks with long Covid, chronic illnesses, and bodies or minds that aren’t adequately supported and celebrated by a society fuelled by ableism and capitalism.

**I have a dragon living in the cave of my sacrum. I have lots of dragon stories to tell.

***I’m doing menopause without HRT. I have very good reasons for this decision, but sometimes it’s hard when the mainstream narrative is focused on HRT being a panacea.

~~~

What happens to your sex life when ‘life’ happens?

In Sex Meets Life, 17 international authors share the challenges and celebrations of navigating change.

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