It's Good To Be Bad

Not that kind of bad ;)

I used to love to dance.

At lunchtime, when I was in primary school (elementary school for my American friends), I and a gaggle of other preteen girls would gather on the grass outside our classroom and choreograph, practice, and perform entire dance routines.

There is a picture of this somewhere, but I can't find it between all the moving countries I’ve done, so you’ll have to imagine it based on this photo from around the same time.

I also had a brief period as a ballet dancer, which ended after the teacher told me I wasn’t good enough to sit the Grade 1 ballet exam I had coming up.

Her doubt in me fuelled an epic week of nonstop home practice, after which I sat the exam, got top of the class, and then quit.

In hindsight, that’s probably where my hunger to prove people wrong when they say I can’t do something began.

From there, I entered that wonderful stage of adolescence where everything about your body feels awkward. By the time I emerged from that in high school, my love of music had morphed into performing it, not moving to it.

I started playing bass just before I turned 15, and for almost 30 years, I felt comfortable moving to a beat only when I had a bass in my hands.

I move a lot on stage and often feel like I’m dancing as I play, but I take that bass away, and unless there’s some inhibition-annihilating substance involved, I want to melt into the floor and disappear forever.

I’ve always admired dancers’ ability to be utterly in tune with their bodies and harness that physical power so beautifully. I wanted to do that, too, but I just never felt comfortable moving my body to music unless I was involved in creating the music myself.

But not anymore, my friends!

A few months ago, while zombie scrolling on social media, an ad for a dance fitness app popped up. The trial was $3 a month, so I clicked buy before I could talk myself out of it.

I ignored it for a month, and then a few weeks ago, I started a hip-hop-inspired fitness program.

Every morning, while the cats watch me like I’ve lost my mind, I’ve been step-touching, body-waving, disco arm rolling, popping, and locking, and it is SO fun.

Being a musician is sometimes considered a disability when learning to dance because we’re too in our heads about the beat (according to the nice man I was two-stepping with one night who noted how terrible I was and said, “Ahhh, that explains it” when I said I was a bass player).

But as the heavy bass-driven hip-hop beat cranks, the professional bass player in me who has spent years continuing to play in time through back pain, heat stroke, blisters, and whatever else the gigging world could throw at me, simply refuses to let my body stop moving to the beat. And that has made it a great workout, if nothing else.

Pretty inspirational quotes on Instagram often encourage us to reconnect with the things we did as kids, and there’s a part of me who is probably enjoying this because it’s something I did when I was young.

But the other part is enjoying that I’m finally allowing myself to be bad at something that I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time.

Of course, the irony is that now that I’ve finally accepted that I’ll never be a good dancer and started dancing anyway, I’m not quite so bad anymore.