Always feels a bit weird to write about the big stuff here, which is why it generally doesn't happen very often.  Been busy too, which probably contributes to it, but I feel like no matter what kind of time I'm going through, a return to something I've always done is always healing.  It's one of my "potions", as I told someone recently.

I know that everything will be okay...that's something that I didn't quite believe in once, but I guess I do now.  Age and experience will do that, I guess, but also some degree of...self-reliance?  No, more like, faith in my relationship with my self, I guess.  It's not quite so much that I just don't need anybody else, more that I've learned that in the absence of those "vital" things, I can still give myself the strength, care, energy, even excitement, to live on and "fight" another day.

It's been a bit of a challenge to fit everything in, recently, but this was something I already knew was coming, saw it a mile away ever since I thought about the different things that were coming my way this spring.  I guess...somehow, things kinda happened this way to me last spring, too, haha, even though it was a different (similar?) set of things that happened to me.  This time with the Bunny Burn, the trip to New York, my GCC dance, in addition to Fanime, and the other stuff.

My GCC dance went okay, I rested a lot easier after having taken care of that, after having tried to plan out my lesson and figure out how to deliver it.  It wasn't an event that really popped off, which is interesting because somehow I feel like I already had an intuitive sense that that would happen; I found myself wondering how many people would actually show up, and whether I was putting in too many songs for my setlist (ended up cutting out a small handful on the fly...).

That aspect was like, maybe kinda disappointing?  But I can't really =feel= disappointed, I feel like this event, along with the event that I went to a week earlier, made me feel an "actual" sense of community in the dance scene for maybe some of the first times, ever.  So, big milestone for me, really, I think.

Community is this interesting nebulous word/feeling.  I think I've talked before about a sense of community as "a place you belong" but how that can both be "I'm similar to all of these people", versus "I'm different than all of these people but I feel like that difference is respected and celebrated".  It's easy for me, (and moreover, all of us) to feel "different" or "other", just by the very nature of being in our own two shoes and not those of anybody else...I've wondered at times, whether it's futile to seek out groups of people where you feel like you're really the same as everyone else.  But at the same time, there is something about being with people who "get it", even if their exact understanding or tastes or beliefs are different.  I was talking about this with a close friend the other day, about how some people are just "___" people (for various variants of "___").

I'm not sure I've felt that way about dance, really.  Like, yeah, there is sort of a shared appreciation of social dancing, but the exact ways in which people appreciate and enjoy it and what they aspire to is...really so different across people.  But there is this other sense of community too, the sense of being supported.  =That= is what I felt for the first time in my umpteen years of being with social dance, and I was thinking back, really thinking back on all of the times in which I "could have used" that support but just =couldn't= bring it into my life because I was just both incapable and unwilling.

There were countless other times when I was struggling with things in my life and went to dance, and out of those times there were many instances where people tried their best to connect with me, tried to extend a hand or bring a smile or just...going out on a limb trying to do something.  They probably weren't certain what exactly I needed but I think I wasn't really either and I think the thing is that almost =nothing= at that point really would have gotten through to me, I just wasn't ready, wasn't able.  I wanted to be saved, to be rescued, but more as a concept than as an actual thing that would happen.  I didn't have the words to connect with others nor the experience to receive that connection.

It's been a long time since then...but, I mean, it always feels good to try at something again and again and again and finally find some success, right?  That is, after all, the way that I really try to live my life.  And somehow, eventually, it may bear fruit.