At 25, I learned to dance with my two left feet
To dance is to move. But to move—does it mean “to live”?
I have seen dead people at a couple of wakes I have attended. As a child, I used to fear peeking through the inner glass door of a casket. I thought that once I looked at the dead body, it would move. Eventually, as I aged and wised up, I earned the courage to look at dead bodies. The crippling fear that restricted me from paying my respects was replaced by pity once I looked at it.
But it had a name. It had once been a child, a friend, and maybe a sibling, a partner, and a parent. It had been persons whom I knew and loved. And so, when it was alive, it moved. When it had a name and a life, I am certain that it danced and pranced and frolicked and swayed. It is a certainty to say that it danced when it had a life.
To answer the question: When it danced, it moved, and so, does that mean it had a life? Yes.
“This is our time to dance,” Ren McCormack said in a speech in Footloose (1984) to rally the legalization of dancing in their small town.
“It is our way of celebrating life. It’s the way it was in the beginning. It’s the way it has always been. That’s the way it should be now,” Ren preached, taking as reference the story of King David in the Bible who “danced before the Lord.”
The film was made almost two decades before I was born, and 25 years after I emerged into this world, it is still an absolute truth that this is our time to dance. It has always been the “now,” which is the time to dance—from the beginning to the present.
After a decade of foolishly dancing to Lorde’s newly released Ribs in my childhood room when I was 12, I eventually faced one of my fears that resonated with the song: I got older.
The moment I no longer felt accountable only for myself, I still moved and danced in my own way. I admit, however, that I was never good at it. Amid dancing, I had moments of falling onto the ground and sustaining a sprain. After all, I danced with my two left feet.
At 23, I finally had my dream job, but a few months later, I was fired for underperforming. At 24, I was kicked out after my first year in law school for failing two major subjects. At 25, my long-term relationship ended because I refused to yield for something less than what I wanted and needed.
But as Solange yelled at the Sydney Opera House in 2018 performing Losing You, “Let’s dance!” So, I did.
But I had been dancing all along. I danced with fire and in the rain, simultaneously. When I was fired, I decided to reroute into another pursuit because I no longer held the pressure to live up to my own childhood dream job. When I was kicked out of law school, I immediately enrolled in a school willing to give me a second chance. When my three-year relationship ended, I said my piece, moved on, and never looked back.
The dreams and futures and great loves did not end when it felt like they ended at first. It just means those were not the dreams, futures, and great loves I was supposed to end up with. After all, dreams, futures, and great loves—they are not supposed to end. Whatever is meant to be will stay and persist into fruition.
To say that “At 25, I learned to dance” is a lie. But to say that “At 25, I learned to dance despite having two left feet” is precise. This time, I learned to forgive myself for my shortcomings and accepted the repercussions of my fallibility. I am humbled and privileged to have failures in life.
“We will never be this young again,” I told my best friend Lila one evening spent drinking, smoking, and flirting with guys in Makati, while we took to our young, beating hearts what Candi Staton foretold in the song Young Hearts Run Free.
I went home that night blasting Robyn’s Dancing On My Own on my earphones, feeling the warm summer wind of Manila in my Angkas ride. “I hope to have more nights like this,” I wrote in my diary that evening. “Nights where I could love my life, embrace my youth, and live it—truly live it.”
After all, I am still 25. I am young, shameless, and hot. I have my moments of joy and despair—either way, I will dance. I will move through and past it, but I refuse to be caught in stagnation.
I just try my best to dance everything out in ways I know how. And maybe that is how it is and how it should be: I may not make the best steps or have the rhythm in my body to move with sublimity, and yet I still try. I still show up, strive to rise out of every occasion, and give what I can, as much as humanly possible.
I will dance with my two left feet, no matter what, either splendidly or wanting of grace. Whatever it is, I will dance and dance and dance. Whatever comes out of it, it will only mean that I had moved, and thus, I lived.
The lyrics of the songs I listened to may be sorrowful and downcast, but the beat does not have to be. So long as I can dance to the tune, I will live.
