For the last week, I’ve been getting up every morning and starting my day by dancing. I put on my headphones, turn up the volume and dance about my flat to my favourite songs, and then I post a picture on my Instagram story with a link to a song that gave me particular joy that morning. Following some slightly snarky DMs from random strangers, I thought I’d explain why. I’m not sure I owe such people an explanation, but here it is none the less.
Every morning when I wake up, there is a moment when I remember again what’s happening in the world and what lies ahead of me. It reminds me of when my Dad died and every morning it felt like I lost him all over again as I struggled to wrap my head around the permanence of that loss. Every day it felt impossible to fathom and although this pandemic is a short-term crisis with longer term implications rather than a permanent loss, it feels similarly difficult to manage. Before Dad died, he told me that when people remembered him, he wanted them to laugh and dance. In the weeks following his death, I used to get up every morning and dance for a while to his favourite music. Fortunately, I’m such a bad dancer that I inadvertently fulfilled both of his wishes with that one action. These daily dances gave me a moment when I felt connected to him, didn’t take myself too seriously, abandoned myself to the joy of music and let myself be happy despite it all.
One of the reasons I’ve returned to that routine now is because of one of the unexpected side effects of this approach. After Dad died, I would remind myself that it wasn’t impossible to bear – as long as I had the strength to seek out joy every morning despite my grief, nothing else could be considered impossible. That’s why I’m doing it again now, and I post a photo so that my friends know I’m still going despite it all. They are wonderful people who worry about me and everyone has enough on, so it’s a way of checking in on a daily basis without rehashing the things we’re all worried about.
It’s not always easy and I’m not insulated from this situation. I’ve lost income, my Mum’s health is at very serious risk and everything I’ve worked for over the last few years is teetering on the brink of collapse every day. I feel the same as everyone else, I can only watch my life fall apart while I wait indoors, on my own. Most of the time, I feel like I’m screaming from inside a sound-proofed room. Some days, my half hour of dancing is the only time I’m happy all day, and other days it’s a struggle to even find that.
If you’re looking for a way to cope, I can recommend a good old fashioned boogie, but if you’re finding another way through it all, you do you. We’re not in competition as to whose life is the worst – and who really wants to win that competition? – or who has the best way of dealing with it. I don’t know that my approach is particularly wise. It exposes my often uncool tastes in music to the world, my colleagues now know that the nice lady who is good at writing and comes into the office once a week looking reasonably smart listens to a lot of angry, heavy rock, and it’s quite clear that music made after the nineties barely registers with me. I look resolutely awful in every picture and it’s going to become a documented experiment in what happens when you make an already pale redhead stay indoors for three months. All I know for sure is that my Dad would tell me that now is not the time to turn the music down. Now more than ever, we must turn it up to eleven. Rock on.