The picture above is a Bharatanatyam dancer. Image above comes from Pexels.com.
Content warning: hostile political environment, trauma
It has been a few months since I made my last post. As I had indicated, dance classes eat up a lot of my free time. My vacation visiting family and friends had also been more busy than anticipated. All the same: life in the new year of 2026 had started on a rather positive note even while the world deigns to go on fire.
Relationship Unplanned
I am going onto my third month of a relationship that began to blossom on the night of our Winter Showcase 2025, on the most auspicious 13th month of December.
This had not been planned one bit; I had planned to ‘see’ about dating again after I had my DIY Hell concluded and had time to sit down and figure out a dating site to meet people. Being aroflux, or at this point, I am finding likely some form or gray or demiomniromantic, I just had not felt any sense of romance for a long time. One person I felt romantic interest in had been someone I decided was not compatible with me and they happened to be an old flame, who parted ways with me as still one of my best friends, but I had decided we would not work out.
Then as my valkyra would put it: life happened (and happens) when you are making plans.
Said valkyra, happened to be someone I enjoyed conversations with in our classes together. I went to a few shows, not expecting to see her there and talked there, as well. At one point, I left a post-dance class gathering because it felt like something had been scheduled of which I had no part and she noticed I left. She reached out and offered to have coffee sometime after we attended a veil and candle workshop. We did just that, and just enjoyed talking.
Fast forward a few organic hang outs, and then the performance where we realized we had some dance chemistry, we end up having a deeper conversation that same night. And you can imagine what happened from there.
I definitely feared the honeymoon phase of initial days dating clouding my judgment, but we had gone through so much in this time and we definitely had seen eachother when not our best. We somehow worked through the few misunderstandings we had more seamlessly than I did in any other relationship in the past. She had witnessed a recent nervous breakdown after I ramped up my dance practice and returned to work after holiday break at the same time and she still holds space for me (and I try to do the same for her).
I do not know how long any of us have to live in this country, with how things had been going. My comfort in all of this beyond finding joy in my dance practice and community surrounding, has been the fact I am not going to face what comes next alone.
Remembering Myself More
Being with my partner, I per the quote of a famous Cure song, “Feel young again.” I am remembering all the years I spent in the goth scene in the past, and how over time I stopped adorning the aesthetic as much whether due to work or that part of me that felt excluded in my younger years because my skin did not “get white enough.” Knowing what I do now, that problematic thought came from the white supremacy infiltration into alternative subcultures, something reflected in the value of lighter skin in a space that historically used ethnic aesthetic and drew inspiration from pagan backgrounds.
I refuse to use skin product for the sake of lighter skin now while embracing my natural palette and picking (and mixing) warm shades when doing make-up based on the time of the year and how much I melanated. Goth per Shonalika (they/them) is romance found in horror. That can be expounded in finding beauty in darker, described “ugly” places. It means acknowledging the darker sides of life without stigmatizing the darkness whence we all had come from. In no small irony, the goth community embraces and venerates darkness, yet cannot seem to make it easy for those born with darker skin, whether they be Black or Brown (or “brown looking/seeming”) bodies. This is a legacy I refuse to continue.
Nostalgia mixed with learning and embracing new artists and more folksy music that fits in the independent goth scene for pagans and people of color, combined with the dancing, has me feeling more myself than I had ever been. Now I wish to amplify the voices of those who had long resented the whitewashing of the history of the goth subculture. Black and Brown people started the very trends, including the multiple piercings, designs, and more while also having spearheaded movements meant to challenge the very systems white supremacists wish to enforce and embed in the scene. I want their voices amplified and for no one to feel they cannot enjoy the romance found in horror because their natural palette.
Even with the world burning around me, and both Palestinian and Iranian lives dying because of despotism, fundamentalism, and colonial elements (not to mention all that in my own country), I am finding moments of joy in my remembering myself and why I am here. This feels both mental and also, in its own way, spiritual; even ancestral in a way. I am finding myself in staying with who I am more, I have felt more whole than I ever had. Through returning to where I had found joy, from the goth subculture to dance, I am also finding myself through life coming through even while I make all the plans in the world.
I am also feeling myself closer and closer to my ancestors, whether the Tai-Vietnamese or the Scottish-Irish ones.
That also comes with its own unpleasantness and discomforts…
Trauma (Re)surfacing
Wounds and triggers I thought had been gone had returned. Sometimes, I am able to trace it to which triggers and wounds; other times, I am confused. I started to do some research on this after introspection, realizing I had been not only fighting my avoidant-personality tendencies with my relationship but also had drastically increased my dance activity. In doing this, I learned from various research posts and articles on dance but also from Nurjahan Boulden‘s accounts how bellydancing can release trauma stored within. While this can to an extent apply for physical activity and the mind and body connection, it seems bellydance in particular can do this.
I am now tracing back a conversation I had with a world fusion instructor who learned from under the Salimpour school and Rachel Brice and how she saw I had complex post-traumatic stress disorder well before I had an official diagnosis. She alluded to how such dance can help me on my recovery. At one point, I ceased participation in the dance because I ran into too much orientalism and misappropriation, particularly by cishet white women only interested in their fifteen minutes on stage.
That while understandable and in ways justified, I realize a mistake on my part.
Knowing what I do now, I would have continued the dance. My Bharatanatyam instructor also had said similar about the dance making one do deep, grueling work and also a healing experience. While Bharatanatyam and bellydance are different, I know a number of bellydance styles utilize Bharatanatyam. I am realizing how much I miss the mudras in Indian Classical Dance and Bollywood, the latter of which I had far more experience with than the former. Needless to say, I had returned to the dance. My dance. However that looks.
I will not make the same mistake again. I will dance until I die.
In my dancing, and with the community surrounding, I am learning aspects of myself I would not have by just making a living at my job and partaking in the gaming community. Because of my DIY Hell and the dance, I have had almost no time for gaming lately, but I am finding myself able to do things I did not think I could do months ago. My awareness of myself and the demons that deign to trap my ego into further ignorance had also increased the more I move. Opportunities to tell stories in the dance that may speak truth to power also had followed my return to the scene.
The dance must go on. I also have much to speak about regarding ancestral traumas, childhood trauma, and the legacy that being a child of a postcolonial background means. For now, though, I will end this post.
Please be kind to yourselves. Importantly: do not let the fiends ruling the world deprive you of your capacity for joy.
—Arya
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