The SOJD is on hiatus. The Celtics dance team has gone mixed-gender this year, and he is one of the first men they signed. If any of you are the sort who watch sportsball and actually pay attention to the non-sportsball segments of the broadcast, have fun trying to guess which one of the guys did his best to teach me hip hop.
He says it is temporary. He swears that teaching is "necessary for [his] mental health", and that he's going to figure out how to run single-session pop-ups whenever he can. In theory, he'll go back to twice-weekly classes in April if our team sucks, June if we don't.
I don't like not having that class. It was useful in a technical training sense, but a lot of classes are; I picked up two others that will teach me equally useful things. They're fine. My schedule is fine. Everything's fine, and I hate it. I've spent the past two weeks trying to come up with a reasonable career-based argument for why I'm at such a loss right now, and I can't, because there isn't one.
I miss that class because I felt wanted. And it's taken me this long to articulate that because it feels like a petty thought to have. There are a million other people who have been perfectly lovely to me, and extended a welcome as soon as I asked for one. It shouldn't matter that someone walked up and started talking to me first for once, but it does. I feel ungrateful and childish for caring.
It took me forever to figure out what he was up to, because normally people are only that persistent about talking to me when they want something. He didn't seem to want special treatment from the desk and he was way too gay to be angling for a date, so I didn't know what the fuck. The other thing people normally want out of me is emotional work, because when you're known to be generally unflappable it makes you look like a great repository for everyone's trauma-thoughts, but it actually took me months to convince him that when I asked "how are you?" that was an actual question and not a social noise, so.
He didn't want me to do anything for him. I eventually wound up doing a lot of things for him, but I hadn't done any of them yet, and neither of us had any idea I was going to. He didn't have to talk to me at all. Most of the friends I have now are people who could not avoid making my acquaintance. We worked together or volunteered together or did a show together, or something. We're friends now because we like each other, but we only figured that out because we were required to interact at some point whether we wanted to or not. The SOJD could have just waved and walked past me. But he just wanted to chat, so he did.
How pathetic am I being that this actually matters?
I also felt very seen in that class, which is a whole 'nother can of worms. I have a love/hate relationship with attracting attention in classes, especially from the instructor. On the one hand, I understand it's supposed to be flattering, but on the other hand, I learn far better if I'm just fed a whole bunch of information and then left alone to sort through it, and I know from experience that attention is eventually going to end in me being deputized. I've picked up two other classes to fill in some hours, and both of them have already either started using me as an example. It irks me, but not enough to say anything; explaining why I have so much baggage around it is pretty much never worth the trouble. I just accept that if I want to take classes I'm going to have to put up with being the demonstration model in much the same way I accept that if I want to leave my house I'm going to have to put on real pants. It's just one of life's many annoyances.
Like life's other annoyances, you don't realize how much energy you put into dealing with it until you don't have to. The SOJD likes to pull people who are doing well up to the front row, because watching them succeed makes him happy. He tried it with me exactly once. I asked him, "Why am I up here?" he said, "Do you not like being up front?" I said "NO I DO NOT," he said, "Okay, you can go back where you were." Fin. I eventually drifted closer to the front of my own accord, once the mirror was more help than distraction, but he never brought it up again. I've never felt like I could have that conversation with an instructor, much less that it would solve more problems than it caused.
A lot of things have panned out like that. Fundamentally, I was just grateful to finally be in a room run by someone who Gets It, for certain very specific values of It that confound most other people. A lot of it has to do with understanding that yes, I am always in some amount of pain, and no, that doesn't always mean it would be better if I stopped doing whatever I'm doing. I can choose to do things that hurt, if doing them is more important to me than not being in pain, but that means I forfeit the right to have my pain acknowledged, because mentioning it just makes other people concerned to the point where they interfere. But I might decide that I just can't that day, and that decision isn't always going to be consistent, because it depends on a million bizarre and esoteric factors that I could not even begin to unpack.
I've only had to bail on class a couple of times. The last time I did it, I told him "love y'all, but if I keep going I'm gonna throw up on someone's shoes." He laughed at me -- which was the correct response, because I was being flippant -- but also let me go without kicking up a fuss about whether I was okay enough to get myself home. I've seen him do the normal-person thing when other people have mishaps in class, so I know he knows what most people expect. Having my own self-assessment respected by default is not something I expect, because it happens so rarely.
A part of me is sorry that he Gets It, because this is stuff you can't understand unless you live it for yourself. But I'm not responsible for other people having bad experiences decades before I met them, and now that they are where they are in life, I'm glad when I run into them.
I hate not having that space. I hate not having a class where I don't have to make sure I look 'okay' so I can fly under the radar. I do warn most dance teachers that I'm very bendy and will probably make a lot of mechanically-puzzling choices, but that's not the same as being able to say, "Wow, that really fucking hurts. Hang on a minute and I'll do it again," and not have to deal with all the fallout.
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