missing

For a year and a half, the most important thing in my life was dance. I went to any and every dance class or social I got a sniff of, and as many festivals as I could afford (and some I couldn't). All of my friends were dancers, and I went to everything, dance-related or not, that they invited me to. It was my life's infrastructure. Well, I'm never free on Tuesdays or Thursdays, probably not Wednesdays either. Last Friday of every month is out. Second Sunday of every month is out. I don't know how healthy or sensible that was, but I was busy and happy and had no desire for change.

I've lost that recently. I went for well over a year without missing a single one of my Tuesday classes, and now I go to maybe half, if that. I haven't been to Thursday classes in months. I go to socials infrequently, and usually leave early. I sold my ticket for the one festival I was planning to go to. It's even hard to enjoy stupid bouncy dancing in my bedroom at the moment. I don't quite know how to cope without that, because it's one of my default comfort behaviours and has been since I was a kid, but dancing just isn't fun anymore.

Maybe it's the dance. I've got stuck. In terms of steps and moves, there's not a huge amount more I can learn, and in terms of technique, I've been learning from the same (excellent) teachers for two years, and if they haven't been able to explain it to me by now I'm probably not going to get it from them. Maybe I'm bored of the moves and the music and it's draining my love for dance as a whole.

Maybe it's the scene. Where we once had a group of people learning stuff and having fun, we now have competitions and auditions and troupes and teachers in training. People practise and rehearse rather than dance. Teachers pick favourites and don't know how to hide it. Friends and acquaintances have long, detailed conversations in which they try to pin down their exact dance level in relation to other people we know, and discuss dance like it's our profession, not our hobby. Maybe that's been sucking all the fun out of it.

Maybe it's my body. I'm frustrated at my limitations, limitations other people don't seem to have because they came into this dance with years of learning technique in a different discipline, rather than what I did, which was just show up to a class after spending the vast majority of my adult life sitting on my arse thinking about aubergines. I'm analysing every move I make, trying to persuade myself to take up other dances to get this technique stuff and make my dancing look prettier, so maybe I'm sucking all the fun out of it.

Maybe it's my priorities. When I started dancing I had a dying relationship, almost no friends in the city, and an ache for interaction that had been growing for years. Two years later I have a very healthy relationship and friends that I believe I would keep even if I never danced another step again, so maybe the need is gone. Maybe I never really loved dance as much as I thought I did.

Maybe it's my head. Anxiety is getting in the way of a lot of things right now. Maybe that's all this is, and when I learn how to control it, dancing will be fun again.

It might be any, or all, of these things. There isn't really a fix for any of them, at least not within my power right now, which leaves me without a passion acting as the driver for my life. I'm not good at handling life without that driver. For some reason I can't drive it myself, so it either goes careening off into some bushes or I freak out and stop the whole thing. I wrote in November about needing a new thing, and I've tried several since then. I've enjoyed them all enough to keep going with them; I have made an improbable number of cushion covers this month. But none of them have gripped me in the way I'm looking for. I think about what I've done and where I could go next - dressmaking! Kickboxing belts! - and I don't feel enthused, just scared and a bit sad.

There's something missing. I've tried to fill the empty place but it doesn't want to be filled. Is that because my love of dance will come back, somehow, and doesn't want anything else to crowd it out, or is this a bigger problem? I don't know. Either way, it kind of hurts.