notes on rest

healing, joy, and reclamation: dancing in this trans and queer body

May 09, 2023

Hello my dearest friends!

I’ve been working on this newsletter since we last spoke, but in all honesty, I’m deeply tired. My brain is mired by fog, my body aches, and it feels like a hand is clutching my heart in its fist.

When I began to draft this newsletter a few weeks ago, I wrote a dramatic introductory monologue detailing my love for rambling around in the middle of the night. Sipping my corn silk tea, listening to sounds outside my window, and revisiting the books I set aside to focus on work and grad school applications. The sense of comfort, the joy, and the relief in this space that nurtures physical, mental, and emotional rest, is so precious. These moments cohabitate with sadness and despair and fear—accepting each in a space of refuge—allowing rest to become a restorative ritual for healing, surviving, inhaling and exhaling.

While I was using the monologue as an approachable artistic interlude into a dense conversation on theory, I haven’t been able to move beyond the introduction to continue said theoretical investigation on themes of labor, capitalism, and rest that I’ve been thinking through recently. I couldn’t move past the irony of forcing myself to sit down and engage in this form of labor despite my very present, very debilitating feelings of exhaustion, anxiety, and grief.

I am yearning for rest. My body is demanding it. So I’m practicing the embrace and honor of this need.

learning to rest: dancing again

Rest has always been something I struggle with, but I’m learning to approach this practice by listening to what I need, when I need it, in ways that are accessible. Sometimes, this looks like laying in bed for an entire day to scroll through Tumblr, taking breaks to eat. Sometimes it’s calling a friend. Other times, I feel restless—I feel the urge to get up and move around.

Movement has always been an essential form of expression, healing, and rest for me. Growing up, I danced anywhere from five to seven days a week for fifteen years. Eventually, this too became a source of pain and burnout for me—my muscles, joints, and bones were hurting, and I lost the sense of joy moving in this body. As I came into my queerness, I realized that although I love dance and movement, the gendered nature of performance was harming my wellbeing. I soon understood that in this dissonance of feeling grounded in movement yet feeling uncomfortable being observed, watched, and perceived through a gendered lens, I was experiencing gender dysphoria. Performing femininity—specifically the form of racialized-exoticized femininity I was subjected to as a mixed-Asian person—felt violent, especially since I didn’t have the language to understand why I felt like the odd one out in a room full of girls. Until I started to learn about trans and non-binary identities and broader queer histories, I hadn’t realized how much of a role growing up as a dancer contributed to the shame I internalized for being queer and trans, given how feminine ballet demands one to be in gesture, mannerism, and appearance. For years, I found no comfort or joy moving in a body I didn’t feel at home in, or a body and self I didn’t yet accept, embrace, or love.

Though I’m no longer dancing in an organized community like I used to, I’ve been gradually incorporating dance into my everyday ritual, reclaiming this body, attempting to transcend institutionalized, colonized, gendered, and racialized practices of movement. I’m dancing around whenever, wherever, to music that feels so liberating, so gut wrenching, so joyous, so healing, that I can’t help but feel like I’m stepping toward something more. Something beyond myself, but also into myself and who I’m becoming.

finding joy: dancing to queer music

I’ve been listening to MUNA’s most recent album, MUNA, over and over and over (MUNA is a queer indie-pop band, and I’m in love with each member, respectfully). Each song offers therapeutic reflections on former relationships, declarations of transformation, the fluidity of identity, moving through grief, and queer joy. Every time I listen to What I Want, I’m transported to a queer bar where I’m dancing, screaming, singing with friends and kin. I can’t imagine anything I long for more than this. So when I’m dancing, I’m moving around, I’m bumping into my desk and accidentally knocking over a jar of colored pencils onto the floor, I feel unstoppable. I feel connected to the queer and trans collective, past and present. I feel in touch with my past self that found so much joy and purpose in dancing, all while moving around with a new sense of agency and freedom in this presently trans and queer body. I’m dreaming of dancing and being surrounded by community, entrenched in an overwhelming sense of togetherness.

Through this practice, this reclamation of dance, of being present in my body, and finding reason to hope for a future where I can “dance in the middle of a gay bar”, as MUNA sings, I begin to feel rested in the sense that my soul and body and mind feel at ease. I can breathe and actually feel my muscles relax from their tensed state. My lungs expand to a fuller capacity, and my vision becomes so clear.

to share with you

I want to share with you some other things I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to these past few months, all of which are planting seeds within me for future exploration, curiosity, investigation, action, and healing.