Sometimes I feel like I learned to dance before I could even walk. I spent a good portion of my childhood blasting music in the basement and pretending like I was a background dancer for Christina Aguilera. Inevitably, my love and passion for dance started early on. I only dreamed of being a famous dancer; it was never something I ever wanted to pursue as a career. My childish heart wanted to be an astronaut. How ironic -- without gravity in space, the universe would have been my stage to dance around on!
When I reflect on my memories of dance, it always comes back to the people I got to dance with and how dance became my best friend. Over the years, dance allowed me to build relationships with many people. When I was in elementary school, I had a friend who lived down the street; we loved to do everything together. Being Christina Aguilera’s imaginary back up dancers had to be one of my favorite things to do with her. It was silly. We would come up with these routines together and spend hours in my basement blasting her CD through my little Sony CD player. It must have been the feeling of not having a care in the world, yet feeling more free than ever while twirling and jumping around with each other that made me fall in love with dance. I didn’t know it at the time, but now when I look back on my life, that age was the time in my life where I was suffering the most pain. I was just too young and naïve to even realize it. So, dancing became my way of escape, it became my safe place, it became the time of day I got to be a kid and not face the reality of what my life really was.
A few years later, my best friend and I got warped into being classically trained dancers. Though I enjoyed training and learning Bharatnatyam, I think the two of us enjoyed being mischievous and teasing our Guru (teacher). Whatever the case or reason for the two of us coming together in my basement every week to endlessly stomp our feet to the well clapped out beat by our Guru, again this became my escape. To my childhood best friend, who danced by me through the most psychologically challenging years of my life, you made me love it that much more.
In the summer time, I would go stay at my uncle's house for a few days and my eldest cousin would teach me these dances to Bollywood songs that she had choreographed. We would laugh and dance all while our brothers would tease us and imitate us. I never thought dance would be anything more than a way for me to be free and express my joy and innocence.
It wasn’t until high school that dance became a way for me to channel my anger. I started competitive dancing in high school and the first few years, it was for fun, but one day during my junior year, everything changed. I changed. I wasn’t so happy anymore. I had been assaulted in my own room -- the room in which I used to blast music on my iPod and aimlessly dance around it, the room in which I took part in my favorite activity. I didn’t want to eat anymore. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t even want to get up to go to school, mainly because I couldn’t sleep at night. The only thing that forced me to wake up, go to school, smile at everyone I saw and pretend to be fine was knowing that at the end of the day I had dance practice.
At this point in my life, I had picked up a new dance style: Bhangra. Till this day, this is the style of dance I feel most in touch with. Perhaps it’s because this was one of the most difficult times of my life. Perhaps it’s because dancing through this part of my life was the only thing that kept me from feeling numb inside. Maybe the pain of doing a million betkas (squats) made the pain from the real world feel less. Maybe the vibration of the music on the stage made me feel so full of adrenaline, I felt alive again. Maybe it was because I was dancing along side a team of warriors who became more like family and next to them, I felt like I was invincible for the first time in a long time.
I didn’t want to ever lose that feeling again, so I made sure I found my emotional outlet through dance as I transitioned to college and moved miles and miles away from home. I guess after the incident in high school, home stopped feeling like home, so as I entered college, I searched for a new home and I sure did find it. I was fortunate enough to dance on Drexel University's Bhangra team for my freshman year. I met some of the most impactful people of my life while on this team. My teammates probably don’t know it, but they helped me grow and change, learn to be happy, and let go of some of my anger. They redefined dance for me. They danced alongside me as I went through some of the worst days of my life and made them some of my best days. They taught me most of what I know about teamwork and never giving up on myself.
However, I didn’t find home until I got the opportunity to start my own team with the help of some amazing dancers themselves. At this point in my life, I didn’t feel like I had much that I could call my own, but, I found my own, I found my home when USciences Dhadkan was born. I struggled a lot through college trying to rediscover myself. I tried to find my way back to who I used to be and I could not have done it without the team I called “my little heartbeats.” Here, I picked up a new style of dance called Fusion, which was a mix of western and eastern styles and just every style of dance I loved in one. Over the last three years, I came across all of these talented dancers that had no idea they were helping me learn to take back my identity just by showing up and dancing with me three days a week.
My dance career was a roller coaster ride. I found myself, lost myself and redefined myself all at once and I never could have done it without the inside jokes, the laughs, the tears and the feeling of being on a stage with the people you love and learn to call family. I never would be who I am if it weren’t for dance.
I would like to give a big thanks to everyone who I have ever had the blessing of dancing with, especially those who taught me to be the dancer I am and those who gave me the honor of teaching them. Yes, dance saved my life, but each one of you did, too.
