This story is part of the Healthyish Guide to Being Alone, a series of tips, recipes, and stories about how to be alone when we’re together and together when we’re alone. And, if you want to dance with us, Hilary will be hosting a mini 5Rhythms dance party on Healthyish's IG Live on Friday, April 24th at 3 EST. See you on the dance floor (or, uh, in your living room) then!
I’m standing in a 10-foot-by-4-foot rectangle, wedged between the kitchen island and the kitchen table, which is wedged against a wall. This is the largest continuous space in my entire Brooklyn apartment. It is not large. But I’ve gotten pretty good at leaping, spinning, swinging my hips, and waving my arms around without slamming my elbows into the granite countertop. That only happened once.
My laptop sits at eye-level on a bookshelf between Where the Wild Things Are and Air Fryer Revolution. On its screen is a grid of 12 sweaty people, one of whom is me. We’re physically scattered, separated into kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms around the globe, but digitally we’re all right here, in our little rectangles, listening to the same streaming playlist, moving faster and faster as the beat builds, transitioning (not quite smoothly—my free online DJ app offers no crossfade) from a Nina Simone remix into the pounding bleeps and bloops of “Space Junk”, an EDM anthem my friends and I used to collectively freak out to in our early twenties.
I pick up my cat and speed-waltz with him close to the screen until he scratches me in the face. Someone starts waving a flashlight around like we’re at a rave and suddenly we’re all pulling out flashlights, candles, sage sticks, our little screens exploding with light. We are alone, but we are not alone, and we are dancing.
I went to my first 5Rhythms class in Atlanta about five years ago, finally succumbing to a friend’s persistent promises that I would love it. “It’s this thing, where like, a bunch of people dance together in a room,” she’d told me. “There’s no choreography, but there’s a vibe. It’s kind of like...a meditation? But also a dance party.”
When I finally made it one rainy Tuesday night, said friend did not appear, so I found myself alone in a room full of strangers, ages ranging from 20-something to 70-something, bodies of all sizes and colors and shapes, outfits falling at all spectral points between athleisure and Burning Man. The music kicked off like one of those new age-y soundtracks they play at spas. I clomped around awkwardly, circling my arms a little, not sure how to dance to massage music. But then it slowly began building until we crossed over the 128 BPM line into that place where your head drops loose and your hips turn liquid and your feet come untethered from reality and suddenly you’re free. We thrashed and sweated until the music lightened into something jangly-warm and good for ballerina twirls, then slowed back to massage music levels, collapsing in sticky heaps on the floor. It amazed me how I could come into a space knowing no one and, without speaking a single word, leave it feeling connected to everybody.
Depression and anxiety are woven into my fabric—periods of intense joy sandwiched between panic and sadness and deep, biting worry, the kind that wakes me up in the middle of the night and knocks against my skull like an intruder with a hammer. The period when I first started 5Rhythms was a particularly rough one; I’d recently moved back to Atlanta after three years in Thailand and was struggling to re-find my place in the city. My anxiety made me awkward, unsure of how to carry my body. I felt trapped in my brain and I cried all the time. (Does this sound like all of us right now? Yes, it does.)
Other Articles
My Anxiety Symptoms Were Ruining My Life
