Introspection, like curiosity, is something you can only distract; never silence. Self-questioning is never boring, but it has become tiring. After a while you have to wonder if they are the kind of questions which can have conclusive answers, or whether you'll always be keeping up with the subtle changes in your own silhouette. If like me most of the answers you come upon are upsetting, and you think that there's no point in self-questioning if all it leads to is self-flagellation, maybe you soon begin to doubt that you're asking useful questions.
That's where I am right now. I think I need a better lens.
The problem with the answers I find at present are not their accuracy, but their focus. They all cling to the past, and like all bad distractions make it impossible to be optimistic about the future. This monocle should retire to its proper home: fiction.
Unsurprisingly given this tunnel-vision, the best insight I've heard on this has come from the outside. Perhaps surprisingly from Madonna, in her tribute to my greatest dancing inspiration, at the 2009 Video Music Awards. She said that "when you never get to have something, you become obsessed by it." For Madonna, that something was a mother figure. In very different senses, for Michael Jackson and me that something was a missed childhood.
I have long felt I missed what seems the norm of this period; learning to make friends in a way that I can only express as to have them not seem like one-in-two-billion gifts of chance. To not have recoiled reflexively when touched for the first time on the shoulder by (my goodness!) a girl. To not (still!) occasionally blush when trying to make the most trivial conversation with an unfamiliar member of the opposite sex. To not have learned to feel helpless.
For a long time I hoped that dancing could compensate for the social skills I lack, could help me connect with others. Instead it entrenched the feeling that I would need to be someone else for that to happen. That I would find myself in more relationships if I was gay. That in order to be exceptional one must accept being an outsider. And that the only means for an outsider to escape loneliness are wealth and power.
Never did it, like writing this, make me think that considering every friend a product of random chance refuses both myself and those friends credit for the qualities that we have bonded over. I love that my friends seem so special to me, but hate that this makes me feel both old and childish - given a range of encounters that are either rare or novel (and blush-inducing). I feel cowardly whenever I leave it to others to break the ice, or when I otherwise know that I am only doing so because others are obliged to be friendly.
I can no longer endorse the idea that I could only have honed my hobby in an absence of friends. There's too much evidence that creativity does not have to be a casualty of socialising. Reality doesn't tolerate such grandiose musings. While Madonna may be right to say that most performers are "shy and plagued with insecurities", using statistics about insecurity to feel part of a privileged 'in-group' crosses the line between becoming more self-assured and further fortifying that insecurity.
I am tired of religiously defining myself by what should just be a fun cardio workout that doubles as entertainment. In the words of William Ernest Henley:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
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