Bellydancing, Getting My Confidence Back

“You look beautiful,” Julz said to me.  I didn’t know what to say. We were practicing zilling in Bellydancing class and Julz was across from me in the circle.  “No really,” she said, “I’m going to take a picture then you can see what I see.”

And she did.

After class Julz texted it to me, with the message that my smile was real too.

We’ve been working on smiling while we dance along with many other things in class to get ready for our performance on August 25th at the Bennington Museum.

I wrote about that a while ago, saying how I didn’t think I was good enough to perform with everyone else.  What I haven’t written about is what happened after that.

First Kat (aka Kitty who introduced me to Bellydancing) read my blog post and called me up to reassure me that I’d be fine.

Then Julz texted me.  Her message began like this…

“You did fine, it was the first fucking time we all danced to that set!”  Then she assured me that by the time of the performance I’d know the songs and be able to dance to them and that I get better every week.

Julz said that it’s rare for her to finish a performance and feel like she did well.  That it’s only after she’s watched a video of it that she can see that it wasn’t as bad as she thought.  “There have only been a small handful of times we knew we kicked ass” she texted me.  She said we all really dance the best when we love the music and when we’re having fun.

Basically, Julz was letting me know that what I was feeling was perfectly normal and that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

She also came up with some ideas about practice and performing that made me feel better about the whole thing.

Julz also wanted me to write about it.  She felt that it was only right that I let my readers know the truth.  Because even if I still question myself as a dancer, Julz doesn’t.

After that, I got my confidence back.

Since then I’ve been going to class with the attitude that I’m going to be able to perform.  Honestly, I don’t think about the performance much.  I just work at learning as much as I can and trusting it.

When I think of myself as a Bellydancer, I still don’t believe it.  It makes me want to tell anyone who ever believed they couldn’t do something that if I can Bellydance, anything is possible.

Dancing is something I didn’t think I was capable of doing. Yet, I’ve been doing it for five years and I still don’t understand why it means so much to me.  Jon says it’s who I really am.  But when I take that idea and roll it around my brain, it doesn’t quite land.

And yet a tiny part of me thinks…maybe...

But really, it doesn’t matter much what I think, because I’m doing it.  I’m dancing.