Deanne Schildroth dot com

We had an ice storm earlier this week in my city. There was freezing rain for 2 days; the weather got very mild and melted some of the snow, which then froze overnight. After the freezing rain stopped, we had a blizzard. I was grateful to be working from home, and be done with school and dance for the year. I didn’t have to leave the house at all except for a social engagement later in the week. It got me thinking back to the last ice storm I can recall.

In early January, 2018, we got a stretch of freezing rain that coated everything with a thick layer of ice for several days. I know this, because my mom died on January 6, and in the midst of rushing around trying to deal with her estate, cleaning out her apartment and rehoming her cat all in the measly week of bereavement leave I got from work, I slipped on the ice at my apartment complex and sprained my wrist. I hit the ground so hard that I just lay there for a couple minutes, spread eagled in the middle of the parking lot, a little dazed.

Surely, something was broken. I wiggled my toes, they were fine. Next, I moved my legs, also no pain. I moved up my body and everything felt okay. Lucky me! I went to stand up by planting my hands on the ground and pain shot through one of my wrists. It’s funny, I remember that moment so clearly and yet now, nearly six years later, I can’t tell you what wrist it was. But one of them was absolutely sprained. And it was so icy everywhere, I felt I couldn’t get up using only one hand to steady myself. So I crawled across the parking lot to the back door of my apartment where there was less ice and I could safely stand up.

I didn’t go to the doctor because I knew the wrist wasn’t broken. It rapidly became twice the size of its counterpart on the other side of my body, but it was not broken! With everything going on that week, I just didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to sit in the ER or walk-in clinic just to be told “yep, that’s a sprain.” So I used the RICE method (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) and carried on with my day.

Every time I go out onto an icy sidewalk now, I’m taken right back to that day. While the sprain left no lasting damage (I can’t even remember what wrist it was!), I do not wish for a repeat performance. This week’s ice storm, along with it being nearly the end of the year, brought up a lot of thoughts about who I was, versus who I am, versus who I am becoming.

There are parts of my identity that were there for so long, they felt like they would just always be there. As some parts of my life shifted and other parts were ripped away from me this year, I started to think about what was actually serving me and what was holding me back. Last year, after a life time of being a renter, I bought a house. This year, I went back to university part time. I’ve been walking this path of “what else could happen that you never could have imagined?”

I secretly took a belly dance class when I was 28, just for fun, and very quickly it became a huge part of my life. I made lifelong friends through the dance and developed a ton of confidence. I travelled to various places in North America and danced with people from all over the world. But lately, I haven’t been as gung-ho on the style. I love watching belly dance, but the spark do the dance myself isn’t there anymore. I found myself going to practice out of habit more than anything. This is just what I’ve always done. Through studio closures and troupe breakups and COVID-19, my dance partner and I always found a way to keep practising (except in the depths of lockdown, of course!). We get along so well, and have many similar interests outside of dance, that I never thought too hard about dance. I’d go to her house every week for practice and even if we didn’t get a lot of dancing done each time, we had a good visit.

The city we live in is small, and the belly dance community is nearly nonexistent. Putting in a lot of effort for very little pay off just added to the loss of spark for me. So this month, I hung up my skirts. Well, that’s not true. Two of my skirts are still in a bag on the kitchen floor because why put anything away, ever?

I thought about quitting for a while, but didn’t actually tell my friend that I wanted to stop until this month. It was on the tip of my tongue at the end of so many practices, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. I was scared to disappoint myself. If I just stopped doing FCBD-style belly dance, who was I? It was part of a small list of things that had shifted lately, where I asked “If I don’t ______, am I still me?”

I used to be really into 1940s/1950s fashion. It was a huge part of my personality. The cat eye glasses, the full skirts, the bangs. Anytime I tried my hand at a small business and clothing, it had a mid-century modern slant to it. I still like all that stuff, of course. I live in a 1948 house with a chequerboard-and-Tiffany-blue kitchen, after all! But the very act of growing out my laser-straight micro bangs felt physically impossible. My bangs were my personality. More than belly dance. I was Girl With Baby Bangs.

No one would guess by looking at me right now, but I am growing my bangs out. To what length, I don’t know. Maybe curtain-y? They’re still considered short by most people’s standards, but they’re definitely longer than I usually have them. I still love my cat eye glasses, and I love mid-century fashion. I’m allowing myself to expand beyond the narrow window of full skirts and cardigans. It feels so trivial to talk about, but I made that my personality for so long, and then didn’t let my personality grow beyond it.

Earlier this year, I went through a very painful friendship breakup. Two, actually. The hardest part has been the lack of closure. One day, two friends of over 15 years just stopped answering my texts. I was very sad – and very angry – for most of this year. It’s been made all the more painful by the fact that as a crafty person, I have crafty friends, and there are crafty gifts from both former friends all over my house. While some things I’ve been okay seeing, the crocheted blankets, and mittens and hat I wear every day have been hard. They’re still “good” – fully functional, in good condition, serve a purpose – so I have a hard time just getting rid of this stuff. I finally just gave myself permission tonight to gather up all the blankets and hats and scarves, wash them all, and donate them to a charity.

It’s clear these friendships are irreparable. We’re not going back, and acting like this is a temporary roadblock is not helping me move past it. As an aro-ace person, I’ve never really had to deal with a breakup, so maybe that’s why this is affecting me so much. Another friend of mine went through a similar friendship breakup this year and confided that it hurt more than her actual divorce, so maybe that’s just how this goes. At any rate, giving myself permission to remove things from my house that hold bad memories feels like the closest thing to closure I’ll get.

The ice storm is over now. The blizzard has subsided. The windstorm from today (Jesus does it ever end???) has died down. It’s supposed to be cold this weekend, but manageable. I can shovel the snow off the walk, and resume scraping the ice off the car windshield tomorrow. My bangs might be longer, my social circle a little smaller, but I’m still me. I’m just a version of me that owns a house, goes to university, and does more hip hop than belly dancing these days. The people sticking by me in this storm are the real ones.

As I wrote this, I had a Youtube Pomodoro timer video playing (this one, if you’re the kind of person that watches that kind of stuff). In one of the breaks, a quote appeared on the screen from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship”. How fitting that, of all the quotes in the world, that one should appear tonight. If that isn’t the universe cheering me on, I don’t know what is.