You should be dancing

So, yeah.  Yesterday.

Shitty day.

I did a lot of weepy crying (as opposed to ugly crying), much of it sitting in my office at work.  I missed my kids and missed my family and missed my friends and felt adrift and unmoored and sorry for myself.

Days like that happen from time to time.

And in a previous iteration of myself, I would have struggled to figure out how to pull myself out of the mire.  But now, I know the drill.

Part of it is to just let myself feel what I was feeling  Given that there were concrete reasons for my mood, rather than the amorphous free-floating anxiety and despondency that accompanies a depressive cycle, I knew that I wasn't in any serious mental or emotional distress.  When it's something definable that's making you sad, sometimes you just need to feel shitty until you don't feel shitty anymore.

Part of it is connecting with friends near and far.  And man, do I have some wonderful people in my life - people who love me and care about me and who hold me up when I'm struggling to do it on my own.  It's humbling and gratifying.

Part of it is calling my mother, who always manages to talk me off the ledge and make me laugh, even when the thing we're laughing about is her bewilderment at how she managed to raise such a crazy daughter.

Part of it is getting off my ass and getting some really strenuous exercise in.  The day before the Shitty Day, I sat around and napped and watched sports and did nothing physical of note, and it left me feeling grumpy and gross.  So when I came home from work yesterday, I did a super hard weightlifting session that required so much focus - and resulted in such a lovely release of seratonin and endorphins - that I immediately felt a million times better.

Today was a good day.  I had a great lunch with friends.  I got a massage.  I bought myself a new personal journal, for non-bloggy writing - stuff that is either too intensely personal or too intensely boring (to anyone but me) to publish here.

My new journal. I'm in love with it.

And then I came home and put away laundry while dancing around my room in my underwear.

Which got me thinking about how much dancing I used to do, and how little I do now.

Throughout high school, college, law school, and my 20s living in Atlanta, I danced on the regular.  In India, it was at the Ghungroo, the night club in the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi.  In college, it was fraternity mixers and bars and formals and Bahamas parties and every other kind of party we attended.  Same with law school.  And in Atlanta, it was most weekends, at clubs in Buckhead and Midtown and downtown.

I love to dance, and I used to do it all the time.  It's fun and it's great exercise and it's expressive and cathartic. And now I barely do it ever.

Occasionally I'll dance around with the kids, but they're already at the age when they're rolling their eyes with an exasperated "Mama! Stop!"

So tonight, I put my exercise playlist on, broadcast it through the house via Bluetooth, and boogied my ass off.  It felt kind of fabulous.