Hello,
I hope you're having a lovely Wednesday and that the outdoors, wherever you are, are enjoyable. Boo to car fumes and yay to birdsong.
Last week, I pondered the connection between love and food. This week, I have been thinking about my nine-year-old brother, who dances like a wriggly worm. I captured his wriggly worm dance in a 43-second video on my phone, which I like to watch on the tube when there's no internet between stations. It fills me with joy each time.
Let me tell you about the wriggly worm dance. It's not particularly complicated. Imagine lifting your arms out and letting multiple waves ripple through your body. Sway from side to side. If you really let go, you might roll your neck, close your eyes and wiggle your hips. Dance with your fingers and wriggle your toes for extra measure. Your face might be relaxed at this stage, your jaw no longer clenched. You might even be smiling. There's no rhythm or rhyme. The wriggly worm dance is whatever you want it to be. I have called it the wriggly worm dance simply because that's what I thought my brother looked like when he danced like this. You might call it an inflatable tube man dance or a wobbly jelly dance.
I first saw my brother dance like a worm when we were making music together on a beat-making app. After recording two minutes of our creative nonsense, my brother played the house track back and started dancing, moving his arms up and down to the beat while his index fingers remained pointed towards the ceiling. He wiggled his bum and laughed with joy. "Diyora, can we post our song on Youtube?!" he asked sweetly.
At that moment I tried to dance with him, but my moves were stiff. I instinctively turned around to see if anyone was watching. I knew no one else was at home, but still, I had to check that I wasn't making a fool of myself. My posture was sunken, even while standing. It took me a minute, but eventually, I stopped tensing my shoulders, closed my eyes and swung my arms from left to right. I wondered: when was the last time I danced like this? Like a wriggly worm?
As a child, I was embarrassed by almost everything; family members acting silly, having excess body hair, my foreign accent, saying the wrong thing in social settings, making mistakes, trying and losing at sports, public piano performances. Truly, the list was endless. There was nothing scarier than public shame, nothing more mortifying than other people’s disapproval. When I did humiliate myself, my brain would play those moments on loop, as a reminder that I was, in fact, a very embarassing person.
Doing the wriggly worm dance with my brother, I felt two-decades worth of shame slide off of me. It was amazing to see how little he cared about being perceived and how instead, he tried to hold my hands and dance with me, pulling me into the fun. Children who haven't yet been moulded by or have conformed to expectations of conservative social behaviour are freer in how they express themselves and move their bodies when dancing. It’s liberating. What happens in adulthood that crushes our carefree spirits so much?
I wouldn't have been brave enough to dance like that at his age, not even with an older sibling. It reassures me that he has far more self-esteem at this age than I did. I'm relieved he can find joy so quickly through song and dance. I pray that the world doesn't crush his confidence.
Sometimes, when I’m in the supermarket or the park, I wonder what would happen if everyone stopped what they were doing and did the wriggly worm dance for a few minutes. What would be the wide-reaching consequences of the wriggly worm dance as a daily habit? Could the wriggly worm dance achieve world peace or stop world hunger? Could it stop us from living atomised lives and bring us together? I know it’s a silly thought experiment, but I think about it a lot. It’s hard to imagine a world free of shame, but it feels important to at least try.
The wriggly worm lives inside all of us. (Like the two wolves, jk jk). No, but seriously, try your own wriggly worm dance for five minutes and see how much better you feel shaking off whatever is weighing you down. Maybe you can only do the wriggly worm dance after four tequila shots or in a dark room where no one’s watching. That’s fine. I just hope you get to experience the freedom of the wriggly worm dance sometime soon.
Things I’ve enjoyed this week
Succession obviously. What I haven’t enjoyed are the think pieces that are like: “the characters aren’t real people!! you aren’t supposed to root for any of them”. Well, I am rooting for Greg, so now what?
Really enjoying Roisin Lanigan’s Substack and latest post on trauma writing.
This NYTimes essay was fantastic writing from Rachel Connolly.
Things I’ve written this week
Women’s Health: 'The real ADHD scandal is NHS underfunding – not over-diagnosis'. I was asked to write about my reaction to BBC’s Panorama documentary about ADHD. I wasn’t a fan.
Really enjoyed reading this! I recently did a 5 rythms dance "class" which is basically 3 hours of dancing like a wriggly worm - or like whatever the hell your body feels like dancing like - in a room full of other people doing the same. It started off as being potentially the most embarrassing thing I've ever done, and ended with a sense of achievement at pushing past that embarrassment. I've been meaning to go again for a while now and this has pushed me to do it! xx