Do We Let Ourselves Be Who We Are, or Convince Ourselves Who we are?

I Was a Dancer, I still Am. I used To Be Too…

The other day I posted a video of myself dancing.

Nothing particularly polished. No elaborate costume. I was wearing one of my usual athletic sets from Melodia, dancing improv, for a tour group I had just taught a mini class for, outside before sunset on a hotel boat in Luxor. The light was beautiful. The whole thing looked almost cinematic.

But what struck me wasn’t really how the video looked.

It was how I looked to myself.

I looked like a woman who knew what she was doing.

Comfortable. Alive. Strong. Beautiful. Not trying very hard to prove any of it.

I looked like a dancer.

And somewhere along the way, I had started talking about myself as though I used to be one.

I came to Egypt after having spent a large part of my adult life as a career dancer. Dance took me around the world. It gave me communities, teachers, students, stages, friendships, and an entire way of understanding my body.

And then I came here.

Part of coming to Egypt was about my family. I wanted to know my parents as I got older. ( I had been cancelled before the word/concept was mainstream.) And my being a dancer—particularly a belly dancer—had never exactly made that easy.

When I first arrived in 2021 , I also wasn’t prepared for the visibility.

Suddenly there were people on my social media I didn’t want there. I didn’t speak the language. I didn’t understand all the social codes yet. I saw what the life of a working belly dancer in Egypt could involve, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to navigate all of that while simultaneously trying to repair relationships with my family. (Also finish a divorce process and international move with my teenage daughter.)

So I went quiet.

Not completely.

I still taught. I still danced privately. I taught workshops and private lessons. Dance remained threaded through my work.

But I stopped sharing it very much.

And eventually I did something humans are remarkably good at doing:

I convinced myself that what I had given up was something I didn’t really want anyway.

I’ve been thinking about how often I’ve done that.

A teacher headshot for a dance studio I taught at while I was in my ‘Hijab” phase in Cairo.

I wore Hijab for 1.5 years during my first years here, not so much for the religious aspect but more to feel in the cultural experience.

When I was young, I told my husband I didn’t like flowers. I got married at 19 and had always been a tomboy, and I think some part of me wanted to be the easy woman. The low-maintenance woman.

Don’t worry about me.

I don’t need that.

We were married for fifteen years.

He never bought me flowers.

Of course he didn’t. I had told him not to.

It’s funny until you realize how many things in life work this way.

We make arrangements inside ourselves for other people.

We negotiate our desires before anyone even has to ask us to.

And I think this is particularly interesting because people don’t generally experience me as a woman who makes herself small.

I’m confident. I’m independent. I go places alone. I do strange things. I have built an unconventional life. I can be forceful. Some people would probably even call me aggressive.

And still.

There have been these quiet negotiations happening inside me all along.

Maybe I won’t do that.

Maybe I don’t really need this.

Maybe it isn’t worth the trouble.

Maybe I don’t actually want flowers.

Maybe I don’t need to dance.

The strange thing is that during the last few years, I kept thinking:

God, I wish I were dancing more.

I missed it.

And occasionally work would appear that would have brought me back into dancing, and somehow I would sabotage it.

Then I would explain to myself why that was fine.

Now my life has changed rather dramatically.

The attempt at reconciliation with my family did not end the way I imagined it would. My mother’s illness has changed everything. I am no longer living in the family home. I packed up my life and moved south.

And here I am in Luxor, approaching my 42nd birthday, asking a very simple question:

How do I actually want to spend my time?

Not how am I supposed to spend it.

Not what keeps everyone comfortable.

Not what version of me creates the least friction.

What makes me feel alive?

And dance keeps answering.

I told my friend Bevin, when she was visiting Cairo that I thought I was going back to dancing full-time. We have danced in proximity and at events and festivals over the years. At the time it felt like a decision I was making intellectually. She was the first person I had said it out loud to.

Now that I’m in Luxor, I feel it in my body.

I love the life of a dancer.

I love what it asks of me.

When you’re a dancer, taking care of your body isn’t an indulgence you have to justify. Your body is your instrument. You condition it. You feed it. You rest it. You train it. You pay attention to it.

Your practice gets to matter.

There is something incredibly freeing about that, particularly for women.

So many women have been taught to feel guilty about the time they spend caring for themselves.

Teaching class in Eastern Canada many years ago…

All my ladies doing thier conditioning warmups.

But when you’re a dancer?

Of course you train.

Of course you take care of yourself.

Of course you make your body a priority.

It is part of the work.

And I’m realizing how much I missed living that way.

I’m also not the same woman who arrived in Egypt.

I speak enough Arabic now to navigate my own life. I understand far more about the culture. I know how to establish boundaries. I can walk into a room with Egyptian musicians and communicate with them without needing someone standing beside me translating everything.

I can work here differently now.

Maybe I needed these years.

Maybe I needed to disappear a little before I understood what disappearing was costing me.

And then I posted this little dancing video.

It received hundreds more likes than most of what I’ve been posting lately, but that wasn’t really the interesting part.

The comments were almost entirely from women.

Women I’ve danced beside.

Women who have taken my classes.

Women whose classes I’ve taken.

Women who know this language.

And what they reflected back to me wasn’t really admiration.

It was joy.

They could see that I was happy.

And they were happy to see me dancing again.

That moved me much more than I expected.

Because I realized that perhaps the thing I thought I had quietly retired from wasn’t gone at all.

I used to say:

I was a dancer.

Maybe I won’t say that anymore.

I am a dancer.

Apparently that isn’t something that leaves you.

I’m turning 42 in a few days, and I don’t imagine I’ve magically freed myself from every conditioning I’ve accumulated over a lifetime.

But I can see some of them now.

And that matters.

I can see the bargains.

I can see the accommodations.

I can see the energetic load created by all those tiny internal negotiations.

And while I may still be carrying some of the old ones, I know one thing:

I don’t want to add any more.

There are all kinds of ways we pay for belonging.

Sometimes the price is obvious.

Sometimes it’s simply becoming quieter about the things we love until eventually we convince ourselves we never loved them very much in the first place.

I’m interested now in finding out what happens when I stop doing that.

So I’m dancing.

And perhaps this time, I’m going to let myself be seen.

Nawal