I isolated myself again. It happens every time I feel bad, and I think it’s something fairly common in the animal kingdom: to flee, to hide, to curl up and lick your own wounds. In my case, I disappear from every place I can, and emotionally disconnect from those I can’t avoid. Then, everything turns dull and monotonous. Food loses its flavor, colors stop shining. It’s as if I were seeing reality through a yellowish filter that stains everything in sepia.
In those moments, “being well” becomes an odyssey, that distant, almost unreachable goal that keeps us forever expectant. I’ve been thinking for a while about what “being well” really means — feeling good, experiencing life through joy rather than anxious agony — and it’s in moments like these that I feel all the progress I had built crumbling down. But in that same exploration, I also understood that even on the uphill path of improvement, there are valleys that make us doubt our ability to sustain change, and we must accept them as they come.
This week was one of those valleys; I hurt my back and couldn’t do the one activity that lights up my days: dancing. The break was so awful that it felt like entire weeks had passed, as I kept questioning whether the pain was truly unbearable or if I was exaggerating, questioning my own judgment. But it did hurt, and it still does. Resting is part of any training, taking care of the body too. And I learned it the hard way.
That’s why I isolated myself, again. I disappeared from everywhere, hid away, ran as if I had done something wrong, punishing myself before anyone else could. In that confinement, I realized this behavior is a pattern I’ve been dragging along for years: when I feel bad, I simply pull away and go silent. Because of it, I have lost friendships, and my social networks have turned into almost ghost towns.
The internal voices grow stronger when I feel this way. They whisper that no one loves me, that everyone is angry with me, that I’m worthless, that I will end up alone forever, sinking into my own madness. So I shrink even further inside myself, wondering who would ever want to share space with someone who feels so insignificant.
Once, I isolated myself so deeply that I even left my home country. I abandoned the world I knew because it felt suffocating, and growing up in the place that had hurt me so much seemed impossible. Today, I feel myself inside that shell again — but slowly breaking it. Locked inside my head, I find that the way out is by externalizing my emotions, and I do it through the way I have always found refuge: by dancing. Dancing is my way of breaking the silence, my key to communicating and expressing what’s happening inside me; dancing makes me free.
While the music plays, I find myself balancing my fears with every movement. With each step, the sepia pulls back and the colors return, inviting me to feel that, despite the pain and doubt, I am still alive.
For the past few years, I have been on the path of healing, a process that involves rebuilding my relationship with my body — a body I neglected for many years. I did whatever I wanted to it, treating it the way I was taught women should be treated: with violence. Years passed and the symptoms worsened. I could no longer even notice when I was disappearing from my own body, leaving it to become a hollow, empty shell. I pushed it to extremes, but deep inside, there was always something that kept the will to live, to set goals, to experience.
Today, I can see it. Today, I am reclaiming my body through dance. Today, I can fill the space inside the shell, occupy it, expand. Today, I move to create the reality I want.
Dancing doesn’t keep me from falling. It doesn’t keep me from doubting, from getting lost, from hiding. But just like in meditation, the important thing isn’t to never get distracted — the important thing is to return. Return to the body, return to the movement, return to the rhythm. Over and over, even if I get lost a thousand more times. Dancing teaches me that I can always come back to myself. That even when everything turns sepia, I still have a doorway back to color.
Mel Bruja 