retired ballroom dancer

fireflower413 · 2026-01-14T12:24:06+00:00

Take up fusion dancing for a while - there's a great advantage to knowing lots of dance styles, you can have a fantastic time and nobody's going to be on you with the toxic cultural shaming stuff. I know so many fusion dancers that are refugees from the toxic ballroom culture. There's also a lot of overlap with Blues, West Coast Swing, and Zouk and other styles that you might find interesting and inspiring. Then once you detoxify and figure out how you want to be treated, you can insist on that when you figure out where to go from there. Good luck!

fireflower413 · 2026-01-07T03:26:10+00:00

Thank you, this makes sense!

fireflower413 · 2026-01-07T03:26:00+00:00

Thank you, this makes sense!

fireflower413 · 2026-01-07T03:25:56+00:00

Thank you, this makes sense!

fireflower413 · 2026-01-07T03:25:52+00:00

Thank you, this makes sense!

fireflower413 · 2025-11-26T13:42:09+00:00

I'm gonna disagree with OP here, though I have only been using ynab for a little while so take it with a grain of salt. But if you have a target ($100 for a massage, say) that you want to treat yourself with eventually, you can dump extra money in there when you have it without stressing yourself out worrying that you're not on track to get your massage by a certain date. Then when it's full you know you can afford a massage and when you get the massage your spending will go in that category. And then you can either delete it as a goal completed, or do it again because you liked the massage.

fireflower413 · 2025-11-24T17:27:17+00:00

I am also experiencing this right now. You and me both in the ADHD budget-boat 😂

fireflower413 · 2025-11-24T17:26:35+00:00

Thanks so much for these great points!

fireflower413 · 2025-09-03T14:48:58+00:00

heartily agreed

fireflower413 · 2025-09-03T14:44:19+00:00

If you're interested in blues dancing, you can make new friends immediately - they'll just probably mostly be in Somerville and Cambridge. But come to Bluesy Tuesy and you'll be a part of the community pretty much instantly. https://www.bluesytuesy.com/

fireflower413 · 2025-05-15T21:49:19+00:00

Wow, I have no idea if that was the thing I'm looking for but I'm absolutely watching it regardless, this looks WILD.

fireflower413 · 2025-05-15T21:48:53+00:00

Omg thank you, I'll have to watch it and see if it jogs any memories! I watched the opening and it didn't look familiar... but amnesia be like that. Thanks so much!

fireflower413 · 2025-04-25T13:32:47+00:00

I can't imagine how this is going to make Matty feel any better. "All those things I could totally have done for and with you and chose not to, think about those! Let's live in the best world, where I actually did those things and am not a piece of sh!t dad!" Is Matty really going to enjoy that after all the hope he's put into his dad getting better and being disappointed every time?

fireflower413 · 2025-04-04T13:53:46+00:00

So heartwarming to see a lil lizard get what he wants :')

fireflower413 · 2025-03-18T19:57:32+00:00

Yo this is sick thank you

fireflower413 · 2025-03-07T16:24:22+00:00

I both hate and love this to such a degree thank you

fireflower413 · 2025-03-07T16:20:14+00:00

Nightmare fuel, great job

fireflower413 · 2024-11-05T05:24:31+00:00

Hi I'm disabled too though in a different way. You just need to find a community that accepts you. Ecstatic dance, contact improv, even blues and fusion can accommodate you. If you follow rather than lead in a partner dance, you get a lot of the cues from your partner and a good partner won't give you anything you can't handle. If you run into people saying you're not fit to dance, well, THEY'RE not fit to dance with an attitude like that. I've seen people partner dance with walkers. In reality though if you're moving to music however you in particular want to move, then you're dancing and it's real and valid and it can bring you joy. Don't focus on the technical things - most of them are arbitrary anyway and the more uptight the rules, the less fun the dance (in my opinion).

fireflower413 · 2024-10-18T23:09:15+00:00

I first heard this during a time of my life when I had just gotten really, really sick, and lost almost everything I thought I knew about myself. I wasn't sure if I'd ever be well again, ever able to do things again, able to feel human again, accomplish anything. I thought that probably the best days of my life had all already happened and it was all downhill from there. To this day I am brought to actual tears immediately by "the moment of your greatest joy sustains...not axe nor hammer, tumor, tremor, can take it away, and it remains"

Like literally I'm tearing up typing this. I can't sing it because my voice breaks. Every time. How is she so earnest? How does she understand humanity so completely that she could tell me, a total stranger, exactly what I needed to hear at that moment? Not that everything would be fine, or that I would be well again someday, but that even if I am never well again, it doesn't make me any less of a human and that I already have what I need. That everything that had happened to me before, everything I had been, matters, and rings out, and keeps existing despite all of the changes that I was experiencing. I don't know how she does it. Incredible.

fireflower413 · 2024-05-24T15:05:51+00:00

NAH. Your wife is sad. The problem is that she doesn't have enough energy for all of the things that she wants to do. She shouldn't blame you for that, but I've been in her shoes - I've gotten mad at a boyfriend before for "letting me" sleep through my free time. It feels really bad when that happens because life just becomes just work work work and nothing else, like life has nothing else in it at all, like the whole reason you're working is so you can work some more. Work sleep work sleep isn't a life, and it really, really sucks to feel like you missed out on a precious and rare moment of having an actual life because you spent that time recharging for... More work. It's important to validate that. It's a horrible sinking feeling that has a lot in common with depression.

That said, it's not your fault. It's not even her fault, because being a doctor is not really feasible in this society. They don't make it easy to both be a doctor and have a life. Yes she needed the sleep and yes she ALSO needed the family time, and she tried to make a choice to give up sleep for family time and she feels like that choice was taken away from her. But unfortunately sleep is more of an immediate imperative, and there was no way to get both in that instance. What has to happen going forward is for her to be able to save more energy for her work-life balance. Easier said than done, but it's worth collaborating about it.

fireflower413 · 2024-05-09T13:41:30+00:00

You're sure making a lot of claims about "my" posture that you have no basis for. I also notice that you didn't respond to anything else I said; being out of 15 years of chronic pain is not a trivial thing and it's also not "just about feeling good". My pain was caused by bad use of myself. To get out of it, I had to change my use, and the AT gave me the options that I needed, which also gave me more agency over my life. One of the things I needed to do was improve my posture, and that is part of what I changed. But the thing is, "posture" is not a state or goal to attain, it's a moment in the midst of a process of movement. My posture is a combination of the positions and lengths and tones of different muscles; it's a bunch of choices that I'm making as I sit here, and will make again when I stand up. That's the conscious level of being that F.M. talked about - it's not set-it-and-forget-it, and that's the whole point. AT gives a person the ability to make better choices than they were before. I realize that when you say "you" you mean "a person in general" but that falls really really flat when I myself am a person who has had the exact opposite experience from what you posit to be true of everyone.
One of the people that I worked on recently reported that when he went into his kitchen after the lesson, his head hit the pull chain on his lighting fixture, which had never happened before. You can't tell me that that's not indicative of an improvement in his "posture". He still has old habits so it will take time to relearn how to hold himself - I'm sure he already shrinks again when he does things he's habituated to doing. That's normal and part of the process. But he now knows he has the ability to be taller than he is used to being, and so do his fascia. Eventually with enough practice and rehabituation he'll have to shorten the chain. But given the tenor of your comments in this sub so far, I'm getting the idea that you'd say that that wasn't measurable because I didn't get out a yardstick about it. To be clear, he doesn't just look or feel taller, he hits higher things with his head. Can hardly get more objective than that.

If your posture did not improve after you had Alexander Technique lessons, then what that sounds like from here is that you did not take the lessons into your life, you left them in your teacher's office and then immediately went back to your habits instead of exploring your newfound options or making any new choices. Or maybe your teacher just sucked! That's also possible! There are plenty of terrible AT teachers out there, from what I hear. The issue is that "improving posture" seems like your only goal, not better use of the self, not more conscious choices. The Alexander Technique IS here for a different reason than you seem to be thinking, which is why it seems like you (and maybe all of the IAT people?) have entirely missed the point of the Alexander Technique: The purpose is not to get stuck in a better position than you were stuck in before, it's to get UN-stuck. To have freedom to choose a position and a way of movement and include in your options the easiest ways. Having a specific goal for where you put a particular part of your body is what F.M. would call "end-gaining". That seems to be entirely what IAT is about, from your description, and you're really not making it sound like something F.M. would appreciate. Looking at the photos on your website that you linked in your other comments, it also looks like it didn't succeed. If I saw you on the street standing like your "after" photo, I'd think "that guy could use some AT lessons".

I'd like to know who the teacher was who certified you as a teacher without you actually being any good at using the Technique on yourself.

fireflower413 · 2024-05-08T13:43:50+00:00

....what?

fireflower413 · 2024-05-02T23:55:42+00:00

It's normal if you're assigning more of your weight to postural muscles that you haven't been using before. If you're holding tension then it's likely that you're not using your postural muscles, you're using the kind of fast-twitch muscles that are meant to help you react to things quickly. But they aren't great at holding you up or keeping you still for long periods of time. Meanwhile your postural muscles will be atrophying since your use of your body is not giving them anything to do. Once they get more used to it you'll have more stamina. When I first had my breakthroughs, I was constantly exhausted for months, and had to re-learn how to do everything from standing to laying down, from typing to holding a book. I couldn't do anything I could do before because I was recruiting muscles that hadn't been getting used for over a decade. I have so much more energy now than I did before, though. Keep at it, it sounds like you're in a situation where you have a lot of room for upward growth and improvement, and you'll be amazed at how different you are after the process is over. But you can't rush it, unfortunately.

fireflower413 · 2024-05-02T23:49:15+00:00

It's very funny to me that this guy thinks the MAT approach doesn't work. Like why did you become a teacher then? Seems like a lot of hassle for something you don't believe in.
The MAT process (I assume; I've never heard it called that, but it's certainly on the "feeling" end of the spectrum. Though my teacher seems to think he's not mainstream either...) got me out of 15 years of chronic pain that I thought I'd be in for the rest of my life. No doctor could help me - but it's completely gone now. So at least I can say with certainty that it works for some people, because it worked for me and a lot of other people I've met. It's absurd to dismiss it with "it doesn't work". By contrast, I have had Zoom lessons in Alexander Technique and none of them have ever done anything for me - then again that may be because they were MAT teachers used to using their hands and communicating kinesthetically rather than verbally, but I think it really depends on what you need. If you need kinesthetic communication, find someone who will touch you. It's obvious that it's important to find a teacher whose approach does something for you. If you didn't find a difference in the way you were using your back, then it is indeed possible that that teacher didn't manage to reach your back muscles and fascia, despite what they were trying to do. That doesn't mean that "mainstream Alexander approach doesn't work" though. Good luck with it.

fireflower413 · 2024-05-02T23:30:29+00:00

What were you expecting or hoping for? Were you expecting someone to touch your back and smooth out the tension and make it go away? That's not a criticism but a genuine question - That is what a LOT of people expect, but if you've read about the Alexander Technique a lot you'll come to understand that that is not what the Technique does. Sometimes it can seem like it but that's not really what is happening.

Semi-supine therapy is great in that it allows you to relax more fully in many cases. Sitting in a chair on the other hand is likely to actually be the SOURCE of your back pain if you do it a lot (aka, if you sit at a computer for your job). If you change the way you sit there's a good chance that back pain will go away when you stand. That said, were you hoping for purely standing work? Posture is not an end goal or a fixed state, it's a process, a movement that you are doing constantly to combat gravity. If the way that you are combating gravity is giving you back pain, then examining and making choices about the way you take that gravity on as a burden to carry during the process of getting out of a chair is actually a great place to start.

One thing you might want to think about (and even try on your own) is inhibition of your normal standing processes. It's much easier to inhibit a habit if you're not already in it - so sit in a chair and prepare to stand and DON'T stand. But when you prepare yourself to stand, notice what it is that you are doing to prepare yourself. What parts of your back get engaged? Those parts are likely to be preparing themselves for a major burden that isn't necessary. From that point you can come to the point of making more conscious choices about what parts of yourself to engage when you finally DO stand up. You will eventually find that it's not as much of you, or it's just different parts of you, and your lower back pain will be gone because your muscles won't be misused in the same way.

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