Between Two Dance Floors

There was a time in my life when dancing meant something very different than it does today.

I spent a cumulative five years working in a strip club. That's a part of my story I don't share freely, because it is a part I've had to understand more deeply over time. I didn't wake up one day and randomly decide that was the life I wanted. There was a road that led me there long before I ever stepped onto a stage.

My exposure to sexual behavior began before I entered kindergarten and continued through multiple people and experiences throughout my childhood. I was too young to understand what was happening, but old enough for it to begin shaping me. I learned things about sex and my body before I had the maturity to understand love, intimacy, boundaries, or worth. By the time I was a teenager, hypersexuality felt normal to me because it was all I had ever known.

I chased unhealthy relationships and desperately wanted to be wanted. I learned that my body could get attention. Then attention became confused with affection, desire became confused with worth, and being wanted became confused with being loved.

I began drinking alcohol around eighth grade. As the years went on, the drinking became heavier and my choices became increasingly destructive. Alcohol helped quiet things I didn't know how to deal with and made it easier to become whoever I thought I needed to be in the moment.

So when I entered the strip club world, it didn't feel completely disconnected from the life I had already been living. In some ways, it fit right into it.

I felt valued and adored. I made significant money. There were gifts, expensive dinners, attention, and men willing to spend a large amount of money simply to be around me or speak to me. For someone who had spent years confusing being desired with being valuable, that kind of reinforcement was powerful.

But I also needed alcohol to do it.

What started as drinking to loosen up became a dependency. At the height of it, I was getting blackout drunk five or six nights a week. I needed alcohol to get onstage and become that version of myself, and then that version of myself gave me even more reasons to drink.

There was nothing glamorous about that.

I could make a room full of people want me while having no idea how to build a healthy relationship. I could appear incredibly confident while carrying wounds I hadn't begun to address. I could receive attention all night long and still leave empty.

I had learned to treat my body as something transactional, something I could use to receive attention, affection, money, or a sense of worth. But that was never what God designed my body to be. My body was never meant to be currency for love, acceptance, or value.

Looking back, I can see how often my own hurt spilled over onto other people. I chased unhealthy relationships. I made choices that affected people I loved. I hurt myself, too. And during that particular season, alcohol clouded my judgment and magnified the destruction.

Healing has required me to hold two truths at the same time: terrible things happened to me that I did not cause, and I later made destructive choices that were mine to own. My childhood helps me understand how some of those patterns developed, but it doesn't excuse the choices I made as an adult.

It does, however, give me compassion.

When I think about women working in that industry now, I don't pretend to know their stories. There are countless reasons someone may end up there, and their experiences are not mine to assign to them. But knowing my own story makes me wonder how many are carrying wounds nobody in the room can see.

How many learned too young that their bodies could earn attention? How many experienced abuse, abandonment, rejection, or sexual trauma? How many are numbing something with alcohol or drugs? How many appear confident while desperately needing to feel chosen, powerful, secure, loved, or simply enough?

I don't ask those questions to excuse destructive choices. I ask them because I've learned how little we can know about someone by looking at the behavior we can see.

I know what was underneath mine.

A Very Different Dance Floor

Eventually, I recognized that I had become dependent on alcohol. I knew I couldn't keep living the way I was living, so I walked away from that world. I started building a different life, went to cosmetology school, and somewhere in the middle of all that rebuilding, I met Jesus.

Over the years that followed, God began untangling things in me that had been tangled together for most of my life.

Love from desire. Worth from attention. Intimacy from sexuality. Confidence from performance. Compassion from enabling. Forgiveness from permission. And eventually, who I was from who other people wanted me to be.

It wasn't instant. There wasn't one prayer that suddenly erased everything that had happened or every pattern I'd developed because of it. God has walked me through healing, recovery, forgiveness, boundaries, surrender, and a whole lot of learning to choose differently.

Then, more than two decades after dance had been part of one of the unhealthiest seasons of my life, I found myself dancing again.

This time, West Coast Swing, and Country dancing.

And I absolutely love it.

There is something incredibly special to me about being able to celebrate that now. Dancing doesn't require me to become somebody else anymore. It doesn't require alcohol. It isn't about convincing someone to desire me or proving that I'm worth looking at.

It's fun.

It's healthy.

It's mine.

And somehow, God has turned this new dance era into one of the places where He teaches me the most.

I've danced blindfolded and learned what trust feels like when I can't see what is coming next. I've learned that I don't have to know what happens two steps from now when I know how to respond to the step I'm being given. I've had to receive correction, laugh when I completely miss something, get outside my familiar zone, and keep trying until something that once felt impossible begins to feel natural.

I've also found people.

In my forties, in a season of life when it would have been easy to assume certain experiences had already passed me by, dance gave me a community of people to laugh with, learn with, practice with, travel with, and cheer for.

I went back to dancing and found absolutely nothing I had been looking for the first time.

I found something better.

Redemption Doesn't Always Mean Erasure

For a long time, I think I pictured redemption as God taking the ugly parts of our stories and moving us as far away from them as possible.

Sometimes He does.

But sometimes He does something I find even more beautiful. He allows us to encounter something familiar again as someone completely different.

The dance floor used to be a place where I needed alcohol just to step onto it. Today, I can walk onto one completely sober and fully myself.

I used to dance because being desired made me feel valuable. Today, I know my value before anyone asks me to dance.

I used to need other people to make me feel wanted. Today, dancing has given me friendships, community, joy, growth, and lessons about trust that have followed me far beyond the dance floor.

The activity may still be called dancing, but almost everything underneath it has changed.

That's what redemption can look like.

God didn't cause the abuse in my childhood. He didn't ask me to become hypersexualized, dependent on alcohol, or spend years making destructive choices. I don't have to make those things good in order to recognize what He has done with them.

God didn't redeem the choices I made by pretending they weren't destructive. He redeemed me. And as He changed me, He changed my relationship with my body, with alcohol, with attention, with being desired, and eventually, even with dancing.

Jeremiah 31:13 paints a beautiful picture of restoration: mourning becoming joy, sorrow giving way to comfort, and right there in the middle of it is dancing.

I can't help but see a little of my own story there.

God didn't just take me off one dance floor. Years later, He allowed me to experience dancing completely differently.

He has taken experiences I once carried with shame and turned them into compassion for people I might otherwise have judged. He has taken places where I desperately searched for worth and taught me where my worth actually comes from. What was once connected to pain, alcohol, performance, and a desperate need to be wanted has become connected to friendship, trust, growth, joy, and freedom.

I used to dance because I needed to escape myself.

Now I dance because I finally get to be myself.

There are more than two decades between those dance floors. There is a whole lot of life between them, too.

But most of all, there is a whole lot of Jesus.

Something I once associated with so much brokenness has become one of the places where God continues to teach me about trust, joy, connection, growth, and freedom.

I could never have imagined dance becoming this.

But then again, I could never have imagined what God was going to do with me, either.