I am (finally) writing a [non-fiction] book about tango.
Have you ever wrote about something so awful you had to close your eyes while typing?
I feel I’m doing what I need to be doing.
There’s a schedule. But this book wants to be written and it keeps pushing, keeping me working. It’s ahead of the schedule.
I knew addiction would be a theme.
Just in case you doubt this term is truly relevant to tango, check it.
I finally take a break and go to a milonga (where else would I go?) I’m in the back room of Milonga Popular. I drink good wine and argue with myself. But it’s such a special experience – they explore their bodies, they open themselves, they are vulnerable, they make something beautiful.
Heroin is a beautiful experience too. So is red wine.
That doesn’t make them not addictive. That doesn’t make the addiction not destructive.
Today, I googled “heroin addiction”. From Drugrehab.com I learned that heroin “changes the way the brain operates” causing “cravings, impaired reasoning, and withdrawal.” Ok, well that was the condition I was in in 2010.
I also learned that the meaning of addiction is that “the drug becomes the center of their lives” and that “things they used to cherish lose importance.” Oops.
When I don’t know where else to go besides a milonga at night, I am like an addict who “can’t see a way to escape.”
Like heroin, tango can provide “short-term relief from stress, anxiety, or depression” but the body adapts, and then the addict is no longer feeling high, but feeling “trapped”.
In 2006 I met the man who I believe was my soulmate. In 2010 my addiction blinded me to him.
My experience at the time was that I wanted to be “respected as a dancer” and he didn’t give me that, for whatever reasons.
He did love and respect and desire me as a person.
Unfortunately, the way this planet seems to work is that you get what you ask for.
Now I am respected as a dancer.
And I am alone with my soul, and everything else.
Now I yearn to be known and loved for my personhood, for my intelligence, creativity, and style.
And what did I do when my addiction destroyed the most important and valuable thing in my life? Spent the next 9 years shooting up.
And destroyed almost everything else of value that I had built in my life. I lost (or, threw away)my house, my career, my car.
I called it glamour, I called it entrepreneurship, I called it “art”. I said that tango was keeping me alive. I took horrible risks. I endured bad situations. I withstood betrayal after betrayal by this thing for which I had sacrificed everything I had.
For what?
The hope of another hit. Failure of imagination.
