I’ve been a dancer all my life, but not because I’m good at it. My mom put me in ballet when I was five because I was clumsy, and she thought it might be a good way to help me find some grace.

It was a doomed venture from the start. I grew up to be short, busty, with powerful thighs and a thick butt I could never tuck under my spine to anyone’s satisfaction. Still, I danced ballet until I hit the awkward point in adolescence when you had to be really committed to ballet to keep taking classes.

I loved it the whole time. Not every teacher, not every class, not every sequence, but I loved the combination of music and moving my body, making them sync up.

After I quit ballet, I only danced sporadically. In grad school my friends and I would sometimes go to the club and dance, which was pretty much the only activity you could get me to leave my house at 9pm for. Work had an 80s dance party once, and I danced myself sweaty and exhausted while the CEO told me I was one of the top 5 dancers at the company. Maybe top 10. At a retreat, the leader wanted to teach us all the zombie version of the Thriller dance, and I threw myself into it enthusiastically, only finding out later that everyone else had a much harder time taking in the steps.

It turns out I’m not actually bad at dance, just ballet, which requires a kind of body and flexibility I don’t have. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if I’d taken other kinds of dance as a kid—modern or jazz or even tap.

As I’ve been thinking about WILD, dance keeps coming up. I keep longing for it. The problem, you see, is that I have ME/CFS, which is an energy-limiting condition. I have to be careful and strategic about my expenditure of energy, lest I overdo it and crash and become basically non-functional for a bit. So I’ve been hesitant to do anything.

But I’ve had this condition for a long time now, probably 25 years. That 80s dance party at work? I danced for hours. I was tired afterwards. I slept really well. I had to ask my friend to wash my jeans because they’d gotten so sweaty. But I didn’t crash.

I’m not going to start with hours of dancing. I can’t guarantee the 80s dance party is a replicable experience. But I wonder sometimes how much of my chronic illness has to do with not being aligned with my soul’s deep gladness and what will happen as I keep working on WILD.