This autobiographic story was shared as part of our Tell Your Story campaign.

Written by Alex Wallace. Thank you for sharing your story with us, and allowing us to share it with our community.

There’s nothing like being almost choked to death by your own mother over a seventh-grade science project to put your whole life into perspective.

It wasn’t obvious then, not really; it rapidly segued into becoming another part of ‘normalcy,’ of car rides from school playing host to interrogations, of being allowed no space to breathe, to become a person in the way that we hope our teenagers will. It was another bump in the rhythm of my life, where ‘learning’ went in and test scores came out, all in the name of college and the American dream.

My mother is the eldest daughter of a family that’s the closest thing one corner of the Philippines has to nobility. My father comes from what allegedly sophisticated urbanites would call ‘white trash’ from Missouri. They both arrived at, from very different starting points, the same form of toxicity, one that would leave my psyche in tatters.

Growing up in that cape cod house in a white-collar neighborhood was gray and cold, no matter how much the Virginian summer sun would scorch us. There’s no intimacy in that sort of life, no love and no joy, no touch and no connection. It didn’t help that I am autistic, or that I went to a school that didn’t speak my language. Anglophone me went to what a less enlightened but more honest age would call the colored school, filled with Salvadoran and Bolivian immigrants whose English was, in the early years, not particularly good; I remember those years as very, very lonely.

I tried to quell that loneliness in one way or another, through saxophone or through running for student council so I could yell in the campaign speeches (I won twice with that technique) or Model United Nations or quizbowl. They were all satisfying in their own ways; I got my first kiss at a Model UN conference, in a swanky hotel ballroom in Midtown Manhattan (she was Italian, if it weren’t enough like a mid-2000s Disney Channel original movie), but still I destroyed myself, emulating my mother in ways I could see only in hindsight. I had a breakdown when I forgot a folder of music during a band concert, and in college I would on occasion rip my own hair out when I’d get a question wrong at a quizbowl tournament. 

The scars run deep.

It was band, ultimately, that gave me the tool to what would be my salvation. In eighth grade I joined the middle school jazz band, and that gave me an enduring love for that music, for jazz and for blues and for fifties rock’n’roll, and the ending permutations of that rich musical tradition.

As you may expect, I didn’t particularly fit in at William & Mary at first. The social muscles that were toned and nurtured by my peers were atrophied in me. I was simply happy that I had my own space, far away from the people who never gave me that space at home, and never really said goodbye when they dropped me off in Williamsburg. I spent too much time in dorm lounges doing nothing of substance, just listening to old jazz music as the world receded like the credits of a film from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

That’s who I was, in that moment in April 2016, when that one poster on a dorm bulletin board changed everything.

. . .

“We’ll teach you to dance!” it said, “swing and salsa and foxtrot!”

“We’ll give you a live band!” it said.

“We’ll make you into a new man!” it said, with its pictures of men in suits and women in dresses, a promise of sophistication that all partner dance nowadays has as its bread and butter.

I hemmed and hawed, questioning my judgment as all abused children do. But I had a nice suit, I thought, with a blazer from Target and a vest I bought from a Goodwill on Richmond Road, as well as a Clan Wallace tartan tie I bought at a Williamsburg Scottish festival. There was a part of me that wanted an excuse to look sharp.

So I bit the bullet, paid maybe fifteen dollars to enter, and there I was, learning to use the overweight lump of flesh I had been shackled with.

I combed my hair and shaved several months of beard. I wore dress shoes, a decision I would later regret.

They taught me swing and salsa and foxtrot; I was totally unused to moving in that way, so synchronized and so deliberate. It’s not walking; it’s fancy walking, keeping the ball of your foot almost always on the floor. I learned the bounce of swing, the swagger of salsa, the flow of foxtrot. The very first person to ever partner with me – only for teaching purposes, for the moment – was someone who would become a dear friend, and someone to whom I owe the world.

It was the happiest day in my life.

There’s a thing that happens with a number of people with backgrounds like mine in that we give up to protect ourselves from further disappointment. Many of us, on some level, think that we’ll die at nineteen, because to us, this level of stress without any form of release feels like it must kill you, and soon; who could survive this? But, often, we do end up making it into our twenties and end up drifting aimlessly, psychologically if not physically, with no real way out. In any case, I never thought I’d live to find anything that felt like a calling, but lo and behold, there it was in that second-floor event room in William & Mary’s Sadler Center.

It was the first time I had ever felt joy.

One of the things that makes this sort of dancing so accessible to those on the autism spectrum is how deceptively regular they are. The image of the whole thing is either extremely acrobatic, as lindy hop is, or as extremely sensual, as the Latin dances are. What gets lost is that, compared to the free-form dancing of high school dances and nightclubs, there is a clockwork pattern to each partner dance, the ‘rock step-triple step-triple step’ of East Coast swing or the ‘ONE. TWO. ONE-TWO-THREE’ of tango, upon which are built so many wonderful moves. In that improvised ballroom that night I felt like I had learned a new language. 

And oh, how I had sung in that language that night. I lept and I bounced and I sung to the music that I had only heard in high-school level arrangements or through YouTube and I flirted just a little bit with the women I danced with (really, only with the eyes). These songs I loved, Sing Sing Sing and Kansas City and Jump Jive ‘n Wail were no longer relics – they lived, and they flourished, in the hands of that band. In retrospect, much of my conduct that night was rather silly – you don’t jump like I did then – but the experience was something like being constantly injected with pure, unadulterated bliss. I was a fool, no question, but I was a dancing fool.

. . .

One of the truly insidious things about growing up in an abusive household is that you are never allowed to be good enough. They will start shouting matches when you’re good at something, and create this suffocating atmosphere where you’re constantly on edge. You just aren’t allowed to concentrate. Sure, I had good grades, but they weren’t enough to stop the shouting matches or the regular threats to be kicked to the streets. Growing up in that environment will do a number on your ability to think of yourself as competent or worthy of … well … anything, really.

That’s what dance gave me: the opportunity to be good at something that I personally had chosen. I had previously tried to sate this deep need through Model United Nations or quizbowl or student council or gaming, but none of those worked quite as well as drilling those steps over and over again. It enabled me to have common ground with people I just met, for we all know the same steps. In this regard, I consider these dances to be great social equalizers for those like me who were not blessed to be social butterflies. There’s something about the regularity that just gels with my autistic brain. 

I’ll admit, in the practice rooms with hardwood floors and mirrors all over the walls, it’s not the most glamorous. It’s doing the cha-cha basic to Let Me Take a Selfie about fifty times in a row just to get the timing right. It’s discipline, it’s determination, it’s doing this for multiple hours a day, four to five days a week. It was good exercise, but exhausting at times. I regret not a minute of it.

Sometimes the trainwreck called my mental health showed up in surprising ways. Once, we were made to walk back and forth along the lines of the gym we were in. I tried, but to my misfortune this was a trigger. You see, my feet naturally curve outward at about a forty-five degree angle, like a penguin. If you pay attention to my gait, there’s a slight left-to-right waddle, although most of the time it’s not an issue. My mother has always hated this, saying that people will judge me for it, rejecting me socially and professionally (most people don’t notice that, but they reject me anyway).

At least a few times, she would stick a long piece of tape along the living room floor and make me walk back and forth along it to fix my feet (which never straightened – trying to walk straight for more than maybe a minute makes my knees hurt like hell), screaming obscenities all the while. 

That is why I began to hyperventilate, and hold back tears, when made to do that exercise. To my instructor’s credit, he took me aside and took pains to understand me, and he taught me another way of teaching the same concept.

It was another instructor who told me something that brought happy tears to my eyes: that my curved-out feet actually help in this sort of dancing! It makes it easier to move your hips, by my understanding, which is quite important – your movement is more flexible. It was the first time my feet felt like something other than a curse. I naturally had feet that others train years for.

Another aspect of all of this was clothing; normally I dress like a middle-aged man from the Midwest circa 1983, with polo shirts that are always tucked in (yes, my dad is from Wisconsin, thanks for asking), but I can remember as far back as kindergarten of wanting an older masculine style, the style of the swing era. I don’t know what started it, but it always seemed so much more dignified. It’s growing my hair out long, with both Scottish curls and Filipino slickness, that many have said is elegant.

There’s something about putting on my dancing suit that makes me feel like something other than a barbarian. I stand in the mirror and fasten a belt and button several buttons on a dress shirt (I have several in many colors) and fasten my tie (of which I likewise have many) into a knot. It all requires dexterous hands and the finesse of color coordination. It’s a small, simple thing, but again, it was the sort of thing I was denied as a child.

There’s another thing dance helped me recover from: fear of women. It turns out, being a straight man raised by an abusive mother does peculiar and unpleasant things to how you interact with women. It makes your subconscious, your gut reactions, see all women as time bombs or sirens (in the Greek sense). Those you are attracted to, God forbid, are both alluring and terrifying.

Before you ask – no, I never got into a relationship through dance. The very subject is at best gauche in actual dance circles, and at worst (if you’re clumsy about it, which I would most certainly be) you may well be asked to leave. Dance communities resent the common assumption that we’re all lusty, and I can say with certainty that things like Dancing With the Stars very much sex it up for viewership, as do competitive dancers for judges. Bringing it up at an actual dance will not be looked kindly upon.

(Although, and in full disclosure, I’ve known many wonderful people, all great dancers, who were hypocrites about this. To disclose even more: I’m absolutely one of those hypocrites, given the opportunity. The longer I do these dances, the more I’m convinced that sexuality is the community’s greatest hypocrisy. I find, as an autistic person, how these communities treat sexuality is something akin to a job interview in terms of being high-intensity neurotypical mindgames, but that’s the subject of a different essay)

What this dancing did for me, essentially, is persuade my ape brain that half the population of the planet was not, in fact, trying to kill me. I could be at ease around women after I took up dancing; my subconscious wasn’t incoherently screaming that my life was quite literally in jeopardy, that I could be something other than a weakling or a sexual predator. To those who haven’t lived it, it doesn’t sound like much, but I consider that alone a victory.

. . .

I can’t say I really know where to end this. Other people like me have found other ways of saving themselves from these upbringings; dance is mine. With each passing day, with each dance I go to, I am still writing this story, and its only end will be when I stop (God forbid!) or I die (as it comes for us all). It’s a long fight, no doubt – but I can’t think of a fight that has been more fulfilling, or more flat-out fun, that I’ve been through than this one (more fights should be this way!). It’s been many nights of being ‘swungover’ as we call it, limbs all sore when I wake up at one in the afternoon, but I’ve gained too much from it to care.

That’s one of the things about growing up the way I did: there are no neat and tidy endings. The scars still run deep, and the anxiety still flutters under my consciousness, and the pain numbs but does not abate. It’s a journey with no clear destination, a metro line with no terminus, an essay without an end. All I can do, I guess, is keep to line of dance.

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