Swampwater Debutante

Alas, and so it was that no Hoopie was won.

While the disappointment stings ever so slightly (wah! you don’t like me! you really don’t like me!) (I am joking), I knew it was a long shot anyway, and I am glad I was even nominated. I doubt it will happen again; I don’t anticipate becoming a performer or a groundbreaking instructor. I figure I’ll get better at hooping, but I’m sure I won’t be cutting edge. I just love hooping and dancing and sometimes putting the two together, and that’s it. I’ll make more videos, because I like bringing the music I love to life – I’ve always loved that, I’ve done it in a dozen different ways from knitting to graphic design to my writing. Now I do it with dancing, which is probably as it should have been anyway.

But I don’t much imagine it will mean much to anyone but me in the future, maybe, so I make the videos for myself and whoever wants to watch. Which was the important thing in the first place, when I made the original video. I just wanted to express how I felt, sort of an art therapy sort of thing, and I did and I felt better afterward. That it developed an enormous life of its own beyond that was a staggering bonus. A Hoopie would have really iced the cake I accidentally baked, but that didn’t happen, and so I go on, hooping for me and whoever cares to watch.

And anyway, I was awarded a Revolvie, a personally selected honor from Revolva, a hoop performer I read about way back last summer when I first started hooping. I liked her immediately – it is difficult to not like a hooper who opens for Weird Al, come on – and so this is something very cool that I very much appreciate.

Furthermore, I went to a party this weekend and FINALLY met a hooper I had been communicating with on Twitter – I originally knew her as Kandigurl, but her hoopdance name is Torus. She is also entirely awesome, lives literally just up the road from me, and we had way too much fun.

AND. And and and and. As a direct result of that, I got to hoop with fire.

Pics or it didn’t happen, you say? Bitches, I got me some VIDEO. Hello!

No Frills – Lissa’s First Fire Hooping from Lissa Angeline on Vimeo.

It’s funny – a few days ago I was hooping at work, and as is my wont, I started walking back to the office, hooping all the way. It occurred to me that I didn’t remember at all when that became second nature. I used to have to pirouette constantly in order to hoop and proceed in a forward motion, and now I don’t; I can just walk and hoop like I’m simply walking, and I don’t remember when or how that happened.

This is how hooping has changed my life, one of several ways. There was when I wasn’t hooping and then there’s now, and the prior matters less and less as time goes on.

And back to the old video, the first video. The part I think I meant most wholeheartedly was when I said that for me, hooping meant joy in life rather than a grudging survival.

When you’re depressed, people try to drag you up and out, they tell you to snap out of it, get over it, get out of bed, stop dwelling. All the while not understanding that you can’t, you just can’t. Sadness and grief that pervasive isn’t a choice; it reaches up out of a black pit, grabs you by the throat, and yanks you down into the depths, holding you down until you either eke out the strength to find a way out or…you don’t.

And I never had it in me to go the Don’t Way, so instead I survived every bout with the monster, feeling more tattered and torn and tired each time but just not able to completely shake it, nor to give in to it entirely. I just existed, I survived, and after a while I grew to resent it, feeling trapped in a half-life of shadow and fog, occasionally rewarded with a bright burst of sunlight.

Then there was hooping, and for whatever reason it has worked, it has kept the monster in his pit at bay, it has made me enjoy waking up. It challenges my intellect, my creativity, and my physicality in a way that no other hobby or undertaking has managed to do. It makes use of my innate stubbornness so that instead of that stubbornness only keeping me putting one foot in front of the other, it has me working out choreography and tricks.

In a way, my now-effortless walking with the hoop is a metaphor for my escape from depression. At first I had to spin like a dervish to keep the hoop up and myself away from the pit. Now I am far enough away that I can just simply keep walking away from it, the hoop ambulating with me casually. It is a less frenetic, more skilled pace, and again – I have no idea when it became second nature.

I am not stupid enough to consider myself cured; you’re never cured of depression. But I have a greater degree of self-management over my disease than I had before last April. That means more to me than any accolade or award.

Also? I’ve literally danced with fire. That is so COOL. I frigging love hooping.