Swampwater Debutante

Hi. I’m Lissa. I’m a hooper.

I’ve been hooping since April 24th, 2009, the day I bought my first hoop from Hoopbella at the Arbor Daze festival in Euless. It was love at first sight for me and the silver, red and white hoop I would eventually come to affectionately and jokingly name Sparkly Edward.

My enormous hoop in hand, I would comb the internet searching for tips and tutorials on hooping. I’d watch videos tirelessly, then spend hours working out what I’d seen. I dropped the hoop so much then, but I kept going, kept trying. Things began to come together.

Gold – A Hooping Session from Lissa Angeline on Vimeo.

Nearly a year later, that first hoop is my “blue jeans” hoop, the one I reach for when I need familiarity to ease me into a new technique. It’s been joined by so many more hoops, I had to buy hooks and mount them on the wall to keep the hoops up off the floor; it was getting so I couldn’t walk for all the hoops everywhere. I got to be sort of obsessed, see.

Blending my lifetime of dance training (formal and informal) with hoopdance, I ended up settling into a style I call Lyripop, a mishmash of ballet and contemporary dance with a flavoring of lyrical hip hop. I have a lot of fun with it.

Here’s the big thing, though: hoopdance saved me. When I found it, I was an angry, angry woman. Three years earlier, I had spent most of one year wishing desperately to die or to get the courage to end things myself. I’d managed to claw my way back from that, only to stagnate halfway back to “normality.” I consider that period of time to be my rock bottom rather than the year of suicidal tendencies, because I felt like I was failing at the life I had pulled back from the brink. I was simmering in rage at the world on a pretty nearly daily basis, bitter, cynical and sarcastic – it’s a wonder anyone wanted to be around me.

Then there was hooping. A new, positive focus. Who wouldn’t end up being obsessed with something that made them the complete opposite of angry? Even when I had trouble learning a new technique, I was still happier than I had been in so very long. I kept going, and going, and going, until one day I realized I had been happy for weeks, maybe even months. I’d lost twenty pounds, too, which was nice.

So I made a video, a sort of art therapy project. I’d seen the stories of hoopers like Jonathan Baxter and Abby Albaum, who’d found hooping to be a most effective weapon in the fight against depression. I wanted to add my little story to that library, even if no one would ever see it, which I was sure would be the case. I chose a song that encompassed, to me, my struggle with depression, edited it in with some video and a script that had taken me ages to write, because I wanted to make sure people understood, to make sure they could see how I felt. Then I put it up on my long neglected Vimeo account and wandered off.

Keep Breathing – Finding Healing In The Hoop from Lissa Angeline on Vimeo.

One feature on Hooping.org, a third place finish in a video contest on HoopCity, two Hoopie Award nominations and a Revolvie Award later, I think it is safe to say that people understood. I was a little shellshocked by the unexpected attention at first. I have had to grow a lot as a person to deal with it! But my video did the job I had vaguely hoped it might do, and to a far, far greater scale than I ever could have dreamed – it put another human face on the struggle with depression. If one person had seen my video and been helped by it, that would have been enough, but so many people have come out to say that it inspired them, helped them, encouraged them. It has left me speechless.

I hope to become a certified hoopdance instructor, with goals of teaching my lyrical hoopdance style and finding a way to teach hooping therapeutically to others who need an anchor in their struggle with depression.

All this from a happenstance passing of a booth at a fair and saying, “That is shiny and I want it.”

Oh, life! I love you.