GROUNDED//
WEIGHTLESS
‍t_glo/reddit

“I am overwhelmed with feelings of a calm happiness and contentment. Dancing. Feeling the music. Touching my friends. Being touched. In a moment of self observation and awareness I realize how happy I feel, smiling ear to ear.”

We are in our usual spot, just in front of the pano stair, next to the speaker. Shirtless, my shorts, despite being mesh are drenched from many hours of dancing. The blue strobe lights over our heads illuminate the sweaty, heaving, dancing men all around us. We are about 11 hours in at this point. There is a special headspace I enter after many hours on the floor. The space where adrenaline takes over. My friends call it my "dance energy". It's hard to explain. It's beyond stimulants. It's a state of mind. A trance. Another plateau of existence. Once reached it doesn't seem to end. "Dance energy" is infinite. And in this moment, I am there.

I am overwhelmed with feelings of a calm happiness and contentment. Dancing. Feeling the music. Touching my friends. Being touched. In a moment of self observation and awareness I realize how happy I feel, smiling ear to ear. Bathing in the wave of contentment. I think to myself “If I died right now. Maybe that would be okay.” Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to die. But I felt like “if this was it … I would go out on top”. It was not a sad moment. It was a moment of complete peace, clarity and calm.

I continued to dance. Observing the scene. Looking at my friends, the music still incredibly loud, the bass pounding in my chest. Yet it is almost fading in the background. I dance and I think “I am a human being. An adult. I have a life outside of this space. A job. Relationships. By definition I must have anxieties. Things that worry me. I must. That’s the human condition. And yet, in this very moment. Dancing with my friends. I don’t know what these worries are. I don’t know what my anxieties are. What do I have to worry about? Clearly I there must be something.” I dance and I realize “I don’t even know what that would even feel like - to worry”.

The techno was loud and relentless. The machines had won the war against humans and this was the soundtrack. And yet … I felt warm. I felt safe. My body felt safe. My spirit felt safe. I was fully awake. Fully present. Incredibly aware of the hard concrete floor and feeling grounded by it. And at the same time, floating. Unable to conceptualize what it would even mean “to worry”.

I said to myself “You must remember this feeling. The way you are feeling right now. Weightless. Unencumbered. Remember this feeling. Put it in a bottle. Next time you feel overwhelmed, come back to this moment and remember. You can feel like this. This is out here.” So I did. I tried to remember exactly how I felt. I tried to take a snapshot of all emotions, all neurons, my body, my friends, the music, the lights, the space, the concrete floor, all sensations. To seal that snapshot away.

And every now and then I do remember it. It’s not the same of course. It’s more the meta-memory of the moment that I can access now. The knowledge that it happened. But I also know that this feeling is out there and I can have it. Maybe not all the time, but I can and I will have it again