Back in September 2020, I had three consecutive weeks where I did 4 dance classes each week at Frame in Shoreditch. Alternating between Dance Cardio and 80s Aerobics, I was using the emerging from a global pandemic to reinvent myself (what a twat!) and become a better version of myself (even bigger twat!). I once even bought a Green Juice after a class and everything. Then, in late September I got Covid. Not mild version of Covid, a very spicy one. So much so that I was signed off work for a fortnight after my two week isolation, had a visit to A&E, frequent calls to 111, became besties with my GP, fought for a space in Long Covid Clinics, when school buildings reopened, I spent four months on reduced hours. For two years my life was taken over by it, depleting my energy and taking over my life. It took a toll as it changed my body and how I viewed my body. My plan had been to become a lean, mean fighting machine. Instead I was barely functioning.

Suffice it to say, making a return to Frame and one of their dance classes felt an essential addition to Project 52. It epitomises the purpose of it all, to do things that made me feel braver, as well as the added poignancy that genuinely took me off guard when I got there. It wasn’t so much that I felt like I was picking up where I left off over 4 years ago, instead it felt a celebration of all that I had concurred in that time – the work I had done, the literal blood, sweat and tears that had occurred during that time, to get myself back there.

I’d picked the class as it was themed, learning and performing a routine based on Chappell Roan’s ‘Good Luck Babe‘ which, as we all know, is a total banger. It was also one our setlist from my choir’s Christmas extravaganza performance, called Lipsmas, so it felt doubly fated. It was two hours long, which I knew logically yet hadn’t fully considered what that would mean energy & fitness-wise. By the end of the two hours, I was going to be shattered. I just had to get there first.

I immediately felt out-of-my depth and comfort zone when I arrived in the dance studio. Everyone else knew each other and were clearly regulars to classes at Frame & this specific series of classes too. Having not attended a class there for so long, I’d forgotten what they were like – how so many of the instructor’s imperatives need decoding by outsiders, a series of terms and noises that everyone but me seemed to be able to interpret.

After the warm-up, which I followed pretty well, we then spent the remaining 110 minutes learning the same 1-minute routine, chunk-by-chunk then repeat-by-repeat. My sheer enthusiasm and excitement at being there got me through the first third, then I started to get frustrated with myself at how quickly things were being taught and how slowly I was learning them. If frustration levels could be measured by a thermometer-like device, I was reaching my boiling point stage and having an internal tantrum. It got to the point I debated leaving at the interval break and writing it all off. I’d attended a class, therefore I’d surely had an adventure – if I wasn’t happy then surely it was a good idea to leave.

And that thought train is proof were it needed that, as with doctors supposedly being bad patients, sometimes teachers can be very bad at learning things. I have near endless patience with my students, but never with myself. I wasn’t perfect at this immediately, so I might as well give up.

Thankfully I didn’t. I pushed through that wall of thinking, performed our routine roughly 112 times (not actually, but it felt like that okay!) and agreed to be filmed doing it. I nailed it precisely 0% of times. But, when I embraced and trusted the process, I had so much fun. Looking over the video, I can only describe my dance style as ‘passionate if not detail orientated’ but you know what, when I think about all it took me to get there, both literally during the class and the years since I last entered that dance studio, I’m so feckin’ proud of myself.