Good Or Shit: Dancing

I'm single, unemployed and slightly chubby – while others may look at this as an example of what not to be at the age of thirty, I can honestly say – I've never been happier. To quote Collette's 1989 hit – all I wanna do is dance.

I've always loved dancing. That in no way means I think of myself as a short, white version of Ciara, it just means that despite my inability to pop and lock and appear in any way sexy, if given a beat, I will automatically begin to move my body in a manner that is probably best described as interesting.

I can't help it, I'm compelled. Next to swimming in the Murray River, nothing else makes me feel as free.

Dancing is a contentious, somewhat polarising, and often terrifying activity. All throughout my high school years I was obsessively conscious and paranoid about what I looked like on the dance floor. My best friend was this gorgeous slender thing with long black hair and green eyes. She could sing and she could dance and she was amazing at both of them. Between song breaks I would whisper in her ear, “Are you sure I look OK? You'd tell me if I looked stupid, wouldn't you?” She always fobbed me off with an impatient hiss – “Yes, man. Do you think I'd be dancing with you if you looked stupid?”

After a while, I took on her moves. Partly of my own volition and partly because she made me. (Occasionally, my friends and I still do some of the mini routines she instructed us in fifteen years ago). Because of this, I only ever felt comfortable dancing with her. Like only being able to sing in tune when you sing along with a singer. Without her, I found it difficult to keep in time, to loosen up, to have the confidence to let go.

But, in my experience, as you get older you care less.

In my twenties, at home in Sydney I would dance with my friends until the neighbours were so over the noise they'd start pegging fruit and vegetables at the house. In the front row at hip hop gigs I would wave my hand in the air as much as anyone else. And then I went and took up belly dancing. When my aunty-who-is-the-same-age-as-me told me that, when undulating, I looked like a caterpillar with Down syndrome, I burst out laughing and proceeded to undulate until she was begging me to stop.

Compare this to my first six months in London where, as a brittle and fragile human being, I was barely able to nod my head to a tune. I just stood meekly to the side and smiled at my new friends as they let go of their inhibitions. I wanted to join in, I just couldn't. I baulked, panicked, I longed for my friends back home. I was lost, shy, unsure of who I was or what was going to happen to me. Basically, I was scared of life.

Two years later and I just don't care. I care so little, I will go out wearing clothes with grease stains on them – “Celebrating fat since 1984” one of my fellow thirty-year-olds says – and dance until I'm sweaty, dry mouthed and out of breath, with other people, by myself, at home, or in public. Kinda like the kid in Sia's new video.

Surely this says something about age and confidence. As I have grown older, I have become more confident. As I am more confident, I am not only more prone to dancing, I'm bloody craving it.

They say women enter their sexual peak in their thirties. As well as this, I seem to be in my dancing prime. Or something. Although, I theorise that the two are related. Sex, kissing and dancing all require a certain amount of rhythm, confidence, the ability to let go of consciousness and give way to feeling and sensation. While I don't have any scientific proof, I suspect that if you're rigid when the music comes on, you'll struggle to make music in the bedroom.

My dancing mania has become so renowned that a friend sent me a definition of tarantism – “Overcoming melancholy by dancing; the uncontrollable urge to dance.”

Further research revealed that tarantism was some kind of condition common in southern Italy in the 16th century where, it was claimed, the bite of a tarantula brought about in the victim a kind of restless, hysteric behaviour that could only be cured by dancing to music.

Since losing my job, my boyfriend and my slender figure, I have done little else in my free time other than cut shapes to nineties hip hop and R&B in my living room, slow dance to soul in a bar, move in a bizarre manner to house under the arches of a railway line at a rave that almost gave me epilepsy and, one of my favourite recent excursions – shake my hips and my tits to Arab Idol with two middle-aged Palestinian men.

Restless? Yes. Hysterical? Maybe. Having a fucking great time? I'm a tarantist, what do you think.