I decided that day to pursue psy- chotherapy, and to orient my work toward supporting artists; people who were in the river too, on the ros- ters, on the edges, in the candidate pool, frayed in the fray. I applied to more graduate school, rearranged mostly everything in my day-to-day, engaged in “evidence-based research” in order to learn new ways of doing what I had already been doing, and generally walked right out the door and toward this new thing. I am indeed a therapist now, and, yes, it can be confusing to not know how I will dance. The grief and long- ing are wild and extraordinary some days, but they are not boring, and I remain endlessly fascinated by this shifting life. Nearly seven years after the last public performance of my work, I still don’t know what it means to be standing on the outside of a community and a lifestyle that I once couldn’t even see because I was so obsessively inside of it, shap- ing it. This part remains bizarre, but I’m grateful for the perspective. When I was in my most rigorous and lucrative art-making phase (about 2006-2017), I entered every proj- ect, every inquiry, every performance, with a fairly similar approach: go tenderly into a something, and look around. Listen. Feel the walls. What is already happening? What are the existing modes and languages pres- ent? Who is there and who is not? What is needed? How do you know? How might we curiously shepherd and craft some creative interventions? Of course, this is how I approach my clinical work. The moment on top of Mt. David- son with Siobhan makes me know that I’m okay, and that I will dance. My friend Jesse (Zaritt) and I do dancey drawings together once in a while, and we write things that are dances, that some might think are weird and troubling, but that make us feel alive. My partner gave me crayons for Christmas, and I used them to make a dance therapy
picture just this morning. The cadence and dynamic of my conversations over food with Sara still feel like we are in a studio together, carving away at each other, with love and hunger. I am a dance artist and a therapist, and of course I still don’t know how to explain myself to you any better than I did when I was trying to get you to Come. See. My. Fucking. Show. In my work as a therapist, though, I don’t need you to come see anything or do anything, and I’m glad for that, for now. Recently, in a session, my client (an artist) was stuck in a language- based anxiety loop. His circumstances were untenable, and necessitated that he move his consciousness from his head down into his guts, or he was going to stay stuck. I asked him if he would be okay just getting up, walking around the room, and testing out the textures and densities of the surfaces. He did it. I watched him and tracked his pace and breathing. I moved my breath with his, and flexed my muscles when he pushed on things. When he sat back down, he still seemed a little trapped, but something was brimming. I asked him if we could sit in silence for three minutes. We did. Around one minute in, he wept. Finally. I stayed with him. We were dancing. A quick note to my people, my art- ists, my shades of purple, my adversar- ies, my ghostly ones, my failures, my friends: maybe we will always be in this matrix of abstraction and import, and maybe we deserve to feel okay if we want to. Maybe we sharpen our skills, soften our assessments, and put me out of work, because if there is anything that we know how to do, it is to heal. I’ll follow your lead. Love, Jesse JESSE HEWIT practices psychotherapy in San Francisco, and is faculty at the School of Social Work of San Francisco State University. He also has danced, does dance, and will dance. His crea- tive and therapeutic work continues to be ground- ed in pursuits of connectivity, clarity, and unhinging.
I am a dance artist and a
therapist, and of course I still don’t know how to explain myself to you any better than I did when I was trying to
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