🌞POLESTICE🌞

Some thoughts on milestones.

My dear friend and pole icon Arlene Caffrey wrote a great blog about hitting her 19th poleversary, and I realised this year will be exactly a decade since I started dancing on a stick. In November 2015 I touched a pole for the very first time when I auditioned for Metropolis Strip Club in Bethnal Green. It was an unpromising start. I clattered round the stage with the sex appeal of a newborn baby giraffe, clinging onto the pole while bits of clothing unceremoniously dropped off. I’d picked the only song I knew on the playlist, Britney’s Gimme More, which got increasingly mortifying as everyone watching wished I’d give them less. 

Rather than a steady trajectory of taking classes and learning tricks, I noticed that over the past ten years, pole has appeared in my life at points where I felt very stuck. I started stripping when I was getting nowhere with media jobs and internships in London, and didn’t want to send another grovelling email asking my parents for money. When the Covid pandemic hit, all my work disappeared overnight and I had to move back to my parents’ basement in Belgium, I started taking pole classes on Zoom to stop myself going mad. 

When two friends died by suicide in the same year and I was so wrecked by it I had to quit my job, going to pole dancing classes eventually dragged me back out of the void. And there’s been lots of nice things, too. The only time I’ve been “recognised” was at a house party when someone told my friend “you didn’t say the pole dancing seagull from Britain’s Got Talent would be here!” and I still can’t tell if that means things were going very very badly or very very well. 

The more I talk to pole dancers, the more I see a pattern of people finding this art form while they’re going through a big personal change. It’s often a horrible breakup that gets people scrolling across Instagram pole dancing video at 2am and waking up to realise they’ve booked a class. But I’ve also talked to polers who gravitated towards this while they were recovering from a health scare, going through a complete change of career, discovering a new gender identity, or, in some capacity, finding themselves standing in the ruins of their old life and thinking “Fuck – what do I do now.” 

Of course it’s not always that dramatic and lots of people are pole dancing just for fun, or to get shredded in a cool, sexy way. But I love that the heart of pole is so magical and transformative. I’m obsessed with the work of Jamie Taylor who’s just launched her “MENOPOLE” pole dancing classes for over 45’s, flipping the script on poisonous, patriarchal ideas that there’s any kind of deadline on when to start getting sexy and strong. Teaching the beginners at Venus and my own little class is the most joyful and rewarding part of my week. Yes we are just dancing on a stick but, for reasons that never need to be shared with me and are none of my business, it’s a real privilege to welcome people who’ve made a decision to expand the possibilities of themselves.

A milestone that I crossed the same week of solstice was the date of my 6 years’ sobriety, and it hit me a few days later that, this year, I didn’t even notice. I don’t talk about recovery much because, I don’t think I’m the best advert for sobriety. Partly because I still always look slightly hungover and, despite having not touched booze for six years, spend my whole life falling over and tripping over stuff in my flat that’s been there as long as I have. And also, given the choice, I’d much rather be going out and getting shit-faced with my friends. Why, of all times, while we’re cooking in a heatwave of the climate crisis that will only get worse, and witnessing a barbaric genocide going unchecked, would anybody choose to be alive with uninterrupted clarity. 

Still, it jumped out at me that, given how much obsessive headspace used to be taken up by drinking and then by recovery, it going completely unnoticed now meant that things have moved on. Like the point months or years after a breakup when you used to spend every day in agonising heartbreak or letting your mind wander back to them, and then you realise it’s been a full week and you haven’t thought about them at all. 

This year on the day of my soberversary I came home from work, called my friend in Lisbon, chatted to my flatmate, made some dinner, and thought about my class choreography for that week. I spotted a move in an Enya Torres pole video on Instagram that I immediately wanted to use, did a quick warmup and found exactly the song I wanted for it. I went to the pole in my kitchen and put the move into a routine that just sort of came together. I’d had another choreography in mind, but, that one felt very functional – I’d just put the tricks in order that we’d be doing class and slapped that against an unconnected piece of music, not like the choreography I really love which gets sparked by a feeling or some interesting detail in a song. I finished putting the beats of the routine together, sat on my bed, and realised that, out of nowhere, I felt completely, uncomplicatedly happy. 

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