That curiosity never really left…

Later, people increasingly began sharing their lives with me. In coffeeshops, friendships, relationships and eventually almost everywhere I went, I found myself listening to perspectives very different from my own.

I didn’t need to adopt them.
I wanted to understand how someone could arrive there.

Over time, I began to see how enormously powerful communication is.

We communicate not only to connect, but also to protect ourselves.

We hide behind words.
We soften them.
We weaponise them.
We sometimes say the opposite of what we desperately want someone to understand.

But perhaps one of the most important conversations is also one of the easiest to overlook:

the conversation we have with ourselves.

And perhaps even more importantly, the things we do not dare to say to ourselves out loud.

I know the darkness of self-destructive self-criticism very well.

Strangely enough, one of the places where that began to change was the dance floor.

At first, a compliment was simply nice.

Then there were ten.
Then hundreds.
And eventually, over the years, literally thousands.

But it was never really about my dance moves.

Apparently, they are pretty good. 😄

What people seemed to respond to most was the freedom.

The enormous smile on my face when I completely let go. The joy of being so absorbed in the music that, for a moment, nothing else seemed to matter.

Sometimes someone would come up to me and say:

“Man, I saw you dancing and suddenly I had to dance too. It just happened. Thank you.”

Those are still some of the moments when I feel like the happiest person on earth.

Not because somebody thought I was a good dancer.

But because, for a moment, I was able to share a little of my freedom with someone who was open enough to receive it.

And somehow, they gave something back to me too.

No matter how negative your image of yourself is, at some point it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore what the world keeps reflecting back to you.

It still took me until my early thirties to truly allow that reflection in. Until then, I danced, but compared with the way I move today, I was still holding a lot of myself back.

Eventually, I began to own those credits.

And the more I allowed myself to see what others had apparently been seeing for years, the more freedom entered my movement.

But there was another side to it.

The same appreciation that helped me recognise something beautiful in myself could also make me want to keep dancing for others, even when I was going beyond my own limits.

The same communication can liberate us and still become something we hide behind.

Perhaps that is why perspective matters so much to me.

Not because one perspective is necessarily right and another is wrong.

But because the way we see ourselves, others and the world around us shapes the conversations we are able — and sometimes unable — to have.

And sometimes one honest question can create a small opening in something we had considered absolutely true.