Where Dancing Started
You may already know a little about me from the About page, where I mention dancing as part of my story, but that short introduction doesn’t really explain what dancing has meant in my life.
I was seventeen when I first started dancing and at the time it didn’t feel like a life-changing decision. My younger sister had been dancing for a while and one summer evening I went along to watch her show. I remember sitting there watching the stage and noticing something very simple. Everyone looked like they were enjoying themselves… and part of me wanted to be up there with them.
There were a few other lads there around my age as well, maybe slightly younger, and they looked like they were having the time of their lives. Dancing was still one of those things that raised the occasional eyebrow if you were a teenage boy back then, however, it was becoming more accepted, but there was still that slight hesitation around it.
Watching that show though, none of that really mattered, it simply looked fun. There was curiosity, a sense of wanting to be part of something like that and, the fact that some of the girls were very pretty didn’t hurt!
But there was something else quietly pulling me in as well. Earlier in school I had taken part in productions of Oliver and Smike, and I had always enjoyed performing, but over time I drifted away from that world, focusing more on football and the usual teenage priorities. Sitting there that night felt like a small doorway opening again.
So that September I started dancing. At the time it was simply something new to try, something interesting, something different. I had no idea that more than twenty years later it would still be part of my life… or that it would quietly become one of the things that helps keep my mind balanced. Looking back now, long before I knew I was autistic, my brain was already working in patterns that dancing seemed to understand.
A Mind That Rarely Switches Off
For as long as I can remember my mind has rarely been still. There is almost always something running in the background, conversations replaying long after they have finished. Thinking about work, planning what needs to happen next, trying to make sense of social situations or thinking about home life and responsibilities. Sometimes even thinking about problems that have not happened yet.
Autistic adults often describe this constant mental activity as a form of cognitive load. Research into autistic masking and internal processing shows that navigating everyday environments can require a high level of ongoing mental effort.¹ Even when things appear calm on the outside, the mind is often still working hard behind the scenes.
One way I describe how my mind works is through something that oddly mirrors dancing.
My brain has always worked in sequences. One thought leads to another… one responsibility links into the next… like a dance routine that never quite reaches the final step.
As adult life filled with work, mortgages, family life and everything else that comes with it, those mental sequences seemed to grow longer and louder. What I did not realise at the time was that dancing had quietly become one of the few places where that constant movement of thoughts slowed down.
When the Music Starts
There is a moment at dancing when the music begins and the first steps of a routine fall into place. Something shifts in my mind at that point, the background thoughts do not disappear completely, but they loosen their grip. The rhythm, the steps and the movement suddenly give my mind something clear to hold onto.
When the music starts, the constant movement of my thoughts finally slows down. Not completely… but enough that my mind can breathe for a while.
Physical movement plays a role as well. Much of life is spent sitting, thinking and carrying responsibilities around in your head. Dancing asks something different of you. It asks you to move, to listen and to focus on what is happening in that moment.
Research into rhythm and movement based activities has shown that structured physical movement can support attention, coordination and emotional regulation in autistic individuals. Activities that combine rhythm, repetition and movement appear to give the brain a clearer focus, reducing the amount of mental effort required to process everything happening at once.
Over time I began to realise that those hours spent dancing were often the moments where my mind quietly finds its balance again.
Structure, Sequence and an Autistic Brain
The longer I have danced, the more I have realised how naturally the structure of dance aligns with the way my brain works as choreography is built on sequences. You learn routines step by step, repeating them until the order becomes familiar with each movement flows logically into the next. Practice slowly turns something complicated into something instinctive.
Sequence. Structure. Repetition. Rhythm.
Those patterns are not just part of dancing, they are also familiar ways for many autistic people to process the world. Predictable systems and structured environments often reduce cognitive stress because they remove some of the uncertainty that everyday life constantly introduces. Without ever planning it, I had stepped into something that worked with my brain rather than against it.
Most of the time my mind is already three steps ahead of itself. Dancing is one of the few places where it finally stays in the moment long enough for everything to feel balanced.
There are moments during a routine when everything seems to settle. The music flows, the steps fall into place without conscious thought and the movement carries you forward exactly as it should.
For someone whose mind is normally analysing, planning and running ahead of itself, those moments feel surprisingly rare. For a short time the rest of life fades into the background, but over time something else began to matter just as much… The people.
More Than Just Dancing
Over the years the people around dancing have become just as important as the dancing itself. The dance school gradually became something that feels far closer to an extended family than simply a place you go for lessons. I often joke that dancing has given me 50+ extra little sisters!
What makes that even more surreal is realising how long I have been part of that environment, some of the younger ones were barely more than toddlers when I first started. A few of them were about three years old at the time and now they are in their twenties. You suddenly realise you have watched entire childhoods unfold in the same dance school.
But it is not just the passing of time that makes those relationships special, it’s the humour that develops over the years. The constant winding each other up, the running jokes and the little traditions that only make sense to the people inside that room. There is always some sort of teasing going on. From the long-running jokes of is who will draw the “short straw” and end up partnered with me in the next show routine, or that I somehow always end up as the “main character” in the show numbers, whether that was ever the plan or not. It is that kind of humour, repeated year after year, that makes the environment feel easy to exist in.
Autism research has also begun to recognise that many communication difficulties are not simply about autistic people struggling socially. The Double Empathy Problem, first described by autistic researcher Damian Milton, suggests that misunderstandings often arise because autistic and non-autistic people experience and interpret the world differently. When people spend time together and understand each other well, those differences become far less of a barrier.
At the centre of it all are our teachers Janine and Kelly, who have guided the dance school since the beginning and honestly are closer to me than some family members. Both of them work in schools and have a deep understanding of children who require extra support, and who experience the world differently, something that has always shaped the environment they create at Footsteps.
When you spend that much time together, the relationships naturally stretch beyond the dance school. Many people from dancing, along with their families, were there on one of the most important days of my life when I got married, that is when you realise it stopped being just a hobby a long time ago.
Some people see a dance class. I see years of rehearsals, shows, laughter and friendships with people who quietly became family.
Understanding It Later
For most of my life I simply saw dancing as something I enjoyed, a hobby, something that filled a part of my week and gave me something to look forward to. It was not until my autism diagnosis in my mid-thirties that I began to understand why it had quietly become so important.
Research into autistic burnout shows that long periods of social and cognitive effort can gradually drain mental energy.² Many autistic adults describe needing activities that help regulate their minds and give them space to recover from that ongoing load. Looking back, dancing had been doing that for me for years before I even understood why.
It took an autism diagnosis in my thirties to realise something important… dancing had been helping regulate my mind long before I had the language to explain it.
When Everything Settles
There are moments during a routine when everything seems to slow. The music flows, the steps fall into place without conscious thought, the movement carries you forward and the noise of everything else begins to fade. For a short time the constant analysing stops, the planning pauses and the long list of responsibilities waiting elsewhere slips quietly out of view.
For a few minutes my mind stops racing ahead of itself. The noise quiets, the pressure lifts… and everything inside finally settles.
It is only afterwards that you realise how much that pause mattered, because most of life does not slow down like that. Most of the time my mind is moving quickly, trying to keep up with everything around it, but when the music starts and the first steps of the routine begin, something shifts again. The constant movement of my thoughts finally eases, and the quiet sense of balance returns.
That quiet sense of balance is something that only really makes sense through my eyes.
References and Further Reading
(1) Hull, L. et al. (2017)
“Putting on My Best Normal”: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-016-2870-7
(2) Raymaker, D. et al. (2020)
“Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew”: Defining autistic burnout
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/aut.2019.0079
(3) Milton, D.
The Double Empathy Problem
https://www.autism.org.uk/learn/knowledge-hub/professional-practice/double-empathy
(4) Srinivasan, S. & Bhat, A. (2013)
A Review of Rhythm and Movement Interventions for Individuals with Autism
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2013.01.004