I made a statement the other day that ‘I would not be here if it wasn’t for dance’ and although the unaware listener shrugged it off as a surface layer comment, it felt like a deep punch into my own self, a new awareness of my own life. My journey from performer to freestyler is my most intimate testimony.
As a Māori-Pākeha child, my constant displacement from both sides of my identity led me to a belief that i did not belong or fit anywhere. I took this feeling as a continuous defeat in every area of my life and by the time i reached high school i was already seeing death as a welcoming option.
A gaping void left by an evading father and an abusive replacement, a self-destructive mother and a boxed in, silenced lifestyle of illness masquerading as ‘fine’. Parallel to my abused growing pains was, dance. The introduction to fun, hard work and a sense of achievement at the age of 7 would establish what it meant to express before i even knew of the word.
Entering high-school, being withdrawn became apart of my personality and at home it was ten-fold, as i grew to understand the events that had happened to and around me as a young girl.
With mental illness and suicide on my shoulders the darkness and pain around suicide no longer bothered me. I had become so numb to the world that suicide was the answer to my mindset, absolutely anywhere but here.
At 13 i overdosed on pain medication in my bedroom while looking out the window. After sending texts to the friends i knew deserved a goodbye, i put a song on repeat and drifted into a heavy sleep.
Even though my life would have ended at 13 in 2012, I had a friend who decided they would not accept my decision, found my address and called the police who arrived all before my fate was sealed and my mother had returned from the supermarket.
The trauma of the reality and the weight of pain my actions had put on everyone around me, never left me. Seeing my mother and grandmother hold each other with pure heartbreak, doctors and nurses scoffing at me, being institutionalized as ‘another Maori’ by my allocated counselor who only saw me once, family and friends that visited just to sit in silence, unable to speak, the multitude of worried and anxious timeline posts from people who had never really acknowledged me before, my mother no longer speaking to me but answering ‘puberty’ to all the questions. Although i struggled before, my inability to talk about my feelings was set in concrete.
I had not danced in a few years but after my first suicide attempt i was directed back to my first dance tutor who now had a dance academy.
Through my years of school, my actions became more reckless because of my mental and emotional instability, my respect for adults thinned and the trauma from my consequences piled on top of me.
An annual suicide attempt and an annual dance showcase became my life. In the studio i would train the hardest, was most determined and would internally wear all the negative comments and experiences that seemed to constantly pool around me waist deep. In my last year of high school i was in the encompassing darkness of depression and anxiety while also being a main face in Hawkes Bays most successful dance crew. The duality of my life constantly quietly ripped me apart, the simultaneous height and depth that i could never seem to grasp.
I was a hated target to an admired dancer, intertwining within hourly spaces.
Life became numb, confusing, i felt too tired, to live or to die. I would develop the ability to perform life as if i wasn’t internally rotting and the skill of funneling my internal screaming into every silent form of communication, dance and visual art.
A few days after my last year at school i left for Wellington City, i believed that all my troubles came from the house, the suburb, the city, the school and the people, so i left absolutely everything i knew. Nothing changed as my mental illnesses traveled with me in the suitcase of my mind. Having little to none respect or love for myself i took refuge into the life of shallow men who matched my phase in conveyed self-destruction. Contributing nothing but an eventual return to the yield of desiring death.
The parallel between me and dance seemed to remain. I was a no one in the city, and i liked it that way, a dancer that seemed to appear out of no where who wouldn’t say where she came from, the background, the dance crew, the hood, the history.
I began attending the dance classes of Patrick Godinet and for the first time in my life i was introduced to what it was like to dance, not from what you think others are seeing but by how you feel on the inside.
For a whole year i failed to establish any real friendship and sat back into my comfortable shadow, but each time i went to a dance class or a workshop a small axe began to swing at my concrete performer mask.
Before my 18th birthday i went to a Pat G. class where he taught something unlike what he would usually teach, to a song named ‘Jasmine’ by Jai Paul, It was the first time i freestyled, meaning to dance in the moment, however you feel. Afterwards i could remember absolutely nothing about what happened when i was dancing, but something felt different. Now i was used to video footage of perfectly rehearsed movements, formations and facials but when i received the footage from my freestlye, it was the first time i truly saw, me and how i was feeling, the first time i saw a moving image of personal truth, with voices of genuine support and encouragement throughout. I began to grow in what it meant to ‘Freestyle’ or to me ‘Style of free’ as well as learn about myself as an adventurous, independent, curious, love to learn and love the stars person, i began to find a voice that wouldn’t exhaust me mentally and emotionally because it was a voice i was used to, a voice that felt natural to me and my body. I discovered freestyle as a pure form of communication. You can not fake how you are feeling or pretend you are someone else when you are dancing/expressing purely moment to moment
In my second year of living in the capital, i started working in a nightclub. Never seeing the sun, constant alcohol, easy access to any drug, nameless faces for temporary entertainment, constant, loud, music. I felt comfortable, a false sense of confidence. Hell on Earth is modernized, and it can be found in the underbelly and behind the scenes of city nightclubs. I called it ‘home’ but every night was different so much it was the same, love was brought and short and pain was a game.
I caught glimpses of myself in the thoughts that i felt like everything was going in circles. That pain lead to more pain.

Dance class became fortnightly then the struggle of the distance seemed to grow. So did the trauma of my daily experiences, to the point i returned to bedrock, levels of pain i didn’t think was possible, I experienced eating disorders and holding the death of my own in my hands, insanity and the brick wall of the police force. I was dehydrated to dance, to attempt to express a pain with no words but because of muscle degeneration my body was too weak, bed bound. I felt as if the only voice i had left and needed the most had been taken from me.
After what felt like an eternity of falling i was able to go back to work and I had also begun to dance purely by feeling, as my physical body was not fit for anything strenuous, moving became like talking.
From the dance studio that seemed to be a sole lamp in my desert of the night, I was invited to perform at an event called ‘A Night With’. Before my performance i left and found a white board in another room, with a marker i poured out poetry about what my performance will be for and about, i felt bare, vulnerable, i found a way of telling my story without the guilt of traumatizing those that listen, I called the performance ‘Bare With Me’. I set fire to how i danced by the years of stored emotions and pain that was too hard to verbally share. It was me and dance.

Near the end of my time working on the main stretch of bars and the fight to not let myself become desensitized, i started noticing the people who were hurt but wore it on the outside as much as they did inside. One in particular was a girl named Bex. By divine timing it was just me and her in my bar that day. She beat herself with comments every $20 she withdrew for the pokie machines, i asked her to stop if it was only bringing her regret and she told me she couldn’t stop, that she had just been released from rehab, she had nowhere else to go and she didn’t want to be alone. I was instructed to tell her to leave but i just, couldn’t. I brought her out of the empty pokies to sit on the sidebar where i could talk to her. She was a singer, a great one to, we shared the love of music and how it always seemed to make things alright, she then told me how she was pushed into drugs and the downward spiral into addiction, her heavy regret and the pain of being separated from her son, she talked with jitterness, like someone in cold weather. After talking for a long time, she told me she had a curfew but was too anxious to take the bus, i put her in an uber and even though she kept thanking me, i couldn’t thank her enough. I realized there was more to life than pretending to be ok, there was more to life than wanting to die.
I wanted to heal.
After 7 years, my suicide attempts stopped and i focused on my art.
The connections i begun to make with a special few became so powerfully healing, by being vulnerable about how i was feeling through dance i started a different journey of transparency, it required the shedding of layers and layers of myself that were false, ugly and dark, i put my soul into every dance and every show. I knew what it was like to lose me and i never wanted to lose me again. I left the city and moved back home to heal the relationships i abandoned.
Dance in my life has transformed into something sacred, a healing force of true love and human connection, a weapon to fight demons. I’ve danced in spaces for women, healing, family, community and the next generation. Being able to express when i was voiceless, gave me hope, built my faith and strengthened my voice. I am privileged to know dance and a god-given second chance to know life.
From the performer to the freestyler, to the teacher.