In 2017 I started teaching myself how to give lap dances.

I practice often, sometimes every day, usually in my studio. For the first few weeks, I practiced by watching someone on YouTube give lap dances to an empty chair. I followed their lead, mimicking their movements. I liked the awkward symmetry involved: I was alone in a room, pushing my hips and grinding on an empty chair, and so was this stranger on the internet. My empty chair and computer screen were my dance partners, my love objects, and my audience.

After a few weeks, I got tired of my teacher and abandoned YouTube, developing the framework for my own routine. Then I started improvising, dancing to music by artists I admire, loud enough to flood the HVAC sounds behind my studio walls and the military planes outside, training.

I started lap dancing because I have a long torso and felt this was something I could get into, something alluring to tuck into a tool box of party tricks and teaching tools. It became a personally significant practice by mistake. I focused on the morphing of my arms, my ass, my chest, and core: the tiny changes, the creation of private muscle memories, humility, or joy. Lap dancing became a way to think differently about what it means to exist in a state of transition, to explore the minute ways that my body is changing all the time.

A recent conversation with a friend: When you have top surgery—if you are able to, if you are in a position, physically, economically, socially, where you are able to make that decision and follow through with it—is it for yourself or for the world?

The past few months that I’ve been lap dancing, I’ve been preparing myself for changes and circling back to the way that the artist Anna/Anča Daučíková once described an experience of “meandering—clearing Paths in language…between the genders…unoccupied territory… balancing between metaphor and metamorphosis.”

I locate my lap dancing as “persisting in the realm of shaping.”

As Daučíková might explain: “I indulged myself in the joy of morphing—it is a labor.”