From lounge-room parties to State of Origin cheerleading, Kay Kerr has boogied with the best of them. But getting back to the dancefloor on her own terms? That took self-love, an autism diagnosis and a few rounds of ‘Kokomo’.

One of my earliest memories – a fuzzy one with soft edges and dreamy lighting – is of living-room dance parties with my family. My parents’ records spinning, me spinning, everyone and everything spinning. Plush carpet underfoot, piles of cushions to land on or spin or throw, freedom of movement until my small body was tired enough to rest. Memory is a tricky thing: some things stick, while others dissolve, or warp, or merge. I had always clearly remembered us listening to a Beach Boys record, but I have since learnt that it was in fact the soundtrack to the 1988 Tom Cruise film Cocktail. And of course, track six is The Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’.

When recalling an event from memory, research shows that autistic people will report it with sensory details. The pillows, the carpet, the light. Songs and smells are most evocative. Research also indicates that some autistic people can struggle with autobiographical memory – long-term memories of the experiences of our lives – and this can impact our ability to form a sense of self. So many of my memories seem to exist without me in them, though I obviously know I was there.
There is comfort in the memories of living-room dance parties, because they’re not clouded by the perception of others. I felt free. But the moment I stepped into a dance class, dancing warped from something pure and expressive into something more fraught.

The attraction was obvious: other girls (normal girls) loved dance class. I certainly loved movement, and feeling as though I belonged. And dance class seemed about the only place where someone would spell out, through direct language and step-by-step demonstration, exactly the right way to be. In that way, dance was a lesson in masking: observe, mimic, practise, repeat.

I also remember the anxiety that came in the lead‑up to a class. Fight or flight would kick in and I would struggle to eat or drink or talk. All effort went to swallowing my feelings, shutting down my instincts and trying to appear as relaxed about it all as every other girl waiting outside the auditorium. It felt like a punishment I had willingly signed up for, and I could never recall why I had.

The running joke is that I was very good at quitting dance. I quit Irish dancing, tap dancing, jazz dancing, ballet dancing, contemporary dancing and hip-hop dancing. The bottom of my wardrobe collected shoes designed to help my feet move in different ways. I shudder to think of the hours and dollars spent by my parents on costumes that itched every part of my body. The smell of hairspray still makes me retch.
As a teenager, I moved away from dance and towards entirely different uses of community halls, like Battles of the Bands and local live music. These worked best when paired with alcohol. The escalating agent allowed me to dial down the self-perception and social anxiety, and dial up the sensory enjoyment of noise that made my ears vibrate and hum. It felt, at its best, like the kind of freedom I had found with ‘Kokomo’ in the living room all those years earlier.

But the flip side of binge-drinking was dangerous and dark. The crinkling of a thermal emergency blanket administered by a faceless paramedic can be found in more than one memory: me like a poisoned burrito wrapped in alfoil, doing my best to not exist within these moments.

Perhaps as a reaction, I made one brief foray back into dance. It did the trick of moving me on for good. I was obsessed with the film Bring It On and rewatched it in that very neurodivergent kind of way, memorising lines and intonations, and jokes I did not necessarily understand. Cheerleading, despite having no cultural significance in Australia at all, felt important to me, the way many American teen rites of passage have saturated our culture. What would be the Australian equivalent? Netball? I was shit at netball.

So towards the end of high school, I auditioned for a State of Origin halftime performance that required dancers who would be dressed as cheerleaders. (I make this distinction because the actual cheerleaders wore green Xbox uniforms and were required on the sideline for the entire game.) I made the cut and was given the maroon crop-top and hot pants, along with a schedule for rehearsals and instructions for making my own pom‑poms.

The first sense that this had been a mistake occurred to me as we lined up in the stadium tunnel, waiting to run out onto the field. The bitter, sweaty smell of beer turned my stomach, and the leering middle-aged men hanging over the rails to scream aggressive, sexual things at us teenagers (children) did, too.
On the field of Suncorp Stadium, in front of a crowd of more than 50,000 people, I had a moment of profound dissociation. When the other girls turned one way, I stood still, frozen, eyes glazed.
*record scratch*
*freeze frame*
Yep, that’s me (in the maroon hot pants). You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. That’s the autism, baby. Honestly, I still can’t perceive myself within the memory of this experience. If I think about it hard enough, I can smell the pyrotechnics, feel my ears ringing, but other than that, it’s like watching a movie about someone else.

The life lesson could have been that I needed to get curious about my struggles with self-perception, dissociation, sensory sensitivities and social anxiety. That would have been swell! Instead, I punted these lessons down the road a good nine years, and went with: dancing feels better when you’re drunk. Cool! As I turned 18, I’m not sure I would have been able to set foot in a club without alcohol as a social masking tool.

The further I move away from those times, the more clarity I gain. Alcohol was a destructive force in my life, but do I have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? I love idioms, and this one particularly. Wouldn’t it be ludicrous to get rid of something so precious as a baby? Absurd. Perhaps there is some joy worth preserving from nights spent on podiums with my best friend at our favourite club, where the playlist went from ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ by Bon Jovi to ‘New Noise’ by Refused, and everywhere in between. Intoxicated mistakes aside (send those down the drain), we were the baby; we were wonderful. Maybe I can treasure imperfection in these memories and make peace with them, rather than burying them completely.

So, I learnt a thing about myself in my mid-twenties (*Insert autism diagnosis story here*) and soon after I stopped drinking. Good life choices all round. The unfortunate thing was that for a while I found that without alcohol and with the understanding of myself as autistic, I no longer quite knew how to dance. There was too much perception, too much awareness. You couldn’t pay me to enter the wedding dancefloor I previously was unable to leave. All that knowledge and body awareness: gone. What do I do with my arms? Perhaps this information had been encoded in the brain cells killed off by 10 years of vodka sunrises and cheap white wine.

Fortunately, though, time has performed its strange, cyclical magic and brought me back to living-room dance parties. This time, I am the mother in the scene rather than the child. And I am doing my best to capture these memories in their entirety (with myself included in them). Ours is a home of musical statues, movie soundtrack performances, YouTube choreography lessons, and special interest songs on a loop.

Raising an autistic child as an autistic parent at this moment in time, with its growing understanding of neurodivergence, is…intense, man. It is not for the faint of heart. It is profound, all-encompassing, healing, triggering, terrifying, overwhelming, life-giving, beautiful. None of this has to do with the child; mine is 10/10, top-tier, no notes.

It’s about outside perception, of a shifting world full of outdated and destructive understandings of what being autistic means. About us parents whose autistic self-perception may have been forged in that fire – but who want greater things, for both the world and our children. This is the community in which I feel most at home.

We have to actively choose to make generational changes and work hard at healing ourselves every day, while pushing back against those not ready to see things differently. And amid all that, we have to remember to dance with our kids (or swim, or bounce, or run, or play – whatever they are into). Because it is joyful – and we need to prioritise joy. They will remember the songs and the lights and how it feels to be loved as themselves. Their foundations will be stronger than ours could have ever been. While we fight for the big changes we need in schools, medical settings, government and our communities, we make our homes neuro‑affirming spaces. Within these four walls, you will find acceptance, celebration, peace.

I still don’t always have a solid perception of myself; it is too influenced by the extreme weather patterns of my mind. Anxiety hangs around, saying I am not doing enough. But I do consider myself a good mum, partner, daughter, sister, friend. Or at least one who is learning and doing their best. And when we are dancing in our “big room” (which is objectively quite small), I can take a break from perceiving myself. I just need movement and music and mellow lighting – and people I love.

Words by Kay Kerr @kaykerr_.
Kay Kerr (she/her) is an AuDHD journalist and author. Her books include Please Don’t Hug Me, Social Queue and Love & Autism. For more info, visit kaykerr.com/books

Illustration by Michelle Pereira

Published ed ed#732