Chapter Eight: Group Therapy

The word therapy can split a room. For some, it’s a lifeline. For others, a bill that never ends. For me—queer kid turned high-functioning adult—I dipped in and out for years. One thing I’ve learned: saying something out loud changes it. So does writing it down and reading it back. The act of being witnessed—by another person or by the page—is a kind of medicine.

This book has been therapy that types itself.

What I hadn’t tried, not really, was group therapy. Not the circle-with-donuts kind—though bless the donuts—but the kind that happens when bodies move to the same pulse and feelings decide to speak in rhythm.

In college I stumbled onto dance music. Years later I found Above & Beyond’s weekly show, Group Therapy. The premise felt simple and radical at once: people everywhere pressing “play,” alone-together, letting the same melodies thread us into one listening body. Sometimes I tuned in live, sometimes later, but I loved knowing thousands of us were out there, hearts softening to the same chord change.

Around that time my work life was scraping the edges of me. Amazon was brilliant and brutal. Smart people, hard problems—and a way of working that sharpened every conversation to a point. My style is not knives. I built up a kind of mental residue I couldn’t think my way out of. Talk therapy helped. But the thing that actually emptied the residue was dancing. When the body takes the job of expression, the mind finally gets to unclench.

My first Above & Beyond gig was at the Warehouse Project in Manchester, that damp cathedral under the arches where the trains exhale above you. Ben Böhmer opened in a smaller room. I stood front row, completely entranced, and only later turned around to find…no one. Everyone had migrated to the main room for the headliners. I sprinted across corridors and landed in a corner behind a forest of shoulders, laughing at myself and still somehow home.

After lockdown, the dam broke. Everyone wanted to dance again. Group Therapy turned into group pilgrimages: milestone shows, pop-ups on unexpected coastlines, city nights that spilled into sunrise. I started saying yes—to travel, to community, to my own visibility. Fairy Drag Mother had already christened me with fairy lights on a cruise ship; soon I was a walking constellation: light-up trainers, suspenders, belt, bowtie, sunglasses, even a ridiculous unicorn wand. It was camp and it was permission. People could find me in a crowd. People did. Friendships sparked that didn’t need explanation, only a beat.

Those friendships spread beyond the dance floor. Weddings, dinners, random Tuesdays. Good On Paper and I glued ourselves together, in part, with music. When we were rocky, a night of dancing re-tuned us for a while. It wasn’t a cure. It was a reprieve.

Then a friend from an older chapter pulled me aside. “I love that you’ve found your people,” he said, “but what happens when the music stops? Will they still be there?”

I wanted to say yes. I believed the yes. And sometimes it was true.

But not always.

The stress test arrived around a small festival that had become our place—a seaside town where the label set up stages each summer. We’d formed as a group there. It was our annual re-threading. By then my relationship with Good On Paper had unraveled, and I had met someone who split my world open—the man I call Great Love. I wasn’t bringing him to the festival; I knew the chemistry and the proximity could turn volatile fast. Even so, I reached out to a friend about simply navigating the week with a little care. Her answer—kind on the surface, cold underneath—was: “We’re on holiday. We don’t want to deal with that.”

I could understand it from one angle. From another, it landed like a door closing. What I heard was: We love you when you’re uncomplicated. And in that moment something clarifying and uncomfortable crystallized: some of what I’d been calling friendship was actually fellowship—real and warm, but contingent on the music still playing.

That realization didn’t sour the scene for me. It tuned it. I started to sort the bonds that were built on resonance from the ones built on circumstance. Both have value; only one will help you move house at 2 a.m. or answer at 3.

The deeper lesson sat under all of it: why I was going out. For a while, dance was my pressure valve. The job demanded more than my nervous system could pay, and the floor became where my body could subsidize my mind. That worked—until it didn’t. The more misaligned my life became, the more compulsive the outings grew. I thought I was choosing joy; I was medicating overwhelm. The distinction matters.

Now, when I go, it’s because I’m already full. Dancing multiplies what’s there; it doesn’t fill a hole. I still believe music is one of the most powerful technologies humans ever made—code for the heart that compiles directly into feeling. I still believe in the holiness of a crowd moving as one, the way sorrow gets metabolized in the bass and tenderness rides the top line. I still believe in lights—maybe fewer batteries.

But I no longer confuse group therapy with the kind of care that requires phone calls, hospital chairs, or truth when it’s inconvenient. I let each thing be what it is.

If there’s a moral to this chapter, it’s simple: movement is medicine; community is medicine; discernment is dosage.

Say yes to the dance that helps your body speak. Say yes to the people who stay when the speakers turn off. And if you find yourself dressing like a Christmas tree to be seen—enjoy the glow, then ask the gentler question: Do the people I’m shining for still see me in the dark?

These days, I carry my own light. The music doesn’t fix me. It reminds me I’m already mending. And when the music stops, the friendships that remain are the kind you can hear even in silence.

I learned that lesson the hard way, because one day the silence spoke so loud that no music could possibly drown it out. 

It was years into that steadier life I had tried to build with Good-on-Paper. I went out with a friend whose closeness had blossomed during the Group Therapy era. We ended up in a club — exactly the kind of place I never expected to find anything real — and there he was. Not Prince Charming. Someone new. The man I would come to call my Great Love.

When our eyes met, it was like the world tilted. Every man I’d ever thought attractive suddenly flattened into two dimensions next to this living, breathing, Technicolor person before me. It was like the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the film bursts from black-and-white into color. And once you’ve seen in color, you can’t go back to black and white. Not for long.

It hit on so many levels. Part of me knew something profound had happened. My heart whispered, Follow this. My mind scolded, You made a promise. Your husband is a solid bet, he’s good on paper. But the heart has no patience for résumés. What’s “good on paper” isn’t always aligned in life. That realization crossed a line I couldn’t uncross. I didn’t yet understand that compatibility without Coherence always asks for a reckoning.