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When I was a young girl living in suburban London in the early 1960s, I was looking for ways to find excitement. The first time my mother took me to see the London Festival Ballet (now the English National Ballet), I felt a sense of rapture as I realised that the body could say things words could not.

I was yearning for more, and that night at the Royal Festival Hall, I saw glimmers of the world out there waiting for me. Watching the dancers, I felt something shift in me. It was like discovering a new language, one that I immediately wanted to speak.

At least twice a year after that, we travelled by train from Wimbledon to the South Bank. I began to see the iron girders of Hungerford Bridge as the passageway from one world to another. From our usual seats in the balcony, I watched dancers perform The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, Giselle. I loved the anticipation of it; the audience’s fidgety excitement and the arrival of the orchestra as they settled into place. Then how out of the darkness came illumination, colour, sound and movement.

Often, when my parents were out, I would play the LP bought for our new record player: An Album of Ballet Melodies by Mantovani and His Orchestra. Hearing the opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker, I found my body responding to the rise and fall of the music, the call and response of melodies. I remember being surprised: it felt so natural, as though I were channelling something that had been inside me, waiting to come out. It was liberating. I was shy, but dancing alone in the living room I felt completely myself.

As a girl, dancing became a way of expressing my inner world, the restlessness and longing that came with growing up. I had attended ballet and tap classes when I was very young, but now I was enjoying it with a new sense of autonomy. In my teens, it was how I felt free, dancing to jazz and rock music in clubs. Later, as a mother, it was something joyful I shared at home with my children. In my 50s, I set up a dance group for women over 50, where we could express ourselves through movement without feeling self-conscious.

Now, in my eighth decade, dance is how I return to myself: me as I have always been, unchanged throughout the years. Every couple of weeks, I put on music and dance alone in my living room, just as I did then. It is one of my greatest pleasures, the best thing I know for my mind and body.

Recently, when I started thinking about ballet’s lifelong effect on my life, I took out that old LP for the first time in years. The cover – pointed feet in pink ballet shoes – is torn now, but after I set the needle down and heard the first few notes, I responded with the same gestures and movements as I always had. It was as if I was remembering a language.

Though I no longer leap or jump, when I listen and move to that music, I feel something rise up – like sap in spring, an irrepressible urge towards life. I feel that young girl’s energy, twirling, stretching and jumping in my parents’ living room, discovering what it means to feel alive in my own body.

Did a cultural moment prompt you to make a major life change? Email us at cultural.awakening@theguardian.com