Five days before Christmas, my sister and I went out dancing. Photo City, a local Rochester dance hall, advertised a Taylor Swift-themed dance party for Friday and a K-pop night Saturday. So, on that wintry December evening, despite heavy flurries falling outside her apartment window that obscured the streets, we got ready in her bathroom. To pop music, we applied makeup, she let me borrow her gold glitter freckles and we pulled on our dancing shoes for the first time in years.

To be clear, I am not a good dancer. With great, mainstream K-pop comes great responsibility. I may not be a good dancer, but I am a very enthusiastic lyric-shouting jumper, which is why we went to Taylor Swift night first.

Photo City, with its sickly sweet cocktails in Day-Glo colors and its neon "Let's get weird" bar sign, reminded me of the unpretentious clubs of my Edinburgh youth. Think sticky floors, ultraviolet laser lights and fog machines. The venue smelled of spilled drinks and bleach. Its name was a nod to the Kodak Company, one of the world's largest film and camera manufacturers before camera phones ruled the world, founded by Rochester's entrepreneur-inventor George Eastman whose name is synonymous with the city's former glory days.

The crowd was eclectic: A girl in head-to-toe sequins rolled in with friends in her wheelchair dropped off by her father in a minivan. Some queer guys in S&M-inspired leather encircled each other under the disco ball and chandeliers. A queen strode onto the dance floor alone in her silver-sequined booty shorts, blazer and platform heels. My sister's friend Paul, a Korean adoptee with the energy of 20 golden retrievers, joined us after a long work shift at Costco, taking a public bus for over an hour. He tore off his heavy winter coat to reveal a red Costco vest, and then he pulled that off to reveal a fantastic Hawaiian shirt with a Christmas Pug print. "My dog died," he said. "But he was 15." We danced to that and more.

We loved the dancing so much that we returned the next night with Paul's girlfriend in tow for K-pop. The vibe was different. Same number of club kids, but much more melanin. The dresses and dancing were sexier and younger. When the sparkling video game sound effects of "Tick-Tack" by ILLIT came on, a tall, lithe black dancer in a pink mesh, cropped hoodie and fluffy pink arm warmers executed every choreographed dance move with flair and attitude, even mouthing the Korean, and everyone cheered them in awe. Unlike last night's crowd, tonight's crowd had memorized the choreography, not just the lyrics. Since I know more Taylor Swift than new K-pop, I expected I wouldn't enjoy it as much. And I was right. I felt awkward and intimidated. I'd grown self-conscious.

Then SHINee's "Ring Ding Dong" came on. Paul started to lasso dance. Adrienne, his girlfriend, put her hands on his shoulder. I put mine on her red Christmas cardigan, and my sister followed behind. Paul led the conga line, and as we rounded a corner, I turned around and realized in disbelief that nearly all the clubgoers were no longer on the dance floor but on our line.

Our noble conga line leaders, Paul and his girlfriend Adrienne, are both adoptees. Adrienne was born in North Gyeongsang Province in 1988, and Paul in Incheon in 1991. Both were raised by white parents in Rochester, New York. Over lobster empanadas at dinner, they told me they met at an adoptee camp called Camp Chin-gu, a Korean culture camp for adopted Korean children who wanted to know their heritage. Paul said there were 7,500 adopted Koreans in Western New York State alone. He ran around the room in joy.

We — the adopted, second generation, immigrant, whatever — belonged despite our questionable dance moves.

That night, I walked out of Photo City with teeth chattering but warmed. Photo City Music Hall exemplified the now endangered "third place," I believe, where communities from all walks of life can meet, outside home and workplace, and relax. It might be a pub, a community pool, a library or a park.

Sociologist Ray Oldenberg argues the third places are the antidote to loneliness, political polarization, and even climate catastrophe. People of different classes, faiths, sexual orientations and politics occupy the same space day by day, night by night. These spaces instill civic engagement and a sense of rootedness. Thanks to my sister, I'd entered a hall where we could shed our worries, leave the alienation at the door and feel gorgeous. This was a dance hall where girls could teeter into the bathroom stalls and scrawl drunken profanities, anonymous fears and insecurities in black Sharpie onto the walls, only to be reassured in reply by other anonymous club kids.

This 2025, even as the world feels like it's tilting, I hope you'll get on your dancing shoes. Dance with reckless abandon out there or in the privacy of your bedroom. Find solace and freedom ever briefly — feel the music vibrate through your body through the fog and dark and flashing lights, letting you for a moment feel nothing else matters, other than this.

Esther Kim is a writer from New York living in Taiwan. She is working on her first book.