Christmas represents a brief relaxation of the ban on over-45s dancing in public. There will be house parties, office parties, cleared kitchen spaces and lounge carpets, and possibly some marquees. For a few weeks only we will stand up, survey the risks, feel the music’s pull, let our guard down and allow the world to see us twist and bob. Initially, we will be cautious, our faces all raised-eyebrow self-mockery, just in case. But once we are sure it’s safe, we will be free again, free to move in ways not normally permitted to the unyoung.

The ageism around clubbing is unquestioned. A recent survey into when people stop going dancing found we retreat at about 37. Walking past the queues outside clubs in London it looks more like 25 to me. The thought of standing there, at the age of 58, waiting to be scrutinised by the door team, makes my stomach scrunch imagining the humiliation of rejection.

“Dad dancing” and “mum dancing” are terms of ridicule – the implication is that we can’t do it properly any more, we shouldn’t try, and if we do it’s very, very funny. We’re allowed salsa, Strictly and Zumba, and we’re permitted to take specialist lessons and attend gym classes, but walking into a huge, dark space with strangers and feeling our internal organs pulse to the bass is no longer acceptable.

And yet dancing is an extraordinarily healthy activity for mature people. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found dance to be the best physical activity for reducing the risk of dementia. Obviously, it is good for the heart and lungs, but it has also been shown to help with depression, improve balance and boost self-esteem.

Improvised bobbing and bouncing to a beat feels unlike any other movement. You are lost in a flow-like state. According to Dr Peter Lovatt, author of The Dance Cure, dancing allows the mind release from day-to-day concerns and interrupts negative looping thoughts.

It’s the brief taste of dance freedom at Christmas – and the occasional wedding – that remind me I’m a club person really. Underneath the stuffy dignified front implied by my age, the real me has hips that move when the rhythm calls. Beneath my disguise as midlife professional, parent and husband, I am a clubber, I have always been a clubber. I have just learned to keep it secret. When you’re 58 you only dance when no one’s looking.

I started as a teenager in east London venues haunted by violence. I was supposed to be looking for romantic encounters, but instead I just followed the beats, possessed by Chic and Tom Browne, eyes closed, unconstrained and fearless. I had discovered who I really was.

By the mid-80s I was lucky enough to be a student at that moment when London club life exploded with gay and mixed nights, the kind captured by the TV series It’s a Sin. It was a warm scene full of humans escaping somewhere else. I remember being in Heaven on election night in 1987 as Margaret Thatcher won her second landslide, feeling resigned but safe with my people. I turned away from the grim news on the screen and just kept moving.

By the 1990s, I was a regular at clubs such as Smashing, where Pulp filmed their Disco 2000 video and the artist Leigh Bowery would reel around and tower over the dancefloor, an animated sculpture, scary and exhilarating.

At each of these life stages, I remember the feeling of being utterly at peace as I moved. Catching an eye and looking away, at one with the people on the floor but also in my own place of bliss.

And then it stopped.

I began to feel a sense of having wandered into the wrong party, of no longer being at home. There were a couple of door refusals – polite, heartbreakingly respectful, with a hint of pity. I was no longer certain of my clothes or my moves; fewer and fewer contemporaries were willing to come out. A whole seam of joy closed down.

Have you seen older people when they are allowed to move again? Our bodies take us back to a time when this was part of our lives; we move like we used to. Mostly I dance like I’m back in the high-energy basements of the mid-80s. My wife tends to sway like Fools Gold has just been released. We are young again when we do this. It’s time travel. I get that it’s funny to the young, who know how to dance as it’s done now, but I’m appealing for a reset. There is beauty in seeing someone’s body rejuvenated by a piece of music.

I also want to reach out to my fellow closet clubbers: maybe this Christmas could be a fresh start for us? Maybe we can find ways to change club culture, join the queues, challenge the system, dismiss our doubts and their prejudices. If we all go, maybe they will accept us.

Above all, we need to win the battle with our own self-consciousness, the internalised biases – we need to stop the self-mocking ironic shuffle and dance. It’s high time we were all lost in music once again.

• Phil Hilton is a writer, editor and podcaster