Starve, Shrink, Speak
Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to take up space
Except, I didn’t want to take up space. I wanted to shrink myself small enough to fit into the emerald tutu. I wanted each sinewy line of every muscle to poke through paper thin skin as I pirouetted and jetéd across the dance floor. I wanted to wear a size zero. No, a double zero. I wanted to disappear.
Those are the thought patterns that nearly destroyed me and they are the thought patterns I continue to battle, even though I am no longer an aspiring ballerina and I am comfortable accepting that I was never and will never be a zero.
Today, I’m a 40-year-old mom of two, and my mission is to teach my children — especially my daughter — that taking up space is a virtue. This is no easy task because choosing to take up space runs counter to everything we are taught as girls and women. In a world where being big, loud, proud, and assertive is only justified if you are a white cishet man, the choice to occupy as much space as possible can be an act of political warfare.
And it can get you killed.
But you know what else can get you killed? Starvation. Silence. Submission. Shrinking your authentic self so much that it’s unrecognizable, even to you. This is how I used to be — a people pleaser, a quiet smiling face, a receding shoreline, eroded by…
