I have spent my life trying to fit. Into friendships, personas, clothes… box after box after box. So many self-help books will ask you; “Why fit IN when you can stand OUT?” or “Don’t limit yourself by fitting into someone else’s mold”.
I grew up in an environment where these phrases were posted on hallways in my school. Where we watched inspiring videos of people promoting individuality and self-love. Did I miss the memo? No. I just didn’t allow myself to see the whole messy story of the journey to self-love. That someone else’s mold might just be the mold that I believed was my perfectly imperfect curated identity; the identity that I would spend the next ten years of my life pursuing. What none of these videos told me was that it was ok to awake crying at the end of the day because it’s exhausting to stand out. That while icons like Ashely Graham and Serena Williams might have overcome these late nights and grown up into the strong inspiring women they are, when you’re 13 and already looking to self-help books all the obstacles they’ve overcome are still in your future.
I was looking through old pictures this morning. Transported back by Lana Del Rey’s song Summertime Sadness to the 13-year-old girl who heard that song for the first time. I was graduating from middle school and desperately clinging to the identity of the underdog. The outcast who would one day walk into the high school dance with the most beautiful dress and suddenly be accepted. I look back on that girl and so badly want her to know that she’s not oddly shaped. That the obstacles in her way aren’t the subtle cues from peers that she just wasn’t quite the “normal” kind of awkward middle schooler. Instead, it was my own idea of who I should be that would stand most in my way.
Watching the sunrise in the hazy morning today I think about how exhausting it is to be the one who is a little different. For all who still wonder what privilege is: privilege is waking up in the morning feeling like the things that make you different are things that you can change. I grew up believing I could change my clothes, wear makeup, do a certain kind of workout and I could be accepted. That belief led to pain, it led to being hospitalized for my eating disorder following my college graduation. But it is still a privilege. This is not to discount any of the pain I just shared, instead it is to put into perspective the way that the word “fit” really plays into the way we perceive ourselves and understand the world and our place in it.
I don’t want to spend my life continuing to fit into boxes too small for my dreams. I am making the choice to be exhausted. To be the person who validates my own feelings. Who doesn’t always have something to prove to others because I haven’t proved it to myself. I am committing to a life of being tired because I’m standing out in a way that isn’t always cool. To lean into conversations that are uncomfortable. Of standing up against what everyone believes is normal. Because not everyone gets that choice.
Peace Love and Doughnuts
Sophia
Diaries of a Dancing Queen 