Leotard Trauma - A Fat Dancer Chronicle
There is one moment
from my years in dance class that sticks out like a sore thumb in my library of memories. I remember I felt like a hot air balloon. I was probably bloated, given my age and new womanhood, but on top of that, I was the fattest girl there. So, fat + bloating = hot air balloon.
Us dance kids had to get measured for our recital costumes every year. My studio didn’t do it the old fashioned way with measuring tape. We had sizers sent to us right from the costume companies themselves.
They were all different colors of the rainbow. There was a bright satin orange one that I dreaded ever having to put on my body. The royal green’s ribbons were frayed. There were purples and neon blues and let’s not forget yellow.
They felt icky and much like a corset. There was no give. Were the costumes we ordered from these companies really made like these? How the heck were we supposed to dance in them? Our task was to move our body in all different directions - what I like to call structured freeness. These did not feel free one single bit.
I take back my hot air balloon simile. I wasn’t the hot air balloon, I was the air in the balloon of colors: trapped and puffed and nowhere to go.
Anyway, we all had to put these Sizer Leotards over our own in front of everyone in class. Now imagine being the fat one. Yup, it’s mortifying.
The studio had shirts with the logo on it that we were allowed to wear over our class attire of tights and leotards. I lived in that shirt. I clung to that shirt. I wore it to every class and never wanted to take it off. I was not letting my chub fly metaphorically naked in a skin tight leo.
So when costume measuring time came, I dreaded going to class. My beloved shirt, my clutch, had to be taken off so we could be properly measured. There was no other way. I felt irritable, vulnerable, and severely insecure.
Because these old things had no give, and because dancer sizes were way smaller than street clothes sizes, I was always a size bigger than my usual size, which made me feel smaller on the inside. But this year, the bloated year, I went up 2 sizes.
Instead of my usual medium adult at age 12, I blew up to an extra large and when my teacher turned me around to see how the back of the leo fit, everyone saw the big XL across my chest.
How diminishing. I felt like a bug afraid to be squashed at any moment. Body shame anxiety was the norm for the next few years. It wasn’t until I graduated high school and they replaced those old leotard sizers by then, thank goodness, that I realized something very important.
I was the fat girl in class, which meant I was different. That meant there was something in me that had drive and passion for what I loved to do - dance. Which meant that I had the power to succeed no matter what I looked like.
Of course, it helped that I was good. I was a damn good dancer and I would use that passion to show others that it doesn’t matter what you look like. My costumes may have been bigger than everyone else’s, but my heart was also bigger.
What matters is what’s on the inside. What matters is seeing your difference as your superpower. What matters is believing that you are enough. Outside validation only creates the need for more validation.
This message - my message - my story, is the reason I became a teacher, director, choreographer, and children’s book author. Someone needs to tell the girls and women out there that they are enough by themselves in a world that tells them they can’t be themselves.
Screw what society deems worthy, because perfection is impossible. Standards are ideals. They are not tangible.
This memory was one of the many that flashed with bright colors while I wrote Bella the Buck-Toothed Ballerina. No one in the world should feel inadequate because of their looks. This book is for the dreamers out there who might need that image of possibility and hope.