With that being said, Halloween is just days away, which gives me the opportunity to share a story with you guys about my body journey as I have traveled into adulthood.
When I was about twelve years old, I wanted to be Ursula so bad. I don't particularly mean I wanted to be her for Halloween, no, I wanted to be her. I wanted to embody everything that she represented for me. It was a deep, secret wish. Most young girls don't go around blasting their aspirations to be a villain, let alone a fat, purple sea witch. So, it was something that I decided to be tight-lipped about.
Ursula as a character was everything that I was fishing for within myself. Fishing for...ya get it? *crickets* oh, never mind.
Anyway, what drew me to Ursula and kept me so enamoured with her was her personality and her appearance, believe it or not. Her skin may have been lilac, her hair may have been white, grey, silver, or whatever the hell it was supposed to be. But, if there was one thing you could say about Ursula; the chick had moxie. Her six tentacles just gave her more appendages to shimmy and shake with enough quick-witted sassiness to make the drag queen Divine -whom she was inspired by- swell with pride. Those wide hips went ba-da boom, boom all over the place during one of the greatest Disney songs of all time -in my not so humble opinion anyway. Those red lips, so full, looked as if they'd uttered a million spells that has recited a thousand secrets. Not to mention that very Marylin Monroe-esque mole, am I right? Her sarcastic cackle and inappropriate truths were humorous and well, true. Ursula was the original bada** who refused to mince her words when telling Ariel about the dangers of the world above. Ursula was everything that I wasn't.
Well, we did have one thing in common; we were both fat. Ursula was the first character in a Disney film, or animated thing that I watched as a kid, actually, who I could identify with. I would watch "Poor Unfortunate Souls" over and over again, twirling and sloshing my hips around as I mimic every line Ursula had. She was my very first spirit animal. It was the first time as a child that I felt like my fat existence was being personified on screen. It felt great. You think Ursula would have cared if some boys at school bullied her about her weight? Huh, no, she'd turn them into helpless little creatures to stick on her cavern wall before the words couldn't even form on her lips.
Ursula was powerful. Not just with her magic but just her sheer being. She was the fat, proud, take me or leave me role model that I wish I could have had more of growing up. I didn't care that she was a villain. I loved her, I wanted to be her. I wanted to be that confident, I wanted to be able to sport a strapless top and not feel the need to cover my body. When I first wanted to be Ursula, I was at the height of my childhood weight gain. I was beginning Junior High and my discomfort, disgust, and disdain for my body had been kicked into full throttle. My sole mission, aside from passing my classes was to hide my body in every way that I could. Every last school memory, for two years straight, involve my body being shrouded by my grey hoodie.
My grey hoodie....I have come so far in my body journey that I can honestly say that I don't miss that damn thing. But back in Junior High, that thing was my security blanket. My mom bought it for me at a store called AJ Wright in the early 2000s and from the day she bought it, I hardly ever took it off. Every outfit I ever wore would get covered up by it, zipped up beneath a heavy force field of shame. See, I wanted to be Ursula, but I wasn't. I wasn't confident in my body, I wasn't powerful, I wasn't any of the things that I needed to be, or wanted to be. So, I did what any young kid does; I hid.
I hid beneath a hoodie so that no one could see me. So badly did I want to be invisible that I did everything within what little power I had to make it possible. It was my greatest fear that if people saw my body, they would do what so many had done before. I would become defined by it. I would stop being Rachel and instantly become the fat girl.
The fat girl. We all know what that means. The fat girl means the one who gets teased, taunted, bullied, belittled. The one they throw food at in the cafeteria, or make noises as she walks down the hall. The fat girl whose walk they imitate, and immediately turn into a waddle. I spent so much of my life afraid to be the fat girl because I thought that being the fat girl meant forever dealing with a life of pain.
But it doesn't have to be.
Over the years, I've learned to reclaim the word fat. It isn't the worst thing to be in the world. I like the way my fat feels, it's soft. I like the way my fat jiggles and shakes when I'm having sex. I like the way my fat looks under all my pretty dresses. Do people still snicker, or point, or laugh, or shout obscenities when I walk down the street. Sure, of course they do. People hate people who are different, they try to squash that quality, they try to make different people feel less than. But you aren't. You are as less than as you allow yourself to feel, and after years of feeling like less than less, I made the conscious decision to not want that any more.
Loving my body is hard. It is a decision that I have to roll out of bed and make every single day, 365 days out of the year. Some days I do, and it's easy, it's wonderful. Some days, it is the hardest thing that I have to do. But you know what? That is my decision to make, day in and day out, no one can make it for me. I may not have ever gotten a chance to be Ursula, but hey, I'm me and it took be twenty-four years to be as okay with that as I am now.
Stories like mine and so many others I have heard is what makes me realize how important representation is for children growing up. We as humans, even adults, are so impressionable. It means so much to us to see idols that represent us in the media, portrayed in a positive life. Ursula may have been a villain, but she was the only big girl I'd ever seen doing what she does best. She was the firs raw, representation of what I looked like and embodied everything that I wanted to be. She gave me a push in the right direction. My journey is far from over, I have no clue if it will ever be over. What I do know, is that without having Ursula in my life as a child, my secret little wish, I'm not sure how I would have ended up.
