I was in the Orlando airport on my way home from Disney World when I saw them.
Three little girls, maybe three, four, five years old. There was a giant screen playing The Lion King and a small stage in front of it, cordoned off with red ropes. They were not supposed to be on that stage. They knew they were not supposed to be on that stage. They went under the ropes anyway.
And they danced.
Not shyly. Not apologetically. They acted out every lyric, every movement, with their whole bodies and their whole hearts. There were thousands of people in that airport. Thirty or forty of them were sitting in chairs facing that screen, watching these girls. And those little girls did not care. Not even a little. They were free in a way that took my breath away.
I stood there watching them and thought: when did we stop doing that?
Somewhere around middle school, most of us learn that being watched is dangerous. We learn that shrinking keeps us safe, so we trade the stage for the sideline and call it modesty instead of what it actually is: fear.
How Women Learn to Shrink
I grew up going to family reunions every summer. There was always badminton or volleyball, and the people playing always wanted me to join in. I never did. I was too self conscious. I was going to mess it up. I was not going to be good enough. Everybody was going to be looking at me.
So I stood on the side and watched instead of playing.
I was not three years old anymore. I had learned, as most of us learn somewhere around middle school, that being seen was dangerous. That standing out meant risking something. That it was safer to watch than to play, safer to blend than to shine, safer to make yourself small than to take up space and have someone decide you weren’t worth it.
I learned that lesson so well I carried it for decades.
What I Noticed at the Pool
I just got back from a vacation and spent some time at the pool. I noticed something there too.
There were women, plus size women, walking around in their bathing suits. Some of them in bikinis. And I found myself watching them with something that felt like admiration and something that felt like envy at the same time. Because I might have been the woman in the cover up. I might have been the one making herself smaller even at the pool, on vacation, surrounded by strangers who were never going to see me again.
Here is the truth I have come to understand: we are so much harder on ourselves than anyone else ever is. We stand in our own heads critiquing every part of ourselves while the people around us are doing the exact same thing about themselves. Nobody is looking at us the way we think they are. They are too busy worrying about how they look.
The women at that pool had figured something out. The little girls under the rope already knew it. And somewhere along the way, most of us forgot.
Forty Years to Just Be Myself
I have been out of high school for more than forty years. And I am only now, finally, getting to the point where I am just myself.
I want to say that plainly because I think it matters. Forty years. That is how long it took me to stop worrying enough about what other people thought to actually show up as who I am.
And here is what I wish someone had said to me sooner: the people who have something to say about how you live your life, how you dress, how much space you take up, what you are reaching for, they are not you. They do not know your purpose. They do not know your gifts or your dreams or what you were put here to do. Their opinions are not your instructions.
But more than that: the time I spent making myself small was not just time I lost. It was time other people lost too. The women I could have helped sooner. The encouragement I could have offered. The beauty and strength I could have helped others see in themselves, all of it was sitting inside me waiting while I hid because I was afraid of what someone might say.
Shrinking does not only cost you. It costs everyone who needed what you had to give.
I am not writing this from the other side of some perfect transformation. I am writing it from the middle of one. But I can see clearly now what hiding cost me, and I do not want that for you.
I hope you will not wait forty years.
I hope you will go under the rope.
If any of this landed for you, I made something that goes deeper. It is called Stop Making Yourself Smaller: A Guide for Women Who Are Ready. You can get it here.
Beth Smith, fit specialist, Howell, Michigan