Latest / Just Julia / How Much of Yourself Have You Shrunk to Fit In?

Transcript

How Much of Yourself Have You Shrunk to Fit In? · Just Julia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: How much of yourself have you shrunk to fit in?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: What being the tallest girl in class,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: years of ballet, and one lesson about body language taught me about taking up space?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: When I was around 10 years old, I was the tallest girl in my class.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, for a while, I think I was taller than almost everyone, girls and boys.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: At school,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: whenever we had to walk somewhere together,
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: the teachers would put us in a line according to height,
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: shortest at the front, tallest at the back.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: I knew exactly where I belonged.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: At the very end, I hated it.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was growing quickly, and most of my friends were much shorter than me.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: So when I walked beside them, I would bend down to talk to them.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: My shoulders would curve forward, my head would come down.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't remember consciously thinking, I need to make myself smaller.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I was simply getting closer to everyone else.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: My mother noticed.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: She could see that I was growing fast, becoming curvier, and developing terrible posture.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So she enrolled me in classical ballet.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, I thought she was trying to fix my back.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm not so sure that was all ballet gave me.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: For those years, my posture completely changed.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: My shoulders went back.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: My spine became straight.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: My neck became long.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I stopped looking at the floor.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I could sit on a chair with a beautifully straight back and walk into a room
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: without folding myself forward.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Ballet required my body to practice over and over again,
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: something I had been trying very hard not to do.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Take my full height.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I would walk from my grandmother's house to ballet several times a week,
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: take my class, and walk back again.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know it then,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: but my mother was making an investment in me
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: that I would understand only decades later.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because I still shrink.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm 1.77 meters now.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not extraordinarily tall, but I'm taller than many of the women around me.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Then I moved to Italy and discovered an expression I'd never heard before.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Altezza e mezza bellezza.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Height is half of beauty.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I remember thinking, like, are you serious?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I had spent years trying to disguise something that,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: in another culture, people were casually describing as half the job done.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was something almost funny about it.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: The body hadn't changed, only the story around it had.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes when I'm walking beside a shorter friend,
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I catch myself doing exactly what I did as a little girl.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I bend.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I lower myself.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I make myself closer to her height.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: The strange thing is that I've started noticing that I don't only do this with my body.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I do it with my life, CA.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever had that friend who for a period of time seems to be going
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: through one difficult thing after another?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Her relationship isn't working.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Work is awful.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: She had a terrible weekend.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing seems to be going right.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's you.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe at that particular moment, you're actually happy.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Your relationship is good.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: You had a beautiful weekend with your family.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Something exciting is happening at work.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Life isn't perfect, of course, but right now, things are good.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: You sit down with her and listen.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then,
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: almost without realizing it,
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: you start searching your own life for something that isn't going well.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm exhausted.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, something annoying happened this week.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Things aren't perfect for me either.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not because you're lying.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: There is always something we can find.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: But because saying, like, I'm actually really happy right now can suddenly feel almost impolite.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want your happiness to make her sadness feel heavier.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to seem insensitive.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of simply being present for what she's going through,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: you adjust yourself to meet her emotional level.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: You shrink the good things in your life a little so you can fit more comfortably
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: into the conversation.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know there is kindness in that.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to celebrate while someone I love is hurting.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: But I've started wondering where empathy ends and shrinking begins.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, I took a master class with behavioral researcher Vanessa Van Edwards.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: She talks about the physical distance between our ears and our shoulders.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: When we're uncomfortable or insecure, our shoulders can creep upward and our neck retracts.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: We physically contract.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I immediately thought of ballet.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Shoulders down, neck long, head up.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Create space.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It made me wonder how often our bodies reveal something we're doing everywhere else.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: How often do we shrink an opinion because we don't want to sound difficult?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: An ambition because it might sound ridiculous.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Good news because somebody else is struggling.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Our intelligence because we're speaking in a language that doesn't completely belong to us.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Our height because everyone else is standing a little lower.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps this is why,
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: approaching 40,
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've found myself thinking that every woman should take a ballet class.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not because every woman needs to dance,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: because I think every woman should experience what it feels like to spend
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: an hour being asked to take her full height,
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: to open instead of contract,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: to lift her eyes from the floor,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: to stop apologizing physically or otherwise for the space she occupies.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: When my mother enrolled me in ballet, I thought she was fixing my posture.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly 30 years later, I wonder if she was teaching me something much bigger.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Stand up, shoulders back, lengthen your neck, lift your eyes, take the height you were given.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: At 10 I needed a ballet teacher to remind my body how to do it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: At almost 40 perhaps I need to remind myself because I don't want to spend
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: the next 40 years making myself smaller just so I fit more comfortably
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: into somebody else's line.