We, The Unshrinkable Women
February 23, 2023 4 min 28 sec read/listen
If you haven’t heard Lily Myers speak her poem Shrinking Women at the College National Poetry Slam in 2013, I’ll leave the link for you right here.
I was introduced to this piece the other day. This poem about her and her mother and her mother’s mother shrinking in their lives. She primarily uses food as the tool for shrinking but I read between the lines, over the lines, under them and right through them.
Women shrinking exists in the lineage of so many of us and I can speak for myself, that I carried on some of those generational habits in my life for many years. I shrunk. I dimmed. I became small.
I am no longer living like that, but it’s taken work and conscious choice. And taking the time to honestly see how I had been living in myself and where the roots of those habits came from.
As Lily wrote:
”and I never meant to replicate her, but spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits. That’s why women in my family have been shrinking for decades.
We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit weaving silence in between the threads.”
Do you ever think about that? About the habits you may have inherited and whether or not you even want those habits? I’m thinking about that these days.
Her opening line grabbed me: “Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass.”
I recall my entire life watching my mother count points in her food á la Weight Watchers. No amount of “this is delicious” through an expressionless face could convince me her lunch of two pieces of melba toast, a tablespoon of low fat cottage cheese on each piece and a dollap of sugar free jam was ‘delicious.’
Lily says, “I have been taught accommodation. I have been taught to filter. I have been taught to grow in, not out. I have learned to absorb.”
As you listen or read this piece, I wonder which women in your life you’re recalling who are shrinking. Accommodating. Filtering. Growing inward. Absorbing.
Who in your lineage silenced her voice to make room for bigger voices?
Who covered up their smiles, their opinions, their ideas, their bodies, their dreams so as not to draw attention toward them which of course would mean it drew attention away from someone else and that simply wouldn’t do.
I think Lily’s piece is important. And so are these questions and taking time to look and see. Because our lives, these bodies, these minds, these hearts, don’t live in a vacuum. We carry our inheritance.
I think it matters to name the truths that exist, that still exist. To not bypass what has been, and what may still be in the name of positivity. Or ‘carrying on’ or ‘letting go’ or even ‘that was then and this is now.’
How can we here and now, choose better for ourselves or each other or our future generations, if we can’t be brave enough to name what is the truth that has led us to the itch that says, “I have more to say here. I am hungry. I am alive. I have opinions and objections and art to create. I have a voice to be heard.”
First, I think, we honour the shrinking. We name it. See it. Grieve it.
And then we choose.
Who am I now? Who do I want to be in this life now? What lineage patterns of smallness am I willing to break? What stories about my worth, my mother’s worth, my mother’s mother’s worth and so on…what stories and desires to take up space am I ready to rewrite?
Who, of the women I have known, including myself, who have shrunk so small they were nearly forgotten, am I going to honour through how I live now?
If we want to break the cycles of shrinking women, for the women before us and those coming after us, we have to start with ourselves.
Friends, let’s get unshrinkable.
I’m Jenn and I am a professional actor, writer and a self-love coach for women.
I live my life with as much authentic, embodied power as possible. I use my voice to inspire others and my healing journey to guide women home to their voices, their truths, their purpose.
Raising my voice right along with you,
Jenn
Photography by Carlos Quintero with permission from @Unsplash
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