That Big Kid Ellen
Here’s your TL;DR upfront (because I like you): Adult Ellen has allowed fear and anxiety to rule her life for too long. I’ve decided that the antidote for this pattern is to start a blog that documents my experiences completing a list of 100 things that I used to love doing as a kid in an attempt to kickstart joy in my life. I’m going to turn into that Big Kid Ellen.
Here’s the full version:
Right now, it’s almost Jan 1, the time for the ambitious-yet-fleeting New Year’s Resolution. Almost every year for about a decade, I have had the same two resolutions: exercise and journal consistently. I aspired to be like early 20s Ellen who was fit and well-documented. But, by Jan 10th or so, I usually lost interest in journaling and told myself that I’d start over in February, and then never did. I tended to keep up the exercise promise, but never enjoyed a minute of exercising — dreading any training I would force myself to do for some race or event that I had signed up for to keep myself motivated. Last year, I realized that there was something severely flawed with these resolutions — something had significantly changed within me thanks to COVID — so I decided to look a little deeper. Well, a lot deeper.
I am unable to enjoy exercising because I have always viewed it as a means to lose weight. Always. The equation has always been Exercise = Weight Loss. It has been a tool that I have used to shape my body into something it’s not. I’m a big person, literally. I’m a hair under 6'1" and I have curves. I’ve had curves since I was young, and I was reminded that I had curves by family, friends, coaches, neighbors, strangers, anyone who had the audacity to think that they could comment on a girl’s body that wasn’t their own. So I tried to not have curves. I did sports in high school, spin classes in college, boot camps in my early 20s, and even took up running in my late 20s and triathlon in my early 30s. Anything to keep my curvy body in check and to not drift into the *gasp* overweight BMI metric. Over-exercising was coupled with restrictive eating and binging over the years, and honestly, most days I hated my body, no matter how it looked or how I treated it.
During the summer 2020, when I realized that all my two-a-days for a Half Ironman were pointless because every race was being canceled, I began to confront my exercise demons and realized that I just flat-out hated moving my body. It didn’t feel good when I moved it, I was afraid to be seen in public moving it, I hated exercising in the Texas heat, the list of fear and anxiety grew… so I just sat still. For 18 months.
Now, because of this fear of moving, and the endless work-from-home culture coupled with the potent emotional cocktail that is Millennial anxiety and depression, I am heavy. The heaviest I’ve ever been. You might even call me fat. I sometimes look in a mirror and don’t even recognize my face. During those 18 months, I experienced some of the worst body-shaming I have ever felt. I didn’t know how to love myself in motion or not in motion.
I began to immerse myself in the anti-diet culture on social media. I saw influencers on the ‘gram loving their bodies exactly as they are — squishy and pocked and big and gorgeous. I heard them say that always trying to lose weight isn’t bad, just extremely misguided, and exactly “what the patriarchy wants.” I felt vindicated in my rebellion against exercising. Maybe I could I love myself if I didn’t exercise (because reminder, in my mind, exercising = losing weight = cozying up with the patriarchy = not my cup of tea).
It didn’t work.
The anti-guilt eventually turned into anti-anti-guilt, which *news flash* is just guilt. Now, uncomfortable in a heavy body (unable to bend and move in basic ways, knee pain, back pain, lack of endorphins, etc.), I actually wanted to lose weight to feel better physically. BuT I tHoUgHt LoSiNg WeIgHt WaS tHe EnEmY?! There was now shame being blasted at me from the anti-diet, anti-fatphobic culture when trying to get out of my fat body. All I wanted was to be able to take my pants off without somehow straining a muscle in my neck. How could I both want to lose weight and not want to lose weight? Clearly social media was not the self-love beacon of hope I was looking for. So I hired a coach.
Turns out, I was experiencing pretty severe exercise trauma. And this kind of body confusion was par for the course.
Note: If your first thought is, “oh, what a privileged trauma to have, lucky you,” then, politely, you can fuck right off. This is a shame-free zone, and I will not tolerate trauma comparison or shame of any kind.
While working with my coach (let’s call her Iona, because that’s her name), I came to terms with the fact that I have never loved my body, no matter how thin or athletic I had forced her to be over the years. I never moved her with the sole purpose of understanding or loving her. I had never listened to her needs or pains or joys. I was a head on a stick — totally intellectual, 0% physical. I needed to connect back to my body.
Iona’s coaching style got me to do that by getting back in touch with little kid Ellen, before she was bombarded with society’s not-so-subliminal messages that her body was unacceptable. Back when she ran around the neighborhood with friends, leaped off of swing sets, rollerbladed and biked all over town, and could impress just about anyone with her jump roping skills. Little kid Ellen had something that adult Ellen was missing — joy in movement.
Let’s jump over to journalling. This story is a little more straight-forward but follows a similar pattern.
Ever since I was a kid, I loved writing in diaries and journals. When I was young, the journals mainly consisted of information about boys that I had crushes on or rambling descriptions of dreams that I had (I was really into dream interpretations in middle school). Then the journals eventually shifted into travel diaries, documenting my many adventures abroad during college. I used my journals to capture day-to-day activities as well as my assessments of the injustices that I witnessed and tried to process. I still have most of those journals, and I even read aloud from one of my high school journals in front of total strangers at a comedy show many years ago.
I also used to love writing in a more general sense, mostly creative writing (but if I’m being honest, I even loved writing my graduate thesis). My first “novel” was written in second grade when I was really into writing Rugrats fan fiction, specifically about the character Chuckie Finster. My mom kept all of my poetry in various scrapbooks throughout my life, and I remember writing a short story during my first year of high school about a haunted doll that I was really proud of.
Sometime in high school, I stopped writing for fun. I was taking AP classes in math and sciences (since my school was herding me in that direction), and stopped taking art and writing electives. I veered so firmly away from the arts that by the time I went to college, I had convinced myself that I wasn’t creative at all.
And then sometime in grad school, I stopped journalling. The reasons were nuanced but devastating — I thought my life was boring, I was in a bad relationship with someone who made me feel very unimportant, it felt selfish to spend time writing by myself, I had a lot of work to do, etc.
At that point, my internal dialogue and self-talk had convinced me that writing and journalling wasn’t worth my time. I wasn’t good at it, it wouldn’t lead to anything, it was a selfish use of my time. I was also afraid that if I were to start writing about my life, I’d have to face some pretty big issues that I had been burying deep down inside of me for years. Extracting these fears and emotions and putting them into words would make them real, and facing them seemed harder than keeping them locked away.
Again, Iona reminded me of little kid Ellen and how much she loved writing. How she did it solely for herself, not for anyone else to read, and how she had fun with it. She wrote about silly and goofy things and let her imagination run wild. There was joy in writing.
Have you caught onto the pattern yet?
Adult Ellen = uncertainty, anxiety, fear, not really moving at all.
Little kid Ellen = silly, playful, goofy, full of joy. Unapologetically Ellen.
So we’re going to do something new in 2022.
We’re going to let little kid Ellen live again.
In 2022, I plan to do 100 things that little kid Ellen used to love to do. I’m going to be a Big Kid this year. I’m going to focus on things that get me to move my body and that allow me to explore my creativity, but honestly, I’m just going to do anything that I know little kid Ellen would have loved. And I’m going to write about my experiences as I work my way through the list.
My hope is that I can train my brain and body to move away from a place of fear and anxiety and more towards creativity and curiosity. I want to give my body the freedom to do what it wants to do — enjoy life. I want to hold myself accountable for writing again. And honestly, I just want to giggle more.
I hope that you’ll follow this kid-venture with me and cheer me on. Also, most of the things on the list involve more people than just me, so let me know if you’re interested in participating in one of them with me. I will make it work!
Cheers to the little kids that still live inside of us. May they never be forgotten and may we find joy in letting them live again.
Check back on Jan 1 for the official list!
