{"id":685,"date":"2021-04-12T23:16:45","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T03:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/?p=685"},"modified":"2021-04-12T23:16:45","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T03:16:45","slug":"my-fear-of-standing-in-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/2021\/04\/12\/my-fear-of-standing-in-line\/","title":{"rendered":"My Fear of Standing in Line"},"content":{"rendered":"

Growing up fat, I connected a lot with what Susan Stinson wrote in Belly Songs. <\/em>A lot of things she experienced, especially in her youth, were things I also experienced. While I was able to relate to quite a few of the stories she wrote about, what struck a chord with me the most was the poem \u201cThe Line.\u201d Reading this poem really brought back painful memories from my childhood of standing in line dreading upcoming activities.<\/p>\n

In elementary school, at the end of each year we had field day where all the students in the school went outside to do fun games and team building exercises. Being one of the fatter girls in my grade, I was always terrified of doing an activity where I had to fit through a tight space within an obstacle course or fall back on one of my classmates during one of those trust fall exercises. The events changed each year so I never knew what to expect, but when the time came for field day, I was always petrified of having to do some activity that would make my larger size more obvious to the rest of my classmates. However, these daunting activities didn\u2019t end when I left elementary school.<\/p>\n

In middle school we also had a version of field day. Once again, we all had to participate in events that I sometimes couldn\u2019t do as well as my skinnier classmates because of the size of my body. I had pretty bad anxiety in middle school and having to endure the embarrassment of my peers seeing me struggle at seemingly easy activities for them was too much for me. The week leading up to field day when I was in 7th<\/sup> grade was a week full of anxiety. I didn\u2019t want to go, and I found myself dreading every second leading up to the day everyone else at my school seemed so excited about. When the day was finally upon us, I knew I just couldn\u2019t go through with it. The thought of having to go outside and flail my fat body, panting as I tried to run alongside my skinnier classmates was mortifying, so instead, I pretended I was sick. Thankfully, my parents let me stay home and for once I didn\u2019t have to endure the terrifying sporting events for the day.<\/p>\n

I thought my fear would be left behind once I got to high school because the \u201cfield day\u201d was now optional and I wouldn\u2019t be participating. Instead, I found myself faced with the same anxieties on my first day freshmen year. We were put in small groups and had to do teambuilding exercises, the first of which being trust falls. To say I was scared would be an understatement. I knew none of my classmates would be able to catch me and that I would face the embarrassment of being too fat to participate in the activity. In Stinson\u2019s poem \u201cThe Line,\u201d she writes, \u201cThe air fit me\/ like my jeans.\/ The line moved up.\/ I slipped\/ with grace\/ out the back (Lines 50-55). In my moment of standing in line to do trust falls, I wished for nothing more than run out of the room. When I read that part of the poem, it remined me so much of my own fear and I wished I too were able to escape from the line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Growing up fat, I connected a lot with what Susan Stinson wrote in Belly Songs. A lot of things she experienced, especially in her youth, were things I also experienced. While I was able to relate to quite a few of the stories she wrote about, what struck a chord with me the most was … Continue reading My Fear of Standing in Line<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4637,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4637"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}