Wedesay M rch12 214// .heStteen Personal Statement: Diving into my insecurity by Ruby Wallau the writer's notebo I've encountered slam poetry a few times in the past few years - more so in high school than now. I was always in the audience, never onstage. That's not to say I didn't write poetry. I did, and do. I acted in high school pretty often as well. I didn't do musicals because I wasn't a singer, but I always auditioned for thefall play and did some of the smaller productions and shows that ourschool put on. I considered myself both an actor and a writer, but slam poetry never crossed my mind as a medium of interest. It never sat right with me. Even while in the audience, I wasn't sure how to feel, or how to make sense of what I was experiencing. Perhaps it's because slam poetry is a synthesis of those two mediums of art done poorly. It isn't literature, and it really isn't theatre. The words don't have to be good because they can fall back on the performance and the performance doesn't have to be good because the words are- there to distract you. You forget your expectations and readjust them as you go along. I've gotten chills down my spine from slam poetry. But those chills were inauthentic. Is that possible to have inauthentic emotions? I think SO. It's possible because the emotions exist on the surface level of the art. You get the same sensation you get when watching a drippy romantic comedy. It forgets to make you think ok: not literature, not theatre by max radwin cp . I LLU S and instead, you're left with feelings that conform to what the perfor- mance set out to make you feel at all costs. It's like intentional fallacy, but for your emotions. It's emotional fal- lacy. In the late 'SOs a poet named Robert Lowell published a book of poems called "Life Studies" that began a movement of Confessional poetry. Lowell wrote about his fam- ily, his relationships and his history. In short, he wrote personally. The "I" wasn't a fictional speaker; it was himself. It's not so tidy and clean but - after a storm of literary criticism - it's said that there was a subsequent Post- and Anti-Confessional move- ment, which reconciled the narcis- sism and inaccessibility that comes with writing personally and Confes- sionally. But slam poetry exists outside of these literary movements because it isn't taught in a classroom. No one reads a slam poem and critiques it. They listen and if something con- fuses on the first read-through then it gets cut - it has to be ingested on the first go-around because no one's reading it, only listening. The poem TRATIONS BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND loses its depth. It stops being a poem and becomes something baseless altogether. Lowell's poetry was shocking at the time. Confessional poetry can be pretty shocking. Think about some of those darker poems by Syl- via Plath. Slam Poetry has embraced that full-on and hasn't letgo. In fact, most slam poems I've experienced have been about sexual assault, rape, abuse, alcoholism or depression - and always in an over- the-top kind of way that seemed to miss out on the opportunity to explore the important elements of those topics in favor of dramatic delivery. Without fail, the speaker always seems to say "fuck" or "cunt" sometime during the performance, and usually in a way that doesn't uti- 'lize the word beyond its shock value. Is it unfair to generalize an entire medium and deem it as structurally flawed? I suppose. But if the ang- sty, hyper-Confessionalism of Slam Poetry that has strained all the com- plexity from its product is not inher- ent, then it is at least a trend - and one that exists because its perform- ers often defer to melodrama over art. It was a snowy night as I sat with my grandparents, my mother, her boy- friend and my younger brother at a round booth in a dimly lit restaurant. My grandmother smiled softly beside me as I gently bumped my shoulders against hers, wantingto feel her pres- ence. She is light, her spirit buoyed by unabashed kindness, but I often fear she sacrifices too much of her con- fidence for the happiness of others. She offered my mother a taste of her risotto, the same dish that sat in front of me. My mother laughed and said no, she shouldn't eat so many carbs if she wantedto stay skinny. Mygrandmoth- er said nothing. My skirt suddenly felt too tight to hold in my round tummy and my face too chubby to make eye contact with anyone at the table. I set my fork down and let false claims of fullness spill off of mylips. The sweet red wine and self- consciousness soaked into my skin as I watched my mother incthe candlelight. My arms are like thick logs compared to her twigs. I have always been a round heavy tree standing next to her brittle fluttering leaves. As we left the restaurant, I shimmied into my coat, letting it swallow me. I've learned to relish in the way winter hides me. I was born in a place surrounded by the ocean, but I grew afraid of the beach. I'm not afraid of seeing a silver fin peeking out of the deep blue, or the purple jellyfish that have stung me before, or even being crushed by the pounding waves that once covered my skin with bruises when I ran through them carelessly. I am afraid of the beach because the thought of donning a bathingsuit makes my heartrace and my body cringe. There is a photo of me when I was five wearing a blue bikini with little pink flowers and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the beach. My hair was dirty blonde, curly and wild. My skin was sun-kissed and under- neath my knotted hair was a sandy scalp. It is the last documentation of me eating without shame and the last time I wore a bikini. Each summer, my cousins and I would pretend we were mermaids as we splashed and laughed in Lake Michigan. Now, I spend every summer coming up with new excuses for why I would rather sit in the sand with a book wearing shorts and a tank top than swim with them. Weight transformed into a number that I couldn't stop thiinki about. In the fourti .ral'. a friend ilhisperedt peeking out from the shirt of the chub- to tip-toe downstairs to our pantry and no longer felt like an uncontrollable by girl sitting in front of us, "I bet she sneak yogurt pretzels or a cup of ice force in my life. I had accomplished weighs over ahundred pounds."I something that I had been try- line at the grocery store, between mug to do unsuccessfully for the candy bars and comicbooks, I years. But it didn't transform would read the headlines ofgossip my body; it just changed my tabloids speculating about celeb perception of it. The heavy rity weight gain. I began to see pounds of fat I felt on my body weight everywhere. were only heavy to me. When I When I returned to my child looked in the mirror, my body hood home one summer in mid wasn't all that different, but dle school, I discovered that m awkward round shapes that I best friend, who had always had had hated before began to feel a round face and fleshy arms that like curves I could enjoy. mirrored my own, had become I wore a bathing suit for the so thin that I could wrap a single first time in years the sum- arm around her waist. It felt like mer before my freshman year a betrayal. Her cheeks were sharp of college. It was at a murky and her thickest feature were the campground lake, mosquitos chunky braces on her teeth. I had nipped at my legs and sticky only become rounder during our humidity coated my skin. Clad time apart. in a pinstriped one-piece, I My father handed me the shiny self-consciously wrapped my blue "South Beach Diet" book and arms around my middle. My told me that we would do it togeth friend grabbed me by the waist er. He bought a bag of sugarless and tossed me into the water. I mints and said that if we ate only screamed and dove head first those and vegetables for a week, PHOTO COURTESY OF RUBY WALLAU into the insecurity that had we could lose 10 pounds. The small scared me for so long. He swam book felt heavy inmy hands aslI tucked cream back to my room. after me as my head brokecthe surface. it away in my closet. Later that after- During senior year, I finally dug up It felt like I was floating, weightless, noon, he bought my brother a cheese- that blue glossy "South Beach Diet" even though my feet could touch the burger from McDonalds. I desperately book from where it was hidden in my rockybottom. wanted to lose the weight. Every bite closet. I learned to eat only vegetables A couple of days ago, as I waded of food I swallowed came with three and meat for weeks and would wake across the Diag through the slush on bites of shame. I would eat as little as up an extra hour earlier to run on the my way to class, I overheard the girls possible in front of my parents, instead treadmill before class. When I lost ten in front of me worrying about Spring waitinguntil the late hours of the night pounds, it transformed me. My weight Break. "I've really let myself go," one said. The other agreed, chastising her- self for unhealthy eatinghabits and not going to the gym enough. They began to devise a plan to get bikini-ready in less than three weeks. I wanted to roll my eyes and brush off their words as superficial, but I couldn't because I knew that I have had nearly the exact same conversations with my own friends. I am afraid to ever calculate how many hours I've spent in my short lifetime thinking about losing weight, counting calories and googling crash diets. I once read that women moni- tor their bodies once every30 seconds. We each devise a system to mask our own flaws, learning how to wear our clothes, howto foldourlegsorrest our hips to project the thinnest versions of ourselves. Body image will probably always be an internal struggle for me. There are still days when I obsess about the numbers on the scale or spend all day hating myself for binging on Nutella the night before. But I'mready to fight this battle. I am tired of apologizing for eating. It exhausts me that when I sit at a table with my friends, I expect to hear myself or them make a joke at our own expense. Body hate has become AM a normative behavior in our society. It is a habit that I try to fight everyday. Even though sometimes Ihate the per- son in my reflection and the curves I don't recognize, Iam learning that it's alright to also love the person I find there.too. COVER BY AMY MACKENS & RUBY WALLAU LESSONS I1 ON PURPOSE:I NoNE FROM THE FROG, THE DUNG BEETLE, AND J A special presentation by Victor J Strecher, PhD, MPH, Professor and Director for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, U-M School of I Thursday, March 13, 3:00-4:00 pm Rackham Auditorium No charge for attendance-Open to the public In this presentation, long-held assumptions and beliefs about health, motivation, reconsidered. Dr. Strecher will demonstrate a platform of multimedia strategies di people make quantum, meaningful, and fully engaged changes in their lives, which can positively impact both physical and mental health. This lecture is presented as part of the U-M Depression on College (ampuses (onference. No registration is reQuired to attend Dr. Strecher's presentation.