Julie is a junior in high school who is very committed to theater. Julie, like many of her friends, is self-conscious about her appearance. She has noticed that one friend in particular is struggling with an eating disorder, which concerns Julie. When Julie served as a counselor at an all-girls summer camp, she was struck by how comfortable all of the campers looked in the photos. It sort of “hit” her that she had not seen pictures of herself or her friends looking un-self-conscious in a long time, and she says she is sick of feeling insecure and watching her friends struggle with the same issues. Her experience at the camp helped her to realize that she wants to use theater to help young women be successful and to feel empowered.
Julie is a junior in high school and is very committed to theater. Always outgoing, even as a preschooler, Julie feels as though her experiences as an actor have helped her to build her confidence and her skills both on and off the stage:
“I really believe that theater has helped me improve stuff like my public speaking skills and how I present myself. But also I think I work with people better because of theater. I am able to see things from more than one angle because of the work I do with characters or with directing. I am definitely more creative because of it.”
In her theater program (as in the larger world of theater), there is a lot of competition to land the best roles. Julie explains that, in spite of her many successes, she often feels anxious about her performances:
“You’re on stage and everyone’s looking at you … It just makes you pretty insecure about your face, your body, like the way you’re projecting yourself. Your posture. Sit up straight. Just all that. I think that’s probably the biggest thing that holds me back.”
Julie, like many of her friends, is self-conscious about her appearance. She has noticed that one friend in particular is struggling with an eating disorder, which concerns Julie. Julie describes how she felt when she first learned about her friend’s diagnosis, and how it made her reflect on her relationship to her own body and to food:
“One of my best friends last year was diagnosed with anorexia and when she told me about it, it sort of raised a lot of issues in me… I’ve been raised to believe in myself and everything [but] I still worry about food [and my appearance]. I never thought much about it, I guess. [My friend’s diagnosis] caused me to reevaluate things with myself and how I view my body…I guess I realized that for me this stuff goes deeper than just being worried about what I look like, though that’s part of it. And also, watching my friend struggle with her eating disorder has made me feel really powerless to help her… We’ve been friends for a long time now, and I just wish that I would have been able to stop it before it started somehow.”
What Julie sees her friend going through is not unusual, and she realizes it is very common for girls and young women to feel inadequate. Even though Julie was raised to be strong and stand up for herself, diet culture causes Julie to feel pressure to “look good” and fit into society’s standards for beauty.
Helplessly watching her friend suffer from anorexia makes Julie reassess what she values, and what she thinks is important. When Julie worked at an all-girls camp the following summer, she finds herself facing these issues again:
“… I worked as a counselor this summer at an all girls camp, and on the last night of each session, there’s a ceremony called camper banquet. And at camper banquet, the highlight of it pretty much is the slide show of all the different things that you’ve done during the session. And I was watching it and my camp has a lot of different random programs so there were girls who were in the construction cabin building a house. Girls who were learning how to fix a sail or use a camera or just laughing around with their new best friends who they just met two minutes ago. And in every picture, it just stuck out to me how happy everyone looked and how pleased everyone looked to be caught on camera doing what they were doing. And it sort of sunk into me that I wasn’t used to seeing pictures of girls looking that way. I was just seeing pictures of myself, of my friends, looking sort of like ‘Oh God, my hair looks so bad why are you taking a picture of me?’ But in all these pictures, the girls were like beaming… And that night, I went back to my cabin and I just laid awake for a really long time. I was like I just realized [I felt frustrated that I see] friends [who struggle] with eating disorders. I was tired of reading in my journal [how many times I had written], ‘I don’t think I can do this. I’ve done enough of this. I’m not pretty enough for this.’ I was just sick of hearing the same things in conversations with friends.”
During her time as a counselor, Julie has the opportunity to reflect on what she sees around her. The girls she worked with at the camp were relatively carefree and did not struggle with the same questions about body image that she and her friends did. She reflected on her doubts about herself and questioned where these doubts come from. Because Julie feels that her work in theater has helped her to build confidence and be more comfortable with herself, she wonders if this can help other young women who struggle with similar issues:
“I’m always reading those statistics about how girls who play sports are like twenty five million times more likely to be successful or something… And I’ve always hated sports. But I was like, I bet theater could do the same thing. Because my theory is that it’s not even necessarily sports, it’s activities that [give people confidence].”
For Julie, success on stage results in building her poise and self-assurance. As a young actor, she also learns the value of self-reflection. When she applies these skills off-stage, Julie begins to question the world around her.
Have you ever had an experience that made you think differently about your view of yourself or others? How can you channel what you passion to help others?