"Life is Your Creation"

Discovering your identity in all its aspects comes from being curious, not prescriptive, about yourself.

I didn’t play with Barbie as a kid. Not for ideological reasons (that came later), she just didn’t have fur. Not being furry made her intrinsically less interesting to me than cuddly animal soft toys, Fuzzy Felt, My Little Ponies or that sheer gift to future writers, Sylvanian Families.

The disapproval, which I absolutely took for granted then and am ready to acknowledge and dissect now, came later.

But first, here’s what I didn’t know at the time, shared brilliantly by AnxiousLittleCarrot and currently doing the rounds on social media:

Anxiouslittlecarrot: “I want everybody who’s calling Ken a trophy Husband to know that he’s actually a Trophy Boyfriend, because when Ruth Handler invented Ken in the 1960s, she was adamant that he would never marry her and instead be her “handsome steady”, so that Barbie remained a figure of independence for the little girls and was never put in the position of housewife.”

I did look down on Barbie from a distance, if I looked at her at all. She was not who I was, in every possible way. It might have been the Aqua song that finally did it (“You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere… I’m a blonde bimbo girl in a fantasy world…”,  bringing to my active consciousness and giving eloquent and amusing voice and shape to the prejudices and assumptions around something that was outside of my interest and orbit. And my body shape. The idea girls were “supposed” to look like flamingos, hurtful as that constant messaging has been all my life, didn’t start or end with a doll I didn’t play with.  

I don’t think I knew the word “materialistic” when I was seven or eight, but I know I did internalise the idea that caring about cars and dream houses, rather than non-material things like education and conservation, was what was wrong with other people and the world. It was caring too much about our visible selves that overshadowed the things that mattered more. (So, I clearly didn’t know the words “binary thinking” or “reductive” either.)

I also, at the same age of seven or eight, first remember getting body-shamed. That arrived in the form of comments made in my presence about a photo of me and my much-thinner cousin in a paddling pool, wearing our swimming costumes. My being identified as fat, chubby, and having areas my body pointed out, and particularly being confronted with all this in direct and deliberate comparison with another female body (very thin was fine, of course; a bit overweight was not) was the first domino of the process towards my thinking there were ‘kinds of people’.  My cousin and other thin girls like her was entitled to have fun with clothes and make-up and popularity and I wasn’t. Flamingos had boyfriends and could be interested in clothes, because clothes were made with flamingos in mind. I was Not A Flamingo. It was a source of shame and pride that would take decades to acknowledge as a rule I had internalised, let alone begin to shift, because we make up stories about the world in response to the way we experience it.

In my late twenties I started saving for a mortgage and a PhD. There was no guarantee of getting either, because that’s not how life, academia or the economy ever worked, and putting time and money into a future you wanted to create with no certainty it will come through was and is always scary. Most people I knew were doing these things within couples, if they were doing them at all. I wasn’t. Knowing what I know now, and reading AnxiousLittleCarrot’s post, I can recognise for the first time what a useful friend my self-created enemy, Barbie, could have been for me to have in my mental and emotional armoury:

Anxiouslittlecarrot: “Her house is hers. She bought it and furnished it with money she made in her own job. In STEM, in politics, in healthcare, in fashion, in academy, in customer service. Her credit card is in her name (women in the US couldn’t have their own regardless of marital status until 1974). And it’s all pink and fashionable because femininity and badassness aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s why Barnie’s slogan is ‘you can be anything.’ Not because femininity and badassness aren’t mutually exclusive. No matter who you are, you can be anything.
That’s why Barbie’s slogan is ‘you can be anything’. Teaching these ideals to little girls is why Barbie was created. Empowering women and empowering femininity is the original meaning of the Barbie doll, it’s not that you have to be all this to be a woman, but if you are all or some of this you too are awesome.
And somehow pop culture deliberately changed the narrative. Sexualised, bimboified, and villainised her, when she actually isn’t responsible for the impossible beauty standards – people are, she’s just a stylised, not-to-scale toy like most others.”

Here's what I’d like to suggest, kindly as I can, to the girl I was: it was never binary. Just as creativity comes from the confidence to focus on what’s in your mind – and that confidence to focus on what’s in your mind comes not from thinking how great you are but you’re your authentic interest in the thought you’re willing to follow around the next corner – so discovering your identity in all its aspects comes from being curious, not prescriptive, about yourself. Not assuming what you should be doing with who you are and what you’ve got, but being curious about where you want to take that. And just like seeing your writing ‘on paper’ helps you develop it, helps it become more itself with every draft, it’s absolutely fine and right to enjoy and illustrate your physical self as well as your mental/emotional one. Yes, to think only of our visible selves is to miss our true selves. But to discount our physical selves and their possibilities is just as simplistic. It’s not a choice between the two. It never was. Your body and your mind are you, are yours, and nobody else’s.

Creativity and anxiety use the same software. Focusing out what you want, rather than what you fear, gives you answers you’d otherwise totally miss. Barbie is not why I believed in flamingos.  I held my own distorting mirror up to what I thought of myself, and of other women.  Acknowledging Barbie’s social context, and what her creator intended to open up to women in her era struggling to see their right to economical and emotional independence more than I did in mine, I recognise in Barbie the friend I never had. The more we see it, the more we are reminded we can be it. ‘Imagination: life is your creation” as Aqua put it.

But here’s the other thing, the thing I ignored as hard as I could. It isn’t true that Barbie didn’t ever appeal to me. Sure, she was no Fluppet ring-tailed lemur or Sylavanian Family badger, but there one Barbie advertisement that spoke to me. I didn’t listen. Literally walked away from the television. Even as a sevenish-year-old child, I had the sensation of being “not that sort of person”. It was the Barbie Benneton advert, showing a group of friends expressing themselves through how they looked, all the different clothes, celebrating each other in all their glorious difference (Still all stick-thin, but taking a step. Too small and not enough on its own. But a step). I didn’t want to know that I wanted to know. Barbie was shallow, wasn’t she? Trivial? So this had to be trivial, didn’t it?

Not so trivial. I judged Barbie, minimised her as society was doing to the women who inspired her creation. The body shape did not help me (us) but realising imagination is a life skill, and that we have more choice of who we are than our anxiety might suggest, separates baby and bathwater in a way I didn’t appreciate back then. Barbie is not a faultless creation but the intentions she embodies are worth more than I discounted her for.

My relationship with my body continued to be one of acceptance without ambition, into my early thirties. By then, things had changed for me through physiotherapy, life, work and art; I had accepted and owned more choice in who I was and chose to be. But the messaging around me had been through similar changed too; you visibly did not have to be tall and thin to dress how you wanted, when the power of social media (for all that can go so wrong with it) was being used for good, with body shape and difference being something to own, relish and embody rather than filter out. I saw people who had stepped through that distorting mirror I’d been holding up for myself, to illustrate and embody exactly who they were. Soul of Stevie, who celebrates aesthetic and musical sensibilities I share and doesn’t leave her crutches out of shot to model and own it; Lindy Pieri who I acted with in a film years ago and have been following ever since: body positive, age positive and, like Caitlin Moran who credits her love of Rik Mayall for putting her on the path to pulling faces for fun and breaking out of the idea women couldn’t live in that world alongside men, showing up as the you that’s having a bloody great time. I fill my Instagram feed with people who never stop reminding me I can look like me, speak like me, write like me – and only I get to choose what that means. Age was never a personality. Neither is gender. Independence isn’t either. Other people’s assumptions are not on us (and those are changing), but our choices are.  We can all choose to be ourselves, a little more every day.

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