West - Shrill : notes from a loud woman

W hy is, What do you want to be when you grow up? the go-to small talk we make with children? Hello, child. As I have run out of compliments to pay you on your doodling, can you tell me what sort of niche you plan to carve out for yourself in the howling existential morass of uncertainty known as the future? Also, has anyone given you a heads-up that everyone you love will die someday? Thats like waking a dog up with an air horn and telling it that its president now. I dont know, Uncle Jeff. Im still kind of working on figuring out how to handle these weird popsicles with the two sticks.

There was a time, I am told, when I was very small, that I had a ready response to the question. The answer was ballerina, or, for a minute, veterinarian, as I had been erroneously led to believe that veterinarian was the grown-up term for professional animal-petter. I would later learn, crestfallen and appalled, that its more a term for touching poo all the time featuring intermittent cat murder, so the plan was abandoned. (The fact that ANY kid wants to be a veterinarian is bananas, by the waywhoever does veterinary medicines PR among preschool-aged children should be working in the fucking White House.)

That periodwhen I was wholly myself, effortlessly certain, my identity still undistorted by the magnetic fields of culturewas so long ago that its beyond readily accessible memory. I do not recall being that person. For as long as I can recall, anytime I met a new adultwho would inevitably get nervous (because what is a child and how do you talk to it?) and fumble for that same hacky stock questionmy imagination would come up empty. Doctor? Too gross. Fireman? Too hard. Princess? Those are fictional, right? Astronaut? LOL.

While were interrogating childhood clichs, who decided that astronaut would be a great dream job for a kid? Its like 97 percent math, 1 percent breathing some Russian dudes farts, 1 percent dying, and 1 percent eating awesome powdered ice cream. If youre the very luckiest kind of astronaut ever, your big payoff is that you get to visit a barren airless wasteland for five minutes, do some more math, and then go homeice cream not guaranteed. Anyway, loophole: I can already buy astronaut ice cream at the Science Center, no math or dying required. Lindy, 1; astronauts nada. (Unless you get points for debilitating low bone density, in which case I concede.)

Not that it mattered anyway. Astronaut was never on the table. (Good luck convincing a fat kid that they should pursue a career in floating.) Thanks to a glut of cultural messaging, I knew very clearly what I was not: small, thin, pretty, girlish, normal, weightless, Winona Ryder. But there was precious little media telling me what I was, what I could be. For me, What do you want to be when you grow up? was subsumed by a far more pressing question: What are you?

Id squint into the future and come up blank.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I cant tell. Static? A snow field? A bedsheet? Sour cream? Is sour cream a job?

As a kid, I never saw anyone remotely like myself on TV. Or in the movies, or in video games, or at the childrens theater, or in books, or anywhere at all in my field of vision. There simply were no young, funny, capable, strong, good fat girls. A fat man can be Tony Soprano; he can be Dan from Roseanne (still my number one celeb crush); he can be John Candy, funny without being a human sight gagbut fat women were sexless mothers, pathetic punch lines, or gruesome villains. Dont believe me? Its coolI wrote it down.

Here is a complete list of fat female role models available in my youth.