Something I’ve noticed is how reflexively I look downward when I’m walking anywhere.

I don’t think I always used to do this. I’m sure as a child I looked up. And then when I grew, I looked straight ahead. But something came to interfere with that; something caused me to stop making eye contact and stop looking around me. If you don’t look at anything or anyone, they can’t look back at you. They can’t stare or judge or show any kind of disdain or rejection. If you’re not looking at them, it doesn’t matter. 

I stopped looking at people to escape unwanted attention. The girl who said she didn’t want to look at my face. The men who pointed at my chest and said some variation on “are those real?” It started young, and only went away after I had a child of my own.

Sometimes when I am out walking, I feel so tall. Like I’ve grown six inches in no time, which last happened when I was a child. I was not a skinny kid; my parents made me aware of that, their own insecurities transposed onto me at nine. 

The following year I spent swimming my heart out—for my mother, to please her, because she had a passive aggressive way of making you feel you weren’t working hard enough and wouldn’t measure up—where I suddenly was the right size (weight) and shot up half a foot (height). All the favourable comments I got about my body size. But I hated it. Except for the part where suddenly it was okay to be given chocolate I hadn’t asked for. Or an ice cream sundae at the end of a school day. With cookies. Like rewards for fulfilling a dream she’d been unable to.

She was the one who’d loved swimming that much. Jumping in the Bosphorus and yelling to be saved by her eldest brother. Swimming in her girls’ school house team in Egypt. Her father building pools wherever they lived so she could swim, even on the roof of the textile factory in Syria. 

All I wanted was to be left alone with my thoughts to dream. I was not a jock. I was an artist, but my parents—immigrants hyperfocused on achievement—had yet to register that, despite the signs. 

I’m not a tall person by any measure. It’s funny how easy it can be to gain six inches.  I’ve realized it’s because I am finally looking up, looking straight ahead. I didn’t have to do anything. I just stopped shrinking.