Measuring the Distance

On Comparison as a Mother Tongue

Jenny Saville, Hyphen, 1999

If you really loved ballet you wouldn’t eat chocolate.

The words came out of a 14-year-old, tall, blonde, bony girl who had just wolfed a huge chunk of chocolate without offering me any. She was the girl I was being measured against and routinely deemed inferior to by my ballet teacher. Not only did she have the feet for dancing, the proper turnout, the long limbs — according to my teacher, she looked like a real ballerina. The way her blonde hair tucked perfectly into a neat bun balanced on her perfectly thin neck. The way her leotard fit like a glove against her perfectly flat chest.

At 14, my chest had stopped being flat. My hips widened to an extent that made my teacher call my mother and ask her to come in urgently. She proclaimed my body changing with such violence a disaster. She called me fat and unfit for dancing with the same ease as simply saying my name. But I wasn’t just those things — the worst offense was that I was those things compared to the perfect girls. The ones whose long legs gave them a right to laugh at my body in the locker room. The ones allowed to love chocolate while I cycled through the cabbage soup diet and only had chocolate when my sister stole some for me, eaten hidden in a dark closet.

Ballet is a world of its own — its own vocabulary, clothes, mannerisms, ways of understanding music, ways of exploiting the body and imagination that belong only to the dancing universe. The draw is the beauty. I had fallen in love with it at four years old, after sitting through the full three acts of Swan Lake without squirming. I started taking lessons immediately after, and those afternoons learning steps for the Christmas or summer recital were some of the happiest of my life. I can still smell the synthetic floor covering of that studio, and the particular whiff of pulling a fresh pair of pink tights from their plastic packaging.

But professional ballet school, which I enrolled in a few years later — admitted for my self-expression and musicality, despite misgivings about my body — turned the magic into something else: constant comparison, competition, crumbling self-confidence. When the costumes, the music, the shapes your body produces are all beautiful, and the girls sitting at the barre next to you are also beautiful, you become painfully aware of the danger of being cast out of this magical world if you fail at being beautiful too. I existed between two extremes — trying and failing to manipulate my body into fitting in, and trying to stand out for entirely different reasons: be the one who memorized the steps fastest, the one who overcompensated with expression where she lacked technique.

I stopped dancing at 15. But the comparison never went away. Today my Instagram feed is full of pregnant women whose bodies have magically stayed small, the bump affixing itself without disrupting their beauty. Despite my better judgment, when I see those images I can’t help but compare myself, thinking it so unlikely that my pregnancy body would look anything like theirs. And then I feel guilty. Shouldn’t I be envious that they are pregnant and I am not, instead of thinking about bodies at all? What is beauty against life? It is not a question I have ever quite learned to ask first. I was taught to look at the girl next to me and measure the distance.

It has never been only about the body. In college I had a friend who was also blonde, thin, beautiful. The kind of cool girl who acts aloof, as if always lost in her own world, one I naturally didn’t belong to. She kept me at arm’s length, looked down on my romantic choices, my style, even my writing. She said I chose my words too carefully, that my writing was too pedantic, too concerned with how I would be perceived, nudging me toward embodying another ideal: the girl who is too cool to care.

Even now, I meet women who sort by different criteria. Someone only wants to be friends with ambitious women. Others, having become mothers, have deemed any other pursuit less complete than the holy combination of motherhood and career. Never mind that ambition is often a placeholder for insecurity, or that what someone calls a career is merely a job. Beauty and thinness have been replaced by ambition and doing it all — the same hierarchy, wearing different clothes. And what hasn’t changed is that women are doing most of this sorting. My ballet teachers, the girls in the locker room, the female friends. The system doesn’t need men to perpetuate itself. It lives in us, gets transmitted through us, sometimes by the people who are supposed to be on our side.

A friend once told me about a woman she’d met — someone famous, impressive, the kind of person worth knowing. They had started going to yoga together, each one taking the measure of the other. After a while, the other woman said: I think we should be friends. My friend told me this with satisfaction, as if the deliberateness of it were proof of discernment — that friendship, arrived at this way, meant something more. I smiled and said something appropriate. But I kept thinking about it afterward — the satisfaction on her face, and my own polite smile, and the small, shameful pang of never having been worth that kind of audition to her. How shallow, I thought. And also: why not me?

And I am not immune. I have my own criteria — depth, interiority, taste — qualities I believe make for a richer life, but which can curdle into snobbery without much effort. I look at women who manifest their way to a rich husband and feel contempt. I look at women who sort their friends by professional achievement and feel superior. But superior by whose measure? Mine. Which makes me no different from my ballet teachers.

Behind everyone’s need to sort and dismiss, there is likely a girl who once felt she didn’t deserve proximity — who learned, in some room or another, that belonging had to be earned. It doesn’t make the sorting less painful. But it makes it legible. We are all, in our own way, still standing in front of some mirror, waiting to be told whether we are good enough.

I am terrified of bringing a daughter into a world where comparison has become even more ubiquitous, where we exist not just as ourselves but as social avatars too. And I am terrified of passing on what has lived inside me this entire time. I don’t know how I would teach her to be more interested in self-realization than external validation, to resist sorting herself and others into categories. What I hope I can give her is something simpler: the image of another little girl who was once pulled toward ballet by something she couldn’t name. The pull itself being the thing worth protecting. I don’t know if I can give her that. But I am still trying to give it to myself.

What drew me to ballet was the beauty, but also the experience of being fully inside something — the transcendence, the creation of magic and entire worlds. That pull eventually transformed into a love for writing. And even though I still catch myself comparing my body, I have somehow managed to keep writing uncorrupted from that instinct. Because writing, even when it is paradoxically about my life, is about something outside of myself — understanding, making sense, connecting to the person who reads.

I have been lucky to find that same quality of presence elsewhere too. My mother. My sister. A handful of friends who have never once asked me what I am working on as a way of deciding how to feel about me. What they offer is harder to name and easier to feel — the gift of someone who is simply, fully there. Conversations that move without agenda from the trivial to the most intimate, where you can say the dark thing, the shameful thing, the thing you haven’t said out loud yet, and what comes back is not judgment but attention. The sense that what matters right now is not what either of you has achieved but what is actually happening between you.

It is the same thing, I believe, that writing asks of me. A life organized around interiority doesn’t feel like knowing your worth or any of the other tired reassurances. It means wanting what you actually want. Becoming so absorbed in something — dancing, writing, looking at things and asking questions — that who you are and at what scale you are achieving becomes, if not irrelevant, then secondary. It means choosing presence over measurement. Connecting over sorting. It means, often, eating chocolate out in the open.