I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports. I’ve been faking nausea, headaches and stomach aches since I was six. I remember sitting at my desk, cheek resting in the fold of my elbow, trying to look sorry for myself, little piles of clothes on the carpet all around me. This was when boys and girls still changed together in the classroom. When PE began with hauling apparatus from the edges of the gym into the middle. Balance beams, cracked blue crash mats, waxy hoops. I started my period when I was eleven. That was a far better excuse. I’d say I had cramps every week, no shame. My swimming teacher would panic the second he heard the word. Period. I could drop it like a tiny bomb, and he’d look at the scuzzy tiled floor and wave me off. Even then I liked words, liked seeing what a word could do. I couldn’t give a shit what a ball could do, but a word.
If writing is leaving the body behind, that might explain why I got into it. My body was not an easy place to be. So many parts of it that I didn’t want acknowledged. So many days when it seemed I was born to loathe my body: that was my singular girl-child purpose. Later came the inevitable push-and-pull of wanting to be looked at, while simultaneously not wanting to be looked at. Sport meant being looked at. It meant the fat shaking on my legs, it meant sweat, it meant putting my hand or my foot in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being wrong was of course what terrified me the most; being wrong was what my defiance came down to.
In 2005, when I was nine, the first episode of Zoey 101 aired on Nickelodeon. In the episode, Zoey starts at a boarding school which has only just opened to girls and challenges the all-boys basketball team to a game. I don’t remember who wins, but I remember the scene: Jamie Lynn Spears, who played Zoey, in a pink tank top, shooting hoop after hoop to the soundtrack of ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ by Jet. Here was the impossible ideal: a thin, white girl, infectiously nice, mainstream plus a teensy bit rock, capable of playing the boys at their own game without breaking a sweat.
I see this now as the kind of palatable, narrow feminism that functions through oppression. But I did not see that then. I could barely see past my own shame, because I was not Zoey and never would be. But I didn’t question who made the rules, and why. The rules of bodies, the rules of gender, the rules of the game. I did not see it even when Jamie Lynn Spears got pregnant at sixteen, just after filming the fourth season of Zoey 101, setting her good girl image ablaze. Because what young women do with their bodies is everybody’s business, particularly in America, where sport is sacred and sex, for unmarried women at least, is profane.
Even then I understood that my refusal to practice sports had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, an inescapable loop. But at least within that loop I could uphold the illusion of control. I could pretend, every time I succeeded in getting out of PE, that I was the one pulling the strings, taking charge of how I used my body and when. But I did not exist in a vacuum. Outside of this black hole of shame was a universe built on misogyny.
My avoidance of sport had to do with being a chubby kid, but it also had to do with being a girl. I grew up with girls who were ‘sporty’ until they hit puberty. Girls who were made to feel that their new breasts meant they could no longer run, could no longer play. I had a friend who devoted years to ballet before her girl’s body became a woman’s body, and she was told it was pointless to continue. That same friend told me, age fourteen and in a bid to return to her prepubescent self, that she was on the dancer’s diet: Maltesers and cigarettes. Here again was the illusion of control; the ‘right’ body an item that, with some effort, one could reach out and grab.
My boyfriend talks about his suburban childhood kicking a football against a power box with a look of the purest, simplest love. My six-year-old son climbs on everything, treats the city as his playground, leaping from walls and benches with abandon. For them, the body is not a constraint, is not a ticking clock, is not something to be moulded or hidden. The body is the window to movement, and movement is a window to joy.
I would probably never have been an agile kid. But I would have liked to learn ease within my body, to have found pleasure or peace in just moving. Sport was stolen from me – I really believe that – and it hurts. Look at me now, writing this: a husk hunched over a laptop. If writing is leaving the body behind then it would serve me, for the sake of balance, to be more practiced at leaving my mind. I force myself to swim these days, and I swear I can feel my brain being washed. When I swim, my thoughts go liquid. The black hole loosens, begins its slow uncoil.
Image © Denley
Gunk by Saba Sams is out in May from Bloomsbury.
