Sounds Like Me

by Sara Bareilles

  My family at Easter circa 1985

  My folks divorced when I was twelve. I have a vague memory of my mom calling me in from playing outside in the field one afternoon because we needed to have a talk. Time slowed down and my brain’s little wheels were turning very, very slowly, trying to make sense of what Mom was saying. We love each other very much, but things are going to change. Mom is going to go live somewhere else. We both still love you very much and it’s not your fault.

  It was like a foreign language I couldn’t interpret.

  The next couple of weeks were a fog that included my sister Jenny driving off to her freshman year of college, six hours away, and my mom driving her little gray Toyota Cressida to a tiny yellow house with a big oak tree in the front yard, about a mile and a half from what had been our family home. That mile and a half might as well have been a light-year.

  I was devastated but tried not to show it. Mom and Dad were both so sad already, and verbal communication wasn’t our family’s strong suit. I don’t think I fully understood what I was feeling anyway. Anger. Disappointment. Confusion. Grief. Helplessness. With my sisters both gone to college, I was the only child left in the house to divide up my stuff and decide whether I would keep my Kirk Cameron poster and my Caboodle at my mom or my dad’s house. I didn’t want there to be a “Mom’s house,” much less surrender some of my things to take over there. In the end, I chose my shittiest stuff to take to my mom’s, a tiny rebellion against the separation. My Caboodle and my Bart Simpson jean jacket stayed at Dad’s.

  My emotional world imploded, and there is nothing that could have been said or done to make it easier. No one was in the wrong, and maybe that is what made it so painful. I wanted someone to blame, but instead got the two people I loved most doing their best to navigate uncharted waters. Not knowing how to talk about it, I went inward with my sadness and started writing in journals more often. This would become an important part of my adolescence, and my developing understanding of myself. It tided me over while time did what it always does: softened the hard edges.

  Eventually my parents blazed a pretty remarkable trail toward lives that now orbit each other in a beautiful way. Fast-forward to the present day, and my parents and step-parents are all the best of friends. (True!) We all take trips together. We share every major holiday and then some. They hang out even when us kids aren’t in town. They make dinner for each other and play cards and drink wine and want each other to be happy. We all dance to Love Shack by the B-52s at every family gathering, which I think is really the most important part.

  It was a long road getting there, but over the years we have redefined the word family to encompass all iterations of our pasts. For Christmas this year, my dad, Paul, and my stepdad, Ron, got matching shirts from my little sister Melody, a precious, perfect gift of a girl who came after my dad and Betsy married. One of the shirts says RON’S MY BUDDY, and the other says PAUL’S MY BUDDY. Dad wore his shirt to Christmas dinner.

  The whole thing is “pretty neat,” as my dad would say.

  It’s unpredictable how we are changed by what challenges us as children. For example, dealing with the divorce was difficult but inadvertently encouraged me to go to my private journals and write. But that wasn’t the hardest part of my childhood. My greatest struggle is a big part of why I stand onstage.

  I sing because I was a fat kid.

  I use the term fat kid to describe my experience as a child, because that is the label I was given by my peers, and at the time, that equated to feeling different and somehow bad. But I don’t see my former self that same way now. Fat means nothing. It is a three-letter word that, when you break it down, refers to the thing in food that makes it taste good, so I love fat. (Hey bacon, call me. ;-) ) And as an adjective, the word is completely subjective. I see it get abused and misused all the time. I see magazines wrap it around strong, healthy bodies in ridicule. I see beautiful women among my friends and family do the same thing. One in particular, in my mirror, does it all the time. I have learned to hate that word because it was used as a cruel, incendiary insult in my own life, but I wish I could change my relationship with it. I wish I could go back in time and deconstruct the power that it had.

  St. Bernard’s Elementary classroom photo, 1988

  Maybe that’s what I’m doing now.

  My dysfunctional relationship with my body started around third grade, sparked by comments from a small group of boys at my Catholic school whom I considered my friends. I felt surprised by it when it first started happening. Like, I didn’t know I was fat. In my mind, there hadn’t really been anything wrong with me, until they told me there was. And even then I didn’t really know what to do about it. Now, when I look at pictures of myself at that age, I know there was absolutely nothing “wrong” with me at all, but some thoughtless words carved out a story that I believed, and my body obsession began.

  In the few years that followed, I became increasingly self-critical. I fixated on counting my stomach rolls and paying attention to whether or not my thighs rubbed together when I walked. I hated my knees and the way they interrupted the line of my legs, so I never ever wore shorts. (Side note: I also never wore sandals because of a foot fungus. One of the many unsuccessful ways we tried treating it was soaking my foot in some weird crystals that turned it purple.) I secretly compared the size of my chubby little hands to those of the other little girls in my classes and came to the conclusion that it was really my knuckles that were the problem, and if I just had smaller knuckles everything would be fine. My personality got bigger and bigger among my peers to distract them from my body, and I acted more and more like a clown to fill the space that had otherwise been filled with insults. My eating habits didn’t help either; regularly devouring Cup Noodles two at a time as an after-school snack, or my own invention . . . crouton cereal. (Sourdough croutons in a bowl, drenched with Italian dressing. Still delicious.) Food was a frenemy, making me feel better and worse at the same time. My “mean girls” were Lay’s potato chips and salami.

  The summer before seventh grade I made a concerted effort to change. I started jogging through my neighborhood and came home red-faced and sick to my stomach. I did sit-ups. I ate more salads and less cake, and once I was away from the constant feedback loop of my classmates’ chatter, I started to feel pretty good about myself. I felt stronger, the jogging started getting easier, and although the changes were slight, on the first day of school I looked in the mirror in my school uniform and felt content.

  I was disappointed when no one at school noticed my phoenix-like rise out of my own fat ashes that first day, but I decided they would certainly notice soon enough. During recess in that first week back, I played basketball with a few of the boys. In a friendly tussle with me over possession of the ball, one of them called me a “tub o’ lard” and snatched the ball from my stunned, normal-size knuckles. I pretended not to notice because I didn’t want him to know how biting those words were. Or how much time and energy I had spent trying to shed that image, and how much it leveled me that all my hard work hadn’t changed anything. It was crushing to realize that my identity among them had been branded upon me, and that there was really no changing it. I finished the game and then cried in private that day because I thought the only thing worse than being hurt was letting it be seen by the person who hurt me.

  You don’t ever completely shed those feelings. Those images of myself swim inside me even now, and it’s disturbing how much pleasure I still feel ripple through me when I share this part of my story and someone says they can’t see it—that they can’t imagine me as a fat kid. I see her every single day. As recently as a few months ago, I left a dance class because I couldn’t stand the way I looked in the mirror at the front of the room. I’m not proud of that, and I don’t succumb to those old stories as often as I used to, but it feels like the most defining characteristic of my life. It trumps that I was a tomboy, or that I was loved, or that I was goofy, or that I was an animal lover. It is my involun
tary tattoo.

  I transferred schools at the end of that year. My mom helped me make that decision. She has always been an exceptionally comforting person when it really counts, and has a way of making you feel unconditionally perfect even though we both know it’s just a smoke screen. No one is perfect, but it’s also nice to sometimes just believe her. It must have been hard for her to see her daughter so upset so many times after school. I cried to her and complained and wailed and blamed the other kids incessantly. One day she took a new approach with me, and instead of being comforting and soft, she was exasperated and laid it all out on the line.

  “You can’t just keep complaining about it! What do you want to do, Sara? Do you want to change schools or not?!”

  It felt like a slap in the face, but in a good way. I took her advice, and I’m so glad. Public school offered me a clean slate and an opportunity to shed my Catholic-school skin and reemerge as one of the best things we can ever be: nobody.

  No one knew me. No one cared. It was amazing. I got to reinvent myself in flannel shirts and ’90s boot-cut jeans, constructing a new self-image while the kids in my new school had no idea I was shedding anything. My brand-new set of friends didn’t seem to care about or notice my body at all, and although I was still obsessing internally, I wasn’t tortured by my circumstances anymore. I tried new things. I got involved with sports and extracurricular activities and was surprised at how quickly I formed new and meaningful friendships. While my girlfriends and I were deciding which boys we were crushing on (Mike Rios, I still love you!!!), they also discovered that I could sing. My voice became a deep source of pride for me, and gained me admiration from my new peers. My extroverted personality was growing, and I loved getting attention for something positive for a change. Singing became a part of my social identity, which was something that would stay with me for a very long time. This feeling went hand in hand with another new world that was simultaneously unfolding, asking to be explored.

  Playing Fern in a local theater production of Charlotte’s Web, 1993

  The day of my seventh-grade graduation, at home playing piano

  The theater.

  My mom and sisters had been involved in theater productions for as long as I can remember, and some of my most floaty, blissful moments as a kid were among their theater friends. Loud, brash, eccentric, creative, accepting, and hilarious, they represented a spectrum of people I could see myself inside of. Their bright passion for being in the spotlight was something I could relate to, and maybe it was possible for me as well. Among these people, I never felt fat. I never felt ugly. I was welcomed into the center of all of it. The cast parties were (of course) hosted by my mom, and dancing and singing at the top of my lungs to our beloved Love Shack, I felt truly happy. This was a community of people who made me feel accepted and celebrated, and I wanted more of that.

  Singing. Music. Performance. Those things had been threaded through my whole childhood. Whether it was our mini variety shows on the fireplace hearth, or singing along to my dad playing the piano late at night with a little glass of red wine (he had the wine, I had that bowl of croutons), I had always been a natural singer. I had a good ear, and although the mechanics of playing along to myself on the piano were much more difficult, I always had an affinity for it. I took piano lessons for a little while in the second grade, but as soon as my piano teacher (who pronounced my name “SAY-rah”) asked me to do something different with my left hand than my right hand, I was overwhelmed and over it. But my love of music and of the piano in particular stayed. And now, I was seeing performance in a whole new light. My mom, my sisters, and their friends sparkled onstage in dozens of community theater productions. When Stacey was Eva Perón in Evita, I must have seen it seven or eight times. It was intoxicating. The drama, the costume, the emotion, the lights, the attention, the company of actors. I couldn’t wait to get the chance to officially be a part of an artistic community.

  I got cast in my first show alongside my sister Stacey when I was around thirteen. The experience was an awakening for me. I wore a shin-length gingham dress and pigtail braids, and played a little girl living on the prairie in a show called Quilters. I sang a solo about rolling green hills, and preparing for that moment, when all eyes were on me, was my favorite part of the show. I could feel the weight of being handed the attention of an audience and somehow knew how to hold that space, probably from watching my family before me. I felt powerful. And strong. And important. And beautiful. I was hooked. I wanted more and more of that feeling and I sought it out. Over the next few years, I had supporting roles in community theater productions of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Charlotte’s Web. When I got the lead in Little Shop of Horrors at my high school, I was in heaven. I sang in all sorts of choirs and musical ensembles and was not only welcomed into that world, but validated and rewarded. I sang Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time at our high school graduation, and watched my friends get emotional. It made me feel like I added something of value to the experience, and I was proud of that. I started writing music, and though I didn’t yet share it, I had found my place by finding my voice.

  I still spend a lot of time inside the rose-colored and complicated nostalgia of childhood. I still see myself as a little girl a lot of the time. Those years were precious as well as painful, and they taught me a lot. I learned empathy. I learned humor. I learned compassion. I learned how to soothe myself with my own private world of writing. In the midst of a group of peers who only made room for me sometimes, I sought out the places where I felt acceptance. I found it first in nature, and then on the stage, through performance. We go toward the softest places to land, and sometimes they are few and far between. I was lucky to find some sort of path that stretched out in front of me, like yellow lines on a freeway, and even luckier to have the feeling that it was going to take me somewhere special.

  GRAVITY

  * * *

  I WROTE THIS SONG when I was nineteen. It’s still one of the most requested songs I have and I will probably be playing it for as long as I live. The best part is that it doesn’t even make me want to scratch my own eyes out.

  Gravity was an expression of my first real encounter with heartbreak. The kind that you feel in your bones, that takes your breath away, and keeps you from sleeping. The kind that makes you lose your appetite and drive past his house at all hours of the night. It makes your grades drop, fills entire journals, and wears out cassette tapes of sad songs and drives your parents crazy ’cause you’re being so mopey and pathetic. They can see you’re just a dumdum eighteen-year-old who will get over this eventually, but you just can’t possibly fathom that because you’re so busy starring in your own Greek tragedy. Sadly, it’s the exact same kind of heartbreak that can come back years later with the same characteristics and yet somehow even more venom.

  I was maybe sixteen when I met LR, and he was everything I had always sort of fantasized about, but never in a million years thought I would experience firsthand. He was central casting for the darling romantic lead in any good teen romance flick: drop-dead gorgeous, popular, funny, brooding, not to mention our local sports hero. I, on the other hand, was perhaps less likely to be cast in that movie, fresh off my rejection letter from the auditions for the Mickey Mouse Club, picking up petting-zoo goat poop in my Phantom of the Opera sweatshirt for fun. It seemed unlikely that we would end up together, but life is funny that way.

  I can’t remember too many details of our courtship (if there was one at all), but we had a lot of mutual friends during our sophomore year of high school. I went to all the football and basketball games because that’s generally what my small town did on Friday nights, and he (of course) was on those teams. A few of my close friends were on the cheerleading squad, which led to us ending up at a lot of the same parties, and I found myself gravitating toward him wherever he was in the room. The craziest part was that he seemed to be doing the same. During the summer before our junior year of high school, we started hanging out, and then making ou
t, and both of those things I knew I liked very much. I felt he was so far out of my league, I really couldn’t understand why he was interested in me. But he was, and so I considered myself a very lucky girl. He promptly took his seat at the center of my universe and my soft young heart fell madly in love.

  First day of high school, August 1995

  There was something particularly formative about this experience for me, and I think a large part of that had to do with reciprocity. Because I was an awkward adolescent, and teased incessantly for my weight, I got used to feeling embarrassed about what I looked like. I was uncomfortable in my own skin and felt invisible to boys, unless it was to be the butt of a joke. I still fantasized, though. Awkward and all, I was no stranger to the insane fixation on romance that arrives with adolescence. I had “fallen in love” dozens of times with classmates and magazine photos and David Bowie in Labyrinth and all of the New Kids on the Block. But this was the first time anybody normal really had liked me back. This was a beautiful boy that every girl I knew hoped to get close to . . . who liked me. I was not used to this kind of attention, and especially not from someone like LR, once I got past the fear that this was some elaborate prank that would end up in pig’s blood and ridicule at a prom somewhere, I relaxed into feeling safe and very proud of this love. I leaned into our relationship and the pride that came with wearing someone’s attention. It made me feel powerful and beautiful, two things I now know we can’t effectively cultivate from a place outside ourselves, but never the less, I was hooked.