Kim Williams on Liberation

Hello, I'm Kim. My pronouns are she/her, and I'm a counseling associate at Our Landing Place.

I've been thinking a lot this Pride Month about this scene in Ted Lasso where Rebecca, she's alone, she's in her hallway, she's like on the way out the door to do her day, and she looks in the mirror and she sees her younger self looking back at her. And then she makes herself as big as she can. She lifts her arms up, her arms are wide, her chest is open, and then she does like this full lion's roar. And the first time I watched that scene, I just felt viscerally such an emotional reaction to it because I know what it costs to do that, to be in that space, to have to kind of convince yourself that you can take up space. I am a fat, queer, feminist femme, and I've been told in a hundred ways for my whole life that I take up too much space. I'm too tall, I'm too smart, I'm too loud, I'm too opinionated, my nose is too big, my hair is too long, my hair is too frizzy, like whatever. I don't even know. It was never just a metaphor. See, that's the thing, right? It was actually literal and layered. My body was too much. I was taking up too much space, right? My queerness, my intellect, my social justice advocacy, that was all supposed to stay private. And so every axis except my whiteness got its own instruction to shrink, to be as small as possible. Those messages, they don't arrive all at once. They accumulate. You know, you get a comment here, you get a look there. You know, there's a chair that wasn't built for you. You just rehearse the smallness so many times that it just starts to feel like who you are.

Here's the thing though, right?

My younger self, she didn't know that yet. She didn't know she was supposed to be small. She didn't know her body was supposed to be an apology. She just lived in it, right? I was loud. I was hungry. I was present. I was curious. And that knowledge about being small got into me. something a lot later.

It also means it can be uninstalled.

And that's like what Rebecca's doing in that scene in Ted Lasso. She's not looking at who she became. She's looking at who she was before the instructions to be small arrived.

And then she just lets that little girl lead.

So that roar isn't triumph. It's actually a contradiction.

It's a direct physical refusal of everything she was told to be instead. And so for me, in my body, in my queerness, in my feminism, my liberation lives in moments like that. It's a breath that finally drops all the way down. My shoulders stop apologizing and return to where they're supposed to be. And when I catch myself doing math, right? Like how much room should I take up? Is this too much? Am I too much? Have I talked too much? I just like stop doing the calculations and just try to exist fully in my body. So that's really what pride means to me. It's a liberation. It's not just a celebration, right? But it's a refusal. It's a refusal to make myself smaller so other people are more comfortable. And I want you to find your version of Rebecca's lion. Like let yourself show how you used to be.

What are the lessons that you can learn from that person before all the lessons got installed, all the lessons of settler colonialism and white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchy.

What does the little one in you remember that you were trained to forget?

Because you were never too much. It was always actually the measuring that was the problem in the first place.

So my friends, just be you. Find your lion.

And happy pride.