From Hiding in Plain Sight to Finding My Voice
I recently joined a Toastmasters club to overcome a lifelong fear of public speaking, and this week I gave my very first speech, the Ice Breaker, intended to let fellow club members get to know me a little bit. I told the story of my transformation, of losing 200 pounds and coming out to myself as gay, and how I went from being afraid to be seen to wanting to be heard. This story illustrates my journey down the path I describe on this site: I listened to myself, embraced who I was, and changed my life to be that person. Learn yourself. Know yourself. Be yourself.
Thank you, Madam Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters, and our very distinguished guests. I’m going to start with a question. Has anyone here seen the campy ’80s movie The Man with Two Brains starring Steve Martin? For those who haven’t, Steve Martin plays a brain surgeon who meets a scientist who’s figured out how to keep a human brain alive in a jar.
Steve Martin visits his lab, and for reasons they never explain, he’s able to communicate telepathically with the brain of a woman named Anne Uumellmahaye. They’re both Dutch, they sing a little song together, and they fall in love. It’s very cute. My favorite scene is where Steve Martin takes Anne out onto the lake in a rowboat. So just imagine it: a man sitting across from a brain in a glass jar wearing a giant sun hat.
That movie stuck with me, and for a big part of my life, I wanted to be like Anne, a brain in a jar. No body, just an intellect.
Back then, the idea of standing up in front of you all, with all of your eyes upon me, would’ve been terrifying. Unfathomable, really. I did not want to be seen.
In 2019 I moved way out to Eatonville on a little farm. I was surrounded by animals and trees, but no close neighbors to look at me. I was social distancing before the pandemic. I worked from home like so many people, and I was happy that my company did not require us to be on camera during Zoom meetings, because I didn’t want my coworkers looking at my face.
Even before that, when the selfie craze started and everybody was posting pictures of themselves all over social media, oh, no, not me. My Facebook profile picture was of my very cute dog.
Looking at me now, you might wonder, “What the heck? What was going on? Why was it so hard for you to be seen?” But the person you see up here right now is very different from who I was back then.
Five years ago, I was almost 400 pounds and completely ashamed of how I looked. I had been heavy for a really long time. As a teenager, I was chubby. After having twin babies at age eighteen, I grew to be overweight very quickly, and by the time I was in my forties, I was super morbidly obese. That’s a classification of a BMI over fifty.
I would have done anything to be separated from my body, as long as I could still think and communicate like Anne, the brain in the movie. I used to joke that maybe one day they could put my brain into a robot or something.
But really my fear goes back even before that. I hated speech class in high school. I avoided all extracurricular activities that involved getting on stage. I was smart, and I loved to write poetry, short stories, and essays, but I wouldn’t enter contests because they all involved getting up on stage and reading your work in front of people.
The last public speech I gave was in college. I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine, and it was my job to introduce a guest speaker we had invited to do a reading. I stood in front of the podium, my hands shaking like this (they’re doing that a little bit right now) and my voice wavering. I got through it as quickly as possible and ran off stage and asked my friend, “Do you think they could tell I was nervous?” She was brutally honest. She looked at me and said, “Uh, yeah.”
But it was at home as a kid where I tried my hardest not to be seen. My father was an angry man, and you never knew what would set him off. It could be the wrong word or just a frown. I couldn’t really show negative emotion. I wasn’t allowed to have opinions of my own. So I learned to be the good girl, and I stayed out of sight as much as I could. After the divorce, my mother worked hard every day at her retail job to make ends meet, and I didn’t want to be a burden. So I kept quiet, and I learned how to take care of myself at a really young age.
But something changed for me out on that farm in Eatonville during the pandemic. All that time I spent alone allowed me to get to know myself and to listen to myself in a way I never had before. And I unearthed a truth that I had kept hidden inside that 400-pound body. I admitted to myself, after years of denial, that I was gay.
I’d been alone at that point for nearly two decades, and I knew then that I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I didn’t wanna hide anymore.
Over the course of the next fourteen months, I lost 200 pounds, and I completely changed my lifestyle. I learned to love physical activity that had never been possible for me before. I joined queer women’s groups and active women’s groups, and I started driving long distances to meet new people and try all the new things that I could. And finally, I got tired of all that driving, and I moved back to civilization. Now I live in Tacoma, and I can be seen by any number of people just walking down the street, and it’s OK. Because now I’m living instead of hiding.
It was Toastmasters that showed me how much I’d actually changed. The first time I showed up as a guest, I decided, “Sure, I’ll participate in Table Topics.” My girlfriend had told me about it. She was in Toastmasters many years ago.
I was asked to describe a woman in my family who I admired, and I talked about my sister Stacey, with whom I’d reconciled after many years of estrangement, mostly due to that dysfunctional childhood that divided us. I talked about how that reconnection had made me realize that, if we could get past our differences, then repair was always possible.
That was at a different Toastmasters club where they voted on Table Topics, and I actually won. It was totally shocking, and of course a little bit of a thrill. But what surprised me the most that day is how comfortable I was standing up and talking. And seeing the way that just a little bit of my story resonated with the room made me realize that being seen wasn’t necessarily the important thing. It’s really being heard.
I didn’t join Toastmasters so you could all look at me (even though I’m cute). I joined because I have things I want to say. I want to tell my story. As a coach, I want to help people to understand who they are and to live their lives fully authentically. As a writer and a speaker, I want to talk about how we can take that understanding and apply it to other people, to our partners, our friends, our family, but also strangers and people who live and think so differently than we do, people from other cultures.
We live in a very divided world. The effects of that are obvious today when you turn on the news. But I believe that repair is possible. I believe that division is fueled by fear and ignorance, and that understanding is what brings people together. And understanding comes from talking to each other and listening to each other.
I’m OK in my body now, but the most important thing about me is still the brain. And I realize that what’s important isn’t being seen, it’s being heard.