I Wanted to be Sandy in Grease
/The recent passing of beloved pop icon Olivia Newton-John reminded me of my years-long obsession with Grease.
From the first time I saw the movie at the drive-in theater with my family, I was infatuated with it.
When my neighborhood friend Tami got it on video tape, we spent countless summer afternoons lying on the brown shag carpet in her cool, dark basement watching it as we sang loudly over the roar of the air conditioner.
I was so in love with the movie, I even took an acting class in which we performed Grease.
At such a young age, I didn’t get most of the jokes but loved the singing and dancing and, of course, the love story.
Influenced My Beliefs
While other factors certainly played a role, I’ve come to understand just how much narratives like Grease influenced my view of myself and my body as well as my understanding of how romantic relationships worked.
The primary message I internalized was that I needed to look and act a certain way to be desirable.
I believed that to get a guy, I had to be thin, pretty, sexy and cool. And if I wasn’t these things, I would have to do whatever I could to become them. I would have to transform myself from a wholesome Sandra Dee into a sexpot Sandy.
As a teen, this meant spending hours at the salon getting my long hair permed, hours lying in the sun slathered with baby oil, hours at the mall shopping for the perfect outfit, and hours flipping through magazines in search of weight-loss tips.
I Changed for Him
When I was 14, I fell madly in love with one of the bad boys at my junior high school.
I did everything I thought I needed to do to be attractive to him, from changing how I dressed and wore my hair to the music I listened to and the kids I hung out with.
The first time he called, my heart raced a million miles a minute as I stretched the phone cord as far as possible away from my parents’ ears.
After hanging out for a bit after school, we started going together and things got pretty serious pretty quickly. As my life revolved around him, I was naturally devastated when he dumped me a few years later for another girl.
I was also convinced that if I just lost weight, he would regret breaking up with me and come running back.
While I had flirted with various weight-loss attempts in high school, like drinking SlimFast and eating low-calorie frozen meals, this was the first time I really restricted my eating.
I did lose some weight and we did end up getting back together. However, my smaller jeans size didn’t stop him from breaking my heart again and again. (Yes, he was a jerk, and, yes, I naively believed that by being the perfect girlfriend he would become less of a jerk.)
What’s Your Grease?
My heart aches for my younger self who, like so many of us, bought into the predominant, harmful narrative (one that still prevails today) that I needed to look and act a certain way to be acceptable, desirable and lovable—that I needed to be someone else to be worthy.
Thankfully, I eventually (that is, a few decades later!) came to realize I could stop buying into such damaging narratives and choose instead to just be myself, to embrace the body I was given, and to live according to what I truly value about myself and others, including characteristics like kindness, integrity, respectfulness and trustworthiness.
When you reflect on your own experience, what harmful narratives have you internalized over the years and how would you benefit from letting them go? What’s your Grease?
