I dipped my vulgar body in the sea, and it came out covered in seaweed and rage.
On my Summer of accidental inner-child work, being offline and in water, and conceding that yes, Jemima Kirke, I was thinking about myself too much.
Please note that this essay contains references to eating disorders/disordered eating, so if this is something you’re sensitive about please chat to someone you trust after reading. I don’t mention numbers or glorify EDs at any point, but you may be challenged or moved depending on how closely my experience matches yours.
I don’t believe in blanket statements saying you therefor shouldn’t consume this piece of writing lest it be uncomfortable, it might help formulate useful ideas of your own and help you feel less alone. I hope it helps you to see that there is a point to recovery, and to getting angry about the systems that profit from your suffering.
I love you xx
1 - Skinny women don’t want to see you thriving in a bigger body than theirs, and that’s not your problem.
“It’s just a bit vulgar at the size they are not to have them supported”, a miserable, crinkling, apology of a woman told me during my first ever professional wardrobe fitting. Glasgow was finally out of lockdown and I was preparing to take on the first of many fuck it, go on opportunities I was afforded in quick succession after seeking attention on Instagram and later Tiktok all pandemic in my second language. I was selected for the role because of my “unique” dress sense and personality, it was a Gàidhlig language role, and as I’ve been told in what I think I now understand is a backhanded compliment, (I love to never understand social queues it’s so fun and not at all completely demoralising and soul crushing i LOVE it) I don’t seem like the “usual” Gaelic-speaker.
Given how central my “aesthetic” (when can we retire this fucking word) was to my being approached, it felt weird that such a massive wardrobe budget was afforded to production, when like… I have clothes… that you liked… but the Wardrobe Girl was genuinely such a joy to work and giggle with over the strange Zoom fittings, that I went along with it happily. The clothes picked out by this Wardrobe Girl were cool, they felt me but different, more expensive and less wonky than anything I usually wear. They were mostly from Zara, my wardrobe is mostly my mum’s old clothes from the 1980s and weird stuff from charity shops. Some of the clothes that arrived at my flat in a taxi from the production office (the pandemic was so weird) didn’t fit at all though, as they’d been ordered a month prior and my body was in the middle of recovering from a decade of borderline malnourishment, rapidly gaining healthy, happy, and much needed weight. One of these Zoom meetings was overseen by the aforementioned miserable, crinkling, apology of a woman, where she huffed every time I came back to my laptop to say “no, that one was too wee as well”, and told me that I would have to wear a full-support bra under these clothes, otherwise they would be inappropriate on my body. I told her I didn’t own one, and because of strict covid rules, she wasn’t on set when I filmed so I did what I wanted and no one noticed because that’s a literally insane thing to notice about another human being.
As you can likely tell already, having the natural state of my body described as potentially vulgar stuck with me. It’s something I noticed coming out of the peak of the pandemic, when those who hadn’t seen me since pre-spring-2020 would widen their eyes when they recognised me, 1.5 years later and 4-5 dress sizes bigger. I’ve never been fat, and I want to stress before moving on in this essay, that I am not claiming experiences of people who live in fat bodies every day, and who are subjected to the horrors of a fatphobic society as a result. my experience is that of a formerly underweight person with a history of disordered eating who is now about average weight and doing well with recovery.
Back in The Before Times, I was Glasgow’s saddest waitress with a legitimate phobia of oversized clothes and not having my waist cinched to the point of leaving marks on my skin. It’s my understanding that it’s not useful or kind to those suffering from disordered eating to use numbers when we talk about these things, so I won’t, but the long and short of it is that I was frail and constantly ill. My hair was thin, my skin was blue and transparent, I was cold all the time, I was anaemic for years of my life, I had chronic pain in my ribs and spine, my period was irregular if there at all, and I was so anxious and depressed that I frequently couldn’t leave my flat. My main personality trait in my late teens and early twenties was how small my waist was and I am genuinely sorry to anyone who knew me then about how actually void of life I was. This version of me and my body — sad, placid, stupid, and sore — was significantly more of a crowd pleaser than the one I’m in now, and I know there’s no God because this version of me is more alive in every conceivable way than she was.
This version of me and my body, also, never received comments about wearing a bra, full support or not, or about covering up, or dressing appropriately — read, modestly. I used to be described as “elven”, and looking “like a pixie”, now I wear the same style of outfits and I’m sexualised, gawked at, or told, as I was on the Glasgow Subway this month, to “respect” myself. I have a lot of hot takes right now about choice feminism and modesty, but I’ll save them for a time I’m less angry so that I don’t step on anyone’s toes unnecessarily. It’s not up to me what you do and how you dress, but if you for a second attempt to disguise modesty rhetoric with chat about what’s appropriate or safe, I will square-go you, and I will win, because I eat good now and I am very strong.
If you’re currently dealing with eating and body image issues, I promise you that there is life after it, no matter how annoying and weird people are about weight gain. That life is one that you can experience with every one of your senses and create art about and run around in and pick up and squeeze and chew and lick and take photos of and dip in the water and brush sand off of and live. Seek recovery and focus all of your energy on it until it finds you eating a big slice of cake, laughing with your friends, and it kisses you on the forehead and promises to stay by your side if you promise to give it a call on cold mornings.
2 - Teaching your child, teaching my inner child.
I’ve been dabbling in workshop facilitating since I finished Art School in 2018. My first workshops were for grown ups, centring my art practice at the time, teaching collage techniques and basic digital photo editing. They went fine. Whatever. In 2019, I taught at Girls Rock Glasgow (GRG) for the first time, and it changed the shape of my brain and rewired my soul and I haven’t been the same since. I decided I wanted to focus on this kind of work, and I felt like I knew finally who I was and what I wanted to do with my life - then my mum got sick in January 2020, and then the rest of 2020 happened, and that was that. It wasn’t until 2023 that I got back to delivering art workshops for kids, something I’ve been doing more and more since. This Spring I launched my Gaelic art club Sgioba Ealain for GME kids in Glasgow, and this Summer has been packed full of Fèis teaching, stand alone workshops, and the long-awaited return of GRG.
Sgioba Ealain was born from my love of teaching at the Glasgow Fèis, and a desire to give the kids I’d have in my classes each year a space outwith school to be creative and use their Gaelic all year, not just during that one annual week in Spring. We held our first Saturday club sessions at The Hidden Gardens in the South Side, sessions that were as close to spiritual revelation as I’ve had in my life.
2.5 - Grief Interlude
For those who know me and my work a bit more, you may know that I lost my mum last Summer to an aggressive brain tumour. My mum, Fiona, was a Gaelic nursery teacher who taught both myself and my helper for these sessions, Robert, when we were wee. in 1999, when the Highlanders’ Academy Gaelic Nursery was opening and I was enrolled as one of its first intake, my mum started with me as a supply teacher while they found someone with Gaelic to take over the role in her stead. Over twenty years later, she was still there, having learnt the language and subsequently brought it to the children of Inverclyde. If you know a young person from Inverclyde who attended Gaelic nursery between 1999 and 2020, it was my mum who taught them. You’re welcome, on her behalf. I think that makes us siblings, or something. That first session was a humble badge-making workshop — the true bread and butter of my kids’ workshop repertoire — but the energy in the space, on a gorgeous, sunny day in April, was one I’ll never stop replaying in my mind and body. After the kids had been collected by their grown-ups, Robert and I hugged and cried, “She beams out of you” he told me, and we talked frantically about feeling her there with us.
My mum wasn’t a normal teacher. She knew every child she taught, “ma weins”, as she would call them, like they were family. Her nursery was in the same building as the primary school all her weins would go on to attend, and after they left for high school, most of them ended up on the same bus that would take me up to Glasgow Gaelic School every morning. This meant that by a real fluke, from 3-18, she saw or heard about most of them daily. She had a talent for spotting the children who needed her the most, from those without “two beans to rub thegither” to those with additional support needs. My mum would bring in my old, too wee clothes and wordlessly pop them in the backpacks of kids she knew didn’t have the means to buy new clothes every few months, the way pre-schoolers need. She would lay out a banquet of fresh fruit, toast and mackerel, and crackers and cheese at snack time to make sure every child had their fill. She wouldn’t chase parents for snack money, knowing what it was like to be a wee girl wishing someone would feed her and not stress her mammy out about it. She rooted for the underdog, having a real soft spot for neurodivergent kids who had been labelled “bad” before. The “bad” boys would wander out of their P6 and 7 classes and come and ask if she needed help with photocopying and laminating, and they’d sit happily on the periphery of the joy and chaos of her classroom being her wee helpers until the bell went.
I don’t often feel that my mum and I are very alike. In terms of how we look, we were weirdly similar, but in personality I feel that I got all the rage and angst she knew how to rise above. She had more patience and sense of duty than I ever will, and her capacity to give her whole soul to those in need is something I am astounded by, as I struggle to give attention to myself and my needs. This is why it felt so special that Robert saw her in me while I ran around in The Hidden Gardens, taking rubbings from the trees and turning them into badges with our weins. I had a therapy session immediately afterwards which was deeply well timed, and I sobbed to Lisa (Lisa is my therapist) about this moment, and the whole day, extensively.
Returning to 2 - Teaching your child, teaching my inner child, this is the teaching my inner child bit.
As I mentioned previously, I was educated through Gàidhlig Medium Education, or GME. The reason my own Gaelic is hard to pin down in terms of dialect and accent, is because I speak a patchwork GME dialect that has come together as a result of being taught by native speakers from all over Gaelic’s heartlands. As I’ve grown up, my friend groups and jobs have influenced the Gaelic I speak. One of my best friends, Josie, is a native of the Isle of Lewis, and I used to work for a company based between Glasgow and Stornoway, so a lot of my pronunciations — Dè not Jè, Boinne not Bainne — have shifted as a result. My mum and I would go every Summer when I was wee to the family week at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on the Isle of Skye, and I’d come back with a wee temporary Sgitheanach blas my brothers would absolutely rip me for.
Since GME was so new to the central belt when I was growing up, I didn’t have any teachers with patchwork GME Gaelic, nor did I have teachers who grew up the way that I did. The Gaelic teachers in our primary school were othered by staff and kids alike in The English, (the English-speaking majority population of our school who we somehow got away with giving this name to - any other GME kids out there please let me know if this was universal??) and bar one head of department didn’t last more than a few years there. This is very different now, as old-school (read: evil) teachers are long retired, and fresh, open-hearted teachers have taken their place. I understand that the new iteration of my old school is a much warmer place than it often was back in my day, and the Gaelic unit is going from strength to strength. A community of Gaels has grown from the seeds planted back in 1999, by the hands of my mum and her fellow nursery nurses.
I now find myself facilitating workshops attended by my mum’s weins. It is surreal and beautiful, and I see in them her mannerisms and quirks, no doubt inherited while they were dancing and playing around her classroom. When we congratulate each other, we have the same “whaaaaay!” to offer, hands up, palms out, leaning back slightly, closed by a laugh, maybe a clap. I hear myself using her “ah-ah!” warning to stop children running with scissors or touching still-wet ink on fresh prints, before hearing them do the same to assert boundaries with each other. I can’t help but have an out-of-body experience for a few moments every workshop spent with one of her weins, feeling that there’s part of me teaching and part of me taking part in my lesson, her lesson.
Where I move into my own space as an educator, is in the example I can set as a GME graduate. Someone who isn’t the “usual” Gaelic-speaker. I joked recently to a co-facilitator how strange it is to be perceived as somehow edgy or a risk to some in the Gaelic community who are more traditional in their outlook. “I’m like, a really wholesome person!” I laughed, and she agreed that this perception of more contemporary tastes and views sees funding knock-backs in her line of work frequently. I am neurodivergent, queer, (lightly) tattooed, and as we’ve addressed before, not a modest dresser. I’ve never had an opinion I haven’t aired or made something out of, and I have really hardline views when it comes to the protection of girls from adult men. I’m in no hurry to marry, or have children, and I’m not religious. These are all things that I’ve been harassed about online, and told to my face alienate others in my community. There are weirdos everywhere, and I don’t feel that this strange reception to me and my work has ever reflected normal, functioning adults who can get along with others, even those who are different from them, but it still hurts. In my experience, the majority of the Gaelic world, regardless of age, is a world of cheek, naughtiness, music, laughter, and love. These are my folk, and they’re the folk I can’t wait for my weins, and my mum’s weins, to meet as they follow on up this wee windy path.
At the start of July, I was invited to South Uist to teach at their Fèis for the first time. It was my first time on the Island, and the date that I left for 8+ hours of train-and-ferry-based panic happened to be the day after my mum’s first anniversary. Great timing, thanks soooo much, universe. When I arrived, I felt scooped up by everyone I met immediately, from the Fèis organiser’s daughter picking me up from the ferry terminal, to the men from the accommodation I stayed in making me tea endlessly and leaving me bottles of wine and tins of Guinness to “help” with my lesson planning. The kids in my classes every day were bright, sunny, and full of mischief. They had perfect, beautiful Gàidhlig, and you could tell they saw no real reason to speak to me in English. They took their time making everything I taught them to make, very much in contrast to the whirring vibe I often have with my Glasgow kids. They forced me to slow down to match their pace, and it made me realise how much whirring I do myself usually, trying to fill the air with noise and action, instead of just being there, with them, with the materials, seeing what happens.
4. Wet Interlude
We went to the beach after our first day of teaching in Uist. My pals went out to play in the freezing water, and I walked up the beach a bit further. When I felt sure I was far enough away I could start talking to spirits, I waded into the waves up to my thighs, holding my long skirt gathered up in one hand.
The air was completely still and the sun oppressive, but in that gorgeous way you know you’ll miss once the short Scottish Summer passes, so you let it burn your cheeks and your nose a wee while before you put on more sun block.
I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I started to talk to my mum as the seaweed wrapped around my legs. I know that I told her that I knew she was there, and it was nice to be with her again. It had been a long time.
My eyes started to get teary, and the wind blew for the first time in hours, wooshing my hair from my sweaty face and catching my breath. I kept talking to her, and I took it that she was sending me a breeze to say she was listening.
I think I told her about my day and how she would have loved this work, and loved that I was doing it. My lips were getting chapped from the heat and I licked them, not sure if the salt I tasted was from my tears or my sweat or the ocean.
I looked over at the wee dots of my friends out dunking themselves fresh after a long few days of travel and work, and I told my mum I was going to go back to them, back to the rest of my life. I told her again I was glad she was there, and I would be with her soon.
When I shook the last of the seaweed from my feet, the wind slowed then stopped. I cleaned my slides off in the water and stepped back into them, running back up the beach again.
I’ll be with her again soon.
4. Hello class, my name is Miss Amorphous Blob (The bit of the essay where I start tying all these disparate topics together, I promise)
Dressing for work has always been something I’ve struggled with, no matter the work. When I worked in a corporate-feeling tea shop at the end of Art School, I had to wear all black. It made me genuinely morose. When I quit that job, I gave all of my black clothes to charity shops and I’m not sure I’ve worn an all black outfit since. The job after that meant I had to dress like a sad little butler and I hated it so much that I moved from the restaurant part of the business to the gift shop to save my soul. I’ve done retail, I’ve done corporate, God knows I’ve done hospitality. As I’ve gotten older, dress codes have come to be something I have to take as a gentle suggestion rather than strict rules, it’s amazing what confidence can do. No matter how important you are to your workplace and how much those bastards depend on you, start acting and dressing like you’re the personality hire, embrace the lightness of that persona while you do whatever you’re actually being paid to do, and your whole life will improve, I promise.
Being self-employed has meant going back to my clashing colours, comfort and aesthetic (there she is again, uuugh) over professionalism vibes of old - at least while I’m running my day at home or in coffee shops, and I’m hanging out with other grown ups. I’m embarrassed to admit how much that comment about my potentially “vulgar” body and what I should be doing with it has impacted how I dress it. I call my teacher outfits my “amorphous blob clothes”. Oversized T-shirts with a sports bra underneath have replaced baby tees and anything that suggests I have a nipple, maybe even two, underneath, wide-leg trousers and dungarees have replaced any other form of trouser, and shin-length, floaty skirts with bike shorts under them have replaced mini skirts. Some of this is about practicality, sure, no one wants to flash a 7 year old, but most of it is about shame. If you’re in the habit of dressing “modestly”, I want you to ask yourself truthfully - how much of it is about shame?
When I worked at my first Girls Rock Glasgow in 2019, I hadn’t gained weight yet, and I had never been made to feel that my genderless, pointy wee body was an abject problem to the public. I wore whatever I wanted and no one said a thing, because no one ever said anything about the “appropriateness” of my body when I was skinny, when I was hungry.
Six years later, I have a lot more baggage. I have this new, giant, life altering grief, and all the trauma that comes with it. But, I also have experience, a career, and years of recovery under my belt that I didn’t have then. I’m a much better facilitator than I was at 22, having taught hundreds of kids up and down the country in two different languages, having taught kids in Paisley (this is a joke, I am literally from Greenock, I don’t have a leg to stand on), having the benefit of age and the kind of confidence you can’t possibly have at that young unless you’re awful and insufferable.
Despite all this, the baggage, the stares from old co-workers who gulped when I went back to my old work when they saw how I look now, the word vulgar, all of it, came with me when I walked into the QMU on day one of GRG 2024. I have a compartment in my big Ikea bag for shame, right next to the glue sticks and felt-tip pens. And guess what? No one cared. The people I hadn’t seen since 2019 ran at me and hugged me, “I’m so glad we’re back!!” we all shouted to each other, the new volunteers I hadn’t met yet quickly became new friends who I now have a matching tattoo with. I’ll get to that in a minute. I led a zine making workshop on the first day and the girls created beautiful artwork in their wee zines about their favourite riot grrrls and their pets and their weird interests. They dreamed about the bands they were about to form and what their ethos would be, they got crafty about being angry, and they reminded me on a really visceral level who I actually am, when I’m not thinking about myself too much.
Over the course of the week, our weins wrote songs, and made band merch, and learned about body positivity, and the history of women+ in music, and did all of the things that would have saved us as children. Being in this environment, soaking up the rage and cuteness and sparkles and tenacity of about 50 8-16 year olds, had me in mini skirts and baby tees again. My own femininity is something I’ve struggled with for the last couple of years, but somehow being with them reminded my that my femininity was never soft and candy floss coloured, it was angry, it was rebellious, it bothered people and rubbed them up the wrong way - it was baker-miller pink. I worried about wearing something that showed my belly pouch, then I remembered that was the point, and knew that being visible in this way might make one of those kids figure out how to stop thinking about herself too much before it’s too late.
Your belly is round because you’re blessed to have eaten that cake we talked about before with your friends, you survived it all, you’re here, and I’m so glad. Maybe your belly isn’t rounded out yet, and you’ve not had that cake yet, but you will, and it will be unbelievable and I’ll find myself crying without knowing why and it’ll be joy pulsing through the atmosphere because someone on a plane we can’t see knows you’re going to be okay, and they let us all know.
Eating cake is punk. Making stuff with your friends is punk. Being different, and too much, and yes, vulgar, is punk. Using your native language is punk. Honouring who came before you and knowing you’ll never be alone is punk. Talking to your dead mum in the sea is punk, maybe, it’s definitely something. Getting tattoos with other women and non binary folk you just met because you all just had your inner children healed by the power of punk, is punk.
6. Conclusion
To conclude what is another indulgently long essay, I’d like to thank anyone who read to the end even if they were uncomfortable at any point. I’d like to thank anyone who read to the end, at all, this was a lot and I know it, in length and tone.
I have been thinking about myself too much. About how I don’t really like my hair dark and how maybe I would actually like adult braces to deal with how squinty my bottom teeth are and how if I find the right abs building exercise on Tiktok I’ll finally like myself from the side. I’ve been thinking about what people said to me years ago and why it was mean and I’ve been thinking so much about that weight I gained that you’d think it came with a second brain. I’ve been turning myself vacuous and boring, I’ve compressed my layers and flattened my image out into a succinct piece of content. I’ve been forgetting to go in the sea and not turn it into a succinct piece of content. I’ve been forgetting to make art instead of succinct pieces of content.
I deleted the Tiktok and Instagram apps from my phone before I went away to teach in South Uist, because I didn’t want to be distracted from what I knew would be a month of change for me. I haven’t re-installed the apps. I think I’ve quit Tiktok, the thing I threatened to do two essays ago. Social media has been a tool for growth in the emotional and career-ical sense for me for years, and I can’t deny that. But while it gave me tools to make money and pals, it gave me access to childish paranoia my teenage self would have laughed at. I can’t believe I’ve been worried about forehead lines. I broke a guy’s nose when I was 15 for touching my bum at a gig. I used to be cool. I used to be punk!!
The weight (no pun intended) of comments about your body can be daunting. So can seeing second-hand embarrassment flash across the faces of your peers when they take in that their worst nightmare — becoming not-thin — has happened to you. Being seen as an outsider in your community for things you can’t help and wouldn’t if you could is painful and jarring, no matter how bolshy people see you being about it. But you (I’m talking to myself here, give us a minute) have no right to let it make you two-dimensional and void of anything interesting to give to the world and unable to function offline.
Being indignant about your own treatment, be it at your own hand or by society’s without rage, is just creating cyclical, dull obsessions that you spin around in so fast and frantically that you begin to bore yourself into the ground. Rage is a ladder to the sun. Rage will shake you and remind you who you were supposed to be, before you drowned out the old brag of your heart with an algorithmic quest to numb your grief and ambiguity about actually surviving everything after all.
I love you, stay angry,
C x