The Power of Sharing - A Personal Anecdote

                                                                    By TAN’s Founder

  

    I founded TAN in December of 2020 with one goal in mind; to share my own narrative experience with athlete body shaming, and to raise awareness on the issue. The first Instagram and blog posts were made on December 24th of 2020 - and with it came a reaction from my peers that nothing could have prepared me for. 

    Dozens of messages thanking me for my one Instagram and blog post flooded my Instagram message forum. These were close friends, acquaintances, people that I had never spoken to before in real life - all thanking me for even just addressing the issue. Some even shared their experiences with me, and encouraged me to move forward with curating TAN. I could not even fathom the amount of support that I received for creating TAN, and I was overcome with an immense sense of empowerment. No matter what the scale of the organization - big or small - I realized then that there was a community of people who needed a safe space for their experiences to be heard and recognized. 

    Since then, TAN has generated a gradual yet significant start to a conversation about athlete body shaming and how to prevent and combat it. On this platform, we as an organization have worked to provide perspectives on how athlete body shaming is a pattern that must be broken. However, it admittedly has been difficult to find first-hand accounts written for research purposes to source in our content, simply because the topic is one that has not previously been discussed on a large scale in our media. 

    That being said, it is extremely difficult for most to put into words the feelings that athlete body shaming can bring forth. I personally experienced the same convoluted emotions when I sat down to write a personal narrative about just one experience that I had with athlete body shaming. I realized then how difficult it was to recount my experience; how many times I stopped to read back on my progress and feel deep in my stomach how heartbreaking it sounded, how I wished that nobody else would ever feel these feelings. 

    When I sent in the essay to a large-scale contest, I had no expectations whatsoever. I felt as though I had not answered the prompt properly, my story was not well written, and that it would not gain recognition. But most of all, I felt as though my story felt too sad to read. As though it was a sob story that nobody would believe, that my feelings of body inadequacy would just be attributed to my own insecurities and nothing else, that it was wrong of me to critique the people that I had been so close with at one point. 

    What came next was, again, something that nobody could have prepared me for. Not only did I win the contest, but I also had the opportunity to get the essay published. Dozens upon dozens of athletes just like me were able to read my essay across the nation - and many had so much to contribute to the conversation. Just as the start of TAN had elicited, I received many messages and words of thanks from many athletes, many of whom I had never spoken to until that point. More than ever, it reaffirmed to me the presence of athletes who sought empowerment and reform - a multi-generational community of peer athletes connected not only by their shared affinity for sports, but also in their negative experiences in the sports they loved so dearly. 

    All of this is to say that there is empowerment in writing and publication of the individual experience. It is an opportunity to take back autonomy for one’s narrative, as well as a beautiful way of fostering new connections and communities. Athlete body positivity is a conversation that must go on for generations to come, and each of us plays a part in contributing and continuing this effort. 

    

Sources: 

1. Google Images