The Woman on the Stage

On burlesque, body image, and wondering what other women see when they look at you.

I didn’t feel sexy.

Let’s get that out of the way first.

I was on my period. I was bloated. I was aching. I was hurting. Sexy was pretty much the last word I would have used to describe myself that night.

And yet, there I was.

Gold sequins. Fishnets. Rhinestone heels. Feather boa. Pasties.

Trixie had entered the building.

The audience went absolutely nuts. Screaming, cheering, whistling, hollering. The whole thing. Apparently, I crushed it.

I also almost fell over some props on the floor, but that’s neither here nor there. (Okay, it’s a little here. My brain has already replayed that moment approximately 47 times.)

The funny thing is, I knew the performance went well. I saw snippets of video afterward, and even I had to admit that it looked amazing.

But watching myself perform is a strange experience.

Sometimes I look at the screen and think, Holy shit. I can do THAT?

Because the woman on the screen looks confident. She looks sexy. She looks like she knows exactly what she’s doing.

Meanwhile, the woman who performed that routine was painfully aware of how uncomfortable she felt in her own body.

Apparently, those two women are the same person.

Who knew?

The Woman at the Grocery Store

Here’s the thing about me: I’m not always the woman you see onstage.

I’m the woman who hates making eye contact at the grocery store. I’m the woman who can feel awkward in ordinary social situations. I’m not walking around every day feeling like some glamorous, irresistible creature who knows she’s the hottest woman in the room.

Sometimes I’m just trying to buy groceries without accidentally making eye contact with a stranger.

And then I get onstage.

It’s not that Trixie is a completely different person. She’s a character, sure. A persona. But she’s also me, amplified.

I didn’t start out with some grand plan to become a burlesque performer. I tried something new, then something else. My director encouraged me to pursue it. I took online classes. I practiced.

And here we are.

Somewhere along the way, the things I was experimenting with became burlesque. I developed a stage presence I didn’t even know I possessed.

When my director first encouraged me to pursue burlesque, my response was essentially, Are you sure? Me?

Apparently, he was sure.

I wasn’t.

But I tried anyway.

And now I watch videos of myself and wonder who the hell that woman is.

Not because I don’t recognize my face or my body. I recognize those perfectly well.

It’s the presence that surprises me.

I didn’t know I could do all that.

What Does Another Woman See?

I’ve been thinking about the women in the audience.

Specifically, what another woman might think when she watches me perform.

Is she admiring the costume? Is she enjoying the show? Is she thinking about how much fun it looks like I’m having?

Or is she comparing herself to me?

I wonder because I know how easy it is to compare ourselves to other women. We do it in dressing rooms, in mirrors, in photographs, in the endless scroll of social media. We compare bodies, faces, confidence, desirability. Sometimes we do it without even realizing we’re doing it.

We look at another woman and start measuring the distance between her and ourselves.

She’s thinner than me.

She’s prettier than me.

She’s more confident than me.

She can pull that off, but I never could.

I wonder if someone in the audience looks at me and does the same thing.

And if she does, what is she comparing?

My body? My appearance? The fact that I’m standing on a stage wearing very little clothing in front of a room full of people?

Is she thinking, I could never do that?

Because here’s the part that fascinates me.

I wasn’t feeling particularly sexy that night. I was physically uncomfortable. I was bloated and aching and dealing with all the ordinary, unglamorous things that come with inhabiting a human body.

But none of that was visible in the way I imagined it would be.

I felt uncomfortable. The audience saw a showgirl.

I felt bloated. The audience saw a performer.

I didn’t feel sexy. The audience was screaming.

My internal experience and my external appearance were telling two very different stories.

And I had no idea until I watched the footage.

Maybe that’s true for other women, too.

Maybe the woman I think has everything together is standing in front of her own mirror wondering what everyone else sees.

Maybe the woman I envy has insecurities I would never guess.

Maybe we’re all walking around with these private little inventories of everything we think is wrong with us, completely unaware of how differently we might appear to someone else.

I can’t know what another woman in the audience thinks of me.

She might admire me. She might compare herself to me. She might not give my appearance a second thought.

But I know what I thought of myself that night.

And it wasn’t what I saw on the screen.

I Didn’t Feel Sexy. I Did It Anyway.

I think we’re often taught that confidence comes first.

First, you have to feel beautiful. Then you can wear the outfit.

First, you have to feel sexy. Then you can flirt.

First, you have to feel confident. Then you can take the risk.

We treat confidence like a permission slip we have to obtain before we’re allowed to do the thing we want to do.

But what if it doesn’t work that way?

What if sometimes you put on the costume while you’re bloated and uncomfortable?

What if sometimes you step onto the stage while a little voice in your head is still asking whether you belong there?

What if you do the thing before you feel ready?

I didn’t need to convince myself I was sexy before I performed. I didn’t need to stand backstage and fall in love with my body. I didn’t need to eliminate every insecurity before I could let myself be seen.

I just needed to do my routine.

And when the music started, I forgot about everything else.

I wasn’t thinking about my stomach. I wasn’t thinking about how I looked from the side. I wasn’t thinking about whether I was attractive enough to be doing what I was doing.

I was performing.

I was present.

I was having an experience instead of evaluating myself through it.

And that might be one of the most liberating things about burlesque for me.

For a little while, I get to stop thinking about my body and actually use it. I get to move, dance, tease, entertain, and inhabit the music. My body becomes something I do things with instead of something I constantly assess.

That’s a pretty remarkable feeling.

Especially for a woman who can spend an awful lot of time inside her own head.

Maybe We’re All More Than One Woman

I’m still the woman at the grocery store who doesn’t particularly enjoy making eye contact.

I’m also the woman in the gold sequins.

I’m the woman who feels awkward sometimes, and the woman who can command a stage.

I’m the woman who can look at a photograph and immediately notice everything she doesn’t like, and the woman who can watch a performance video and think, Damn. Look at me go.

I don’t think one version is more authentic than the other.

I think we contain multitudes. (Yes, I’m aware that sounds like something a poet would say. I am, unfortunately, exactly that predictable.)

Maybe we just need different circumstances to access different parts of ourselves.

Onstage, I have the music. The choreography. The costume. The character. I know what I’m there to do. I have a framework that allows me to be bold in ways that might feel unnatural in an ordinary social interaction.

At the grocery store, I’m just trying to remember what I came there to buy.

Both women are me.

And perhaps the same is true for the woman sitting in the audience.

Maybe she has a version of herself that she’s never quite allowed to explore. Maybe she has something she wants to try but hasn’t yet found the courage. Maybe she looks at me and compares herself to me.

Or maybe she simply enjoys the show.

Whatever she thinks, I hope she knows she doesn’t have to become me.

She doesn’t have to put on fishnets and rhinestone heels. She doesn’t have to perform for an audience. She doesn’t have to become the loudest, boldest, sexiest version of herself imaginable.

But I hope she gives herself permission to discover what else she might be capable of.

Because I didn’t know what I was capable of, either.

I had to try.

I had to practice.

I had to let someone encourage me to pursue something I wasn’t sure I could do.

And I had to get onstage before I could discover what happened when I did.

The Woman I Didn’t Know I Could Be

I’m not sure I’ll ever watch a performance video without being a little baffled by myself.

There’s something strange about seeing yourself from the outside, without access to all the insecurities and discomforts you were carrying on the inside.

It’s like meeting someone you know intimately and discovering an entirely new side of her.

And maybe that’s what I’m taking away from this experience.

Not that I need to feel sexy every day. Not that I need to become more outgoing or stop feeling awkward in ordinary situations. Not that I have to turn into Trixie everywhere I go.

Just that there’s more to me than I sometimes realize.

I can feel uncomfortable in my body and still do something incredible with it.

I can doubt myself and still be capable.

I can be the woman who questions whether she belongs onstage and the woman who gets up there and makes an audience go absolutely feral.

I can be a work in progress and still be someone worth watching.

And maybe, the next time I find myself comparing myself to another woman, I’ll remember that I never really know what she’s carrying inside her, either.

Maybe she’ll look at me and see something I don’t see in myself.

Maybe I’ll look at her and do the same.

Or maybe we’ll both spend too much time worrying about whether we’re enough, when neither of us needs to prove a damn thing.

I don’t know what that woman in the audience thought of me.

But I know what I thought when I watched myself afterward.

Holy shit.

I didn’t know I could do all that.

And I think I’d like to keep finding out.