Everyone please welcome my friend and fellow actor, writer, producer, Christine Dickinson, to A Broadway Body: Continued Conversations! Christine is an actor, a writer, and a producer, and I met in our acting class at Crash Acting a few years ago. She very recently debuted her one-woman play “Mother” in Los Angeles, CA, and the show was phenomenal. We’d had this conversation before I saw it, and I will say that many topics of convo that Christine brought to the fore were beautifully touched on in her show.
In our conversation, we discuss…
* Breaking the generational trauma cycle (with body image and more broadly)
* The debut of her one-woman, one-act show “Mother” and what inspired her to write the play
* How rehearsing her play brought her body image story front and center
* The conscious permission it takes to write about topics we don’t necessarily feel “qualified enough” to speak on
* The comment her play makes about the impacts of social media on today’s culture
* Navigating our feelings around our bodies
* Her body image story - from being praised for being thin and invalidated in her feelings about her body, to uncovering a body image story through the rehearsal of her play
Christine so openly shared her body image story with me, and her vulnerability to speak on these topics she’s just recently started to face head on is beautiful. Her thoughts on generational trauma and the impacts of social media on our individual body image are powerful, and I cannot wait for you to hear our conversation!
“I think a lot of comparison is what comes up in the play, kind of in a subtle way. But there are a lot of different videos in the video sequences that you see that indicate that my character is doing girlhood or womanhood incorrectly. So you have one person saying, “Hey, if your body is larger, that’s bad, and you should fix that.” And then another person, “If your body is smaller, that’s also bad and you should fix that.” And then, “Oh, you should be dainty and feminine and always keep a groomed appearance.” And then like, “No, fuck that!” And then, you know, all of these different, you know, expectations about what we should and shouldn’t use our bodies for. And yeah, then there’s, you know, the whole topic of what happens to your body during pregnancy. That’s something that’s explored in one of the video series as well.”
- Christine Dickinson
Megan Gill: Hi, Christine! I’m so excited to talk with you, and I’m just so glad that you’re here.
Christine Dickinson: Hi! Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited. I’m a big fan. I’m a big Megan fan.
Megan Gill: Hey, I’m a big fan of you! Do you wanna just start by introducing yourself and introducing your work in the world?
Christine Dickinson: Yes, I’m Christine Dickinson and I am an actor, playwright, and new producer. And right now, I am producing my first original work called Mother, which will be a workshop production of my one-woman show.
Megan Gill: Which is just so exciting because, at the time of recording this, you are premiering this piece to the world in just a couple of days!
Christine Dickinson: Yep. Yep!
Megan Gill: How do you feel?
Christine Dickinson: I think, more than anything, excited but also terrified. So I would say it’s probably equal parts both. This has been something that’s been marinating for me for a couple of years. A few years ago, I wanted to write a screenplay of this kind of a thing, and now it’s kind of evolved into a play and, you know, that’s a little bit more my realm anyway than film. So I’m definitely excited to share the story in a medium that I have been working in for so long. But scary because I’ve never really put my own voice out there like this before. So I would say it’s a little bit of both.
Megan Gill: Oof, I just got chills. That is so, so totally fair. Okay, so the premise of your story is, “In this comedy thriller play, a daughter faces the cost of being a woman in a modern world where her mother isn’t answering her calls.”
Christine Dickinson: Yes.
Megan Gill: Can you share a bit more about the premise in the story and kind of these themes of what it is to be a young woman today and how those themes are woven into the piece?
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, absolutely. So the play opens when a daughter, my character, comes in from a long-haul flight, and the first call is, you know, just checking in with the mom like, “Hey, I got home,” that kind of thing. And it becomes pretty clear that something happened during the last moments that we saw each other, because I guess the idea is that we live on opposite sides of the country, and I no longer live near my mom. So the phone is really the only way that we can connect. So there’s this idea that something happened, and we’re not quite sure what happened, but there was some sort of tension between daughter and mother that was unresolved before the daughter left to get on a plane to go back home.
So that’s where we start. And throughout the play, without giving too much of it away, we start to see this person’s life shake out kind of maybe how you would imagine it to with a lack of guidance or support. And many of the troubles, again, without getting too much into it, because it’s only 40 minutes. So I’m like, there’s not a ton that I could really tell about the plot that’s not a total spoiler.
Megan Gill: Totally. No spoiler alerts!
Christine Dickinson: I’m like, I just tell you the whole thing right now. “In scene six, this happens.”
Megan Gill: I’m like, “No, I’m seeing the play this weekend!” And I’m so excited. I cannot wait!
Christine Dickinson: Yes. Okay. I won’t spoil it for you. But, you know, it’s everything to do with the things that we have to face, particularly as women in a modern world, everything from pressures of how we look, pressures of how we are coming off (especially to people who have authority over us like employers), pressures of being equal parts girl boss and equal parts dainty, feminine. And then we kind of dive into this whole world of like, whoa, okay, these are modern lenses on these issues, but these are really issues that have existed for centuries.
So we kind of go back and look at some ancestral stuff a little bit and some things that – like what happens when we experience traumatic things and we leave those traumatic things unchecked and we continue to reproduce, especially when it’s a woman giving birth to a daughter, and then she has a daughter, and then she has a daughter. And how those cycles kind of don’t break themselves unless somebody breaks it.
Megan Gill: That is such an important thing to be talking about and something that I very much think our generation is all about looking at and uncovering and trying to get to the bottom of. So I just think it’s really beautiful and also quite relevant to probably what many women are unpacking today.
Christine Dickinson: Hmm. Yeah. Thank you. What’s really interesting about writing this play was that I think we had actually had a conversation years ago because, when I saw your short, A Broadway Body, the screening of that, I felt really inspired. And I was like, “Oh, I’m writing something that’s kind of touching on something similar to this.” And I think we had a conversation about that because I was so inspired. I was like, “How did you sit down and write this?” I kind of felt like I abandoned that project for a while, but then I sat down, I think it was February, and I was, like, “Ooh, I’m really kind of feeling something right now.” And so, I just sat down without thinking of it being a play or anything. I think I just wrote a conversation or a one-ended phone conversation, like a voicemail, like so much of this play is a voicemail series. So I think I just wrote one. From there I was like, “Oh, this is kind of setting something off in me a little bit.” And then I stepped away from it for I think a couple weeks, and then I went back to it and I read it and I was like, “Oh, no, no, no. Something else happens after this.” And it just kind of one thing led to the next, to the next.
I just, over the course of maybe two months, kept walking away and then coming back, and then it was just so abundantly clear what happens next in this person’s story. And I didn’t know how this play was going to end until I sat down and I wrote the final scene. And I think my fiancé, who was literally in the room. He came in, in the middle of me writing it, and he was like, “Hey, how was your –?” And I was like, “No. No, no, no. Hold on, hold on!”
Megan Gill: “Zip it! Not now!”
Christine Dickinson: Hold on one sec. Hold one second. And then da, da, da da, last line of the play. “Okay. Yes, it was fine. Um, take five and I’m gonna read you this.” So yeah, it just – like, I had no idea some elements of it, that were coming in, until literally I was writing it. It was as if something was kind of moving. It sounds silly when I say it, but it’s like something else was moving through me that was not my own narrative anymore, even though it felt like it started off that way.
And even in the rehearsal of it, the reading of it, all of this, we had a dress rehearsal on Sunday, and even in that I’m like, “Oh, there are things that I’m discovering in this text that I was not aware that I was putting into it.” Yeah, so it’s been a really strange experience. So bizarre for me and foreign but cool.
Megan Gill: Wow, that’s so cool and so magical. And how beautiful that you literally produced these words and these words came out of you, and yet you’re still finding so much in them and so much that you are discovering and didn’t know was coming out of you at the time. Are you familiar with Elizabeth Gilbert’s work?
Christine Dickinson: Not super.
Megan Gill: Okay. She wrote this book called Big Magic. When I was moving out to LA, I read it and I was obsessed with this concept because it had happened to me one time before, and it’s this concept of inspiration is flying out there, right? And then inspiration hits you, and either you take it right then and there and you alchemize it into art or you kinda let it pass by you and it’ll go to somebody else. And this feels like a bit of a Big Magic moment because it’s so outside of yourself, but also it’s so beautiful to hear how you were just inspired and hit by this thing that you couldn’t say no to that helped you produce this piece. Anyways, I just think it’s so cool.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah. That is really interesting and cool to hear that this is a thing that – because, in a way, it does kind of feel that. And I think there have been moments of that for me before in glimmers, but it’s always kind of been, “Ugh, yeah. But it would be stupid if I did it.” Like, “Yeah, other people can do this, but like, I don’t think my narrative needs to be heard or my narrative isn’t really quite ready to be heard or like, who am I to really speak on something like ancestral trauma, and who am I to speak on this thing?” And there would be things that I was about to write, and I was like, “Ugh, no. I don’t wanna be the one to say that because I don’t feel qualified to speak on that.” But then I would be like, “No, I’m gonna do it anyway.”
So it was a lot of conscious permission that I had to give myself. And I think – and I brought this up in class too, when we were talking about the play and the creation of it is that I’ve been having to give myself, different versions of myself permission throughout the entire creative process of this, where I feel like my actor-self was kind of on my shoulder when I was writing it saying, “It’s okay. You can say that. I will take care of the words for you. When it’s time for them to be heard, I will take care of that and do that due diligence and build the belief that those words deserve in order to not just make it true to you, playwright, Christine, but to make this transformative for other people as well.” And then when the actor in me was really (and continually is) very hard on myself about the performance of it and like, “I don’t know if that was embodied,” or “I don’t know if that was present,” or “I don’t know if that was true,” the playwright in me is like, “It’s okay. I gave you room to discover things in this. It’s okay that you’re not crying during this line that I was crying during when I was writing it. Like, that’s okay.”
So it has been this continuous permission that playwright is giving actor and actor is giving playwright. That has been really cool and interesting and, and weird. I never thought that I would feel so different as the actor than I do as a playwright. I feel like we’re different people. I mean, obviously it’s both me. This sounds very odd and silly, but I’m not the same person.
Megan Gill: It makes sense! It’s different facets of your vessel, right?
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, and I’m a different person than I was in February when I started writing this. And so, there were many moments where I was so hard on myself where I’m like, “I’m not feeling emotionally moved. This is so – these are the words that I wrote. Why am I not feeling moved?” And it’s like you have to experience those as you are right now for that to be in any way accessible to other people as well. So yeah.
Megan Gill: That’s really lovely. Thank you for speaking to all of that. I know that when were chatting a bit about this piece, you had mentioned that there were parts of the process where some body image themes were coming up for you. Are these baked into the play, or are these kind of subliminal things that, obviously, just by nature of being a woman growing up in today’s culture, is just a part of our life and was actually probably a part of women’s lives for a long, long – for forever and ever, and we’re just now starting to kind of acknowledge them in a different way? But I’m just curious if that’s something that – when these themes of body image started to either come up to you or hit you or maybe made you question your own relationship to your own body – I know that there’s kind of a lot in that, but if anything is jumping out to you, I would be curious to hear.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, absolutely. So when I was writing this, a majority of the body image stuff kind of came up in the second draft. There are little cameos of other students in the – we have multimedia, so it’s video collage. It’s Instagram reels or TikToks, whatever you want to call ‘em. And we have several of those, and my character is living alone. Her mother’s not speaking to her. So these are really her only form of connection with other people is through these videos. They’re the only other faces that we see on the stage. So, you know, naturally, when we don’t have close relationships and we’re kind of just seeing what other people want us to see, in my experience, it’s been a lot of comparison that will come up from that. Especially these days, social media is being used as a marketing tool and it’s not entirely honest about that. So that is something that’s really touched upon.
But I will say my own personal deep-rooted body image stuff didn’t really come up for me until I started rehearsing this. I’ve always – I mean, I feel like every woman, really every person, has their own body image story. But mine didn’t really take a front seat until I started really working on this. And I think it became really abundantly clear some of the things that I had been struggling with and pushing down for a really long time once I started confronting this in my work on this play, in particular.
Megan Gill: Wow.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, I think a lot of comparison is what comes up in the play, kind of in a subtle way. But, you know, there are a lot of different videos in the video sequences that you see that indicate that my character is doing girlhood or womanhood incorrectly. So you have one person saying, “Hey, if your body is larger, that’s bad, and you should fix that.” And then another person, “If your body is smaller, that’s also bad and you should fix that.” And then like, “Oh, you should be dainty and feminine and always keep a groomed appearance.” And then like, “No, fuck that!” And then, you know, all of these different, you know, expectations about what we should and shouldn’t use our bodies for.
And yeah, then there’s, you know, the whole topic of what happens to your body during pregnancy. That’s something that’s explored in one of the video series as well. We have someone featured as a content creator who is going through some pregnancy struggles in her videos, and then my person watching that from a third-person perspective, empathizing for her but also being jealous of her but also being confused by her. So I would say a lot of the issues, my own personal struggles with body image, it’s crazy to say, but for the first 28, 29 years of my life kind of got pushed down, and I was like, “No, no, no. That’s not – I feel a little negatively about myself, but that’s not front and center. But now I’m like, “Okay, yeah, no, it is.”
Megan Gill: Wait, that’s really interesting because – sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off.
Christine Dickinson: oh no, go ahead.
Megan Gill: But this tie between, “Oh, my body image struggles aren’t legit,” is kind of what I am taking from what I hear you saying, you shoving them down, and then you exploring this thought that had come up for you around writing and telling your own stories of, “Oh, well why me? Why my stories? Why?” It’s so interesting that these are both coming to a head at the same time. You deciding to open up and share your heart in this new and very vulnerable way, I’m like, wow, it makes a lot of sense that now is the time that you are giving validation to some of these experiences and feelings and things that maybe you haven’t looked at in this particular way before. And it’s such a – there’s so much nuance in that, I think. I don’t know. I just wanted to point that out because I’m like, “Whoa.” But then also. All of this is happening at the same time. There’s a lot going on here!
Christine Dickinson: Yeah. I didn’t even think about that before, how it is kind of happening at the same time. And so, I think it makes sense why I feel a lot of pressure right now. I will say, the play is a little bit of a call out towards very toxic ideologies that are kind of being promoted on social media right now. Yeah, I mean, not explicitly calling anyone in particular out, but sort of calling out certain types of videos, certain messaging, certain tones, some of them very subtle. And the actors that I gave the scripts to, it was really, really cool to see because I had kind of an image in my head when I was writing it, and then I cast, you know, whoever was interested in being cast in it, and I put it out there, and to see these people’s spin on this was so cool because like, no, it’s not what I envisioned all the time. But to see their spin and to see their language and to see them embody that, it’s like, “Oh, okay, these people get it. I’m not screaming into a void. These actors, they’re on the same page as me that this messaging is also bad without making it so in-your-face, preachy this is bad.”
So yeah, I’m really excited for people to see the cameos as well because they’re a super talented, amazing bunch who just all jumped right into it and were like, “Yeah, let’s do this!” They took the script, made it their own. I told everybody to kind of ad-lib a little bit, and they all did. So, yeah. But it is definitely a little bit of shade. There’s a little bit of shade in there, and I’m not gonna lie about it.
Megan Gill: No, I’m here for it, obviously. I’m obsessed with that. And what a cool experience too for you to have to be like, “Oh, I’m not alone in thinking that this is fucked up or that this isn’t how we should be approaching these conversations.” Like, these actors get it too!” Because also, one of the reasons why I am having these body image conversations is because image is not something that is talked about a lot. It’s a very vulnerable topic, and like you said, we all have a body image story. I believe that as well. And it’s scary to talk about that and sometimes you’re maybe not even in touch with your body image story or things haven’t come to a head for you yet, so what a lovely experience to be like, “Oh, they also get it.”
Christine Dickinson: And I hope that people who are seeing it can kind of – it sounds kind of cliché to be like, “I hope people can relate,” but I hope that people can see it and feel a little bit more seen because, like you said, this is not something that we hear people talking about. I think you and I had a conversation maybe a couple months ago or something where I was talking about this thing that you’re doing and, you know, I think one of us said you see people’s likes, right, on social media. And that’s such a big part of this is that you see who likes what. And so, you’re like, “Oh, that makes me sad that this person that I’m close with is liking this thing that is very clearly telling them to change something about themselves.” And you see certain people that kind of shove these very toxic ideologies on people about how you should be or how you should look, and you see people that you know and love following them and it’s like, “Okay, I think that more conversations need to be had about this because this person is saying that you need to change your body in a way that is not sounding like it’s shaming you, but it is because it is telling you that you need to change. I think I saw this ad the other day that was like, “You’re not fat. You just have high cortisol,” pointing to different parts of her body. And I’m like, okay, so these ads that they’re making are more harmful than they were 15 years ago because they’re saying, “I’m not body shaming you. I’m just looking out for your health.” And it’s like, no, you are because my doctor has never said anything about that affecting my health, and you are telling me that I need to change that about myself. So that in and of itself is not ethically good, and the fact that companies and brands are hiding behind that is very, very disturbing.
Megan Gill: I absolutely agree, and I’m so glad that you are calling it out and have written about it and are speaking in your own way to this cultural phenomenon that’s going on that is, in a way, just sort of brushed under the rug. And then also just to call back to this ad that you just witnessed, all I can think is, well, here we are demonizing being fat. Like, come on. Have we learned nothing, people? Yeah.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, and also using the phrase, “You’re not fat.” It’s like, “Okay, and if I was?” Also, you don’t know who you’re talking to. So it’s just, so bizarre.
Megan Gill: Being fat is not this horribly terrible thing that our culture has made it out to be. It’s literally just a descriptor.
Christine Dickinson: Right.
Megan Gill: This person is fat. This person is skinny. Those are descriptive words. Fat does not equal bad. Fat does not equal unhealthy. It’s, yeah, all of these different pieces of the conversation that are, like you said, just so subtly okay.
Christine Dickinson: Mm-hmm. I did not survive the Tumblr “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” epidemic just to experience this again in my thirties.
Megan Gill: Yeah.
Christine Dickinson: I didn’t go through that, which I, objectively at the time, knew was wrong. Going through that and now looking through this as an adult, and especially – I work with teenage girls. I see that they are, like many other teenagers, kind of chronically online. And it’s very disturbing to see that no matter how supportive your family members are, no matter how many supportive adults you have in your life, that as a teenager in 2025, this is what you’re constantly being bombarded with. It’s heartbreaking, and there’s nothing that adults can really say when their favorite influencers, their friends, their favorite celebrities are endorsing these companies that are like, “GLP-1s, GLP-1s, GLP-1s.” It’s like, how do you – I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m kind of at a loss for words thinking about it, to be honest.
Megan Gill: No, I hear you. So am I. Because, like you said, how are we still here, for the teenagers today or for the young people today? It’s like we already went through all that shit, and here we are again? And it’s rearing its head and making a comeback in this really odd way masked in health. And everything is online. We can see fucking everything, and it’s impacting everyone in such a different way than it was. And maybe that’s a through line to this concept too is that this has always been a thing. Preaching health and preaching thinness has always been a thing, but for our generation, when we started to come online, where I think it really started to become more of an epidemic – granted, I don’t know. I haven’t done the research into the seventies, eighties, nineties, and our moms and our parents’ generation. But the way that it affected us now, tying into how social media was starting to become a thing when we were young. And now that social media is a huge thing and it’s still here and it’s just shape-shifted, and it’s now just being approached in different ways and we’re being marketed to in weird, sneaky ways, it’s always been a thing. The question is how do we continue to try to do better and make a change? And I think it’s so fudging hard, because it is so baked into our culture, in our society, right?
Christine Dickinson: Yeah.
Megan Gill: I love my mom so much, and she doesn’t mean harm when she does these things, but the way that she was raised to applaud thinness and to applaud weight loss was just something in reflecting on my body image journey that she did when I lost weight. When your own mom is like, “Go, you! You lost weight! You look great!” Oh my God. I’m like, yeah, of course she’s doing that because that’s how she was raised. And now that social media is a thing and everyone’s online and people are having these different opinions and are having conversations about body image and are writing more art about body image online or the ways we’re marketed to by influencers or whatever it is. I feel like I’m just on a soapbox at the moment. I don’t even know where I’m going with this, but like, yeah, I’m like this shit has always been here, and is it going away? Are we really going to be able to do anything about it? I mean, it breaks my heart too because I’m like, I can vision a different way and a different world, but it’s gonna take a lot of work on a lot of fronts, right? I don’t know if you have thoughts on that too. Sorry, I’m sweating. Worked up a sweat!
24:23
Christine Dickinson: Me too! I’m pissed off about this. No, for real. Yeah. Everything, everything you said, and it’s interesting that you bring that up about your mom because I think that that’s such a generational thing. When I was much younger, I was very praised for being thin, not just by my own mother, but by everybody. I was a really skinny, small-framed kid. I was very long and skinny, long and thin, tall and thin. And I was also a very weird kid. I was a very bullied kid. I was a very quirky, not normal kid. I had a lot of social issues. I had a lot of social anxiety. I still do. But as a kid it was like, “Well, at least you’re skinny.”
And I remember when I got older, and I was in high school, I had a very close friend who I was talking to about – I have all these other physical insecurities. I’m like, “I don’t like this, I don’t like that. I don’t like this, I don’t like that.” And she was like, “Christine, I need you to shut up because you’re skinny.” And I’m like, oh, okay. So I’m not allowed to have issues or concerns and none of that is valid because I’m thin?” And so, I think I really glamorized my own thinness, and I never looked at someone else and was like, “Oh, I’m better because I’m –,” not consciously, anyway. That was never something that I equated other people’s beauty with. But I think because I had been praised for so much of my life for being skinnier, I hid behind it and I was like, “Okay, yeah, I’m fine,” right?
So then it really hasn’t been until maybe the last two years of my life (like 28, 29, 30), where I’ve looked at myself in the mirror, and I’ve thought, “Okay, I am heavier than I’ve ever been,” objectively speaking, and I see myself a little bit differently now. And I think when you’re raised to equate your thinness with value of yourself, when that goes away, being told you look healthy is an insult. It’s a stab to the heart because you equate, “You look healthy,” with not thin. Because before you were very skinny. You were thin, and like, “Yay. We that,” I guess. And now when you ask a close friend or a family member or a loved one, “Do I look thin in this?” And they say, “You look healthy.” That means no, and that can kind of shatter a person’s self-worth who has gone their entire life being told that thinness for you is all of your beauty. That’s all of your beauty right there, is the fact that you’re skinny.
Megan Gill: Jesus. Yeah.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah.
Megan Gill: That is some heavy shit right there. And also some very real shit too that has just been put on so many of us, specifically, I think of our generation too, or at least the ones that are – you know, no matter when you come around to taking a look at it or examining it or realizing it’s happening or are curious about it, it’s really not okay, and it’s really devastating. And I think what’s even more devastating is that we like to think that’s not what’s happening, right? But you sharing that story, your story, is proof that it is. And that when we tie our value and our “worth in this world” to the shape of our body, which is just the reality of what’s going on and what has been going on forever and ever amen and is potentially not stopping anytime soon, that’s not okay, and it’s really fucked up. And it’s really – the emotional labor that is now put onto that person, whether you’re me when I was 16 like, “Oh my god, I am getting bullied for my weight, and I am fat and I’m getting all these messages,” or you’re 27 and you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve always been thin, and I am now being referred – my friends are telling me I look healthy.” And also, I just wanna point out the fact that looking healthy, A) what does that even mean? But also healthy is relatively used as a good, positive word.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah.
Megan Gill: Like, “You look healthy!” That’s good.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah.
Megan Gill: You don’t look like you’re dying, thank goodness, not to mock that. I think that just shows the depth of how devastating the impacts of the messages we receive about our bodies actually are.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, and I think the answer – I mean, I don’t know the answer, but what I think the answer is towards making this stop, making anything that is evil and bad in the world to stop, it always starts inward, I think. Anything that’s hurting people, anything that’s making people feel insecure, anything that’s making people feel betrayed by the vessel that’s carrying them throughout their life, it all starts inward.
It all starts with work on yourself because people, not to shame anyone for procreating or not, but I think a lot of the times people have – and this is something that’s explored very much in Mother is that people will have children without even looking inward at healing any of their past traumas. They’ll just say, “I’m just gonna be better for this child. I’m just gonna be better because I now have the responsibility of taking care of another human being.” But the reality is that that little child, particularly that little girl is hearing you call her beautiful and then is watching you look at yourself in the mirror and hate what you see.
And that’s something that’s very much, without spoiling it, something that we dive into a little bit in this play is like there’s a whole monologue about what can we do to make sure that our children aren’t constantly obsessing and fearful in the same ways that we have been? And the way to do that is by stopping doing that yourself. Children don’t take on and learn based on what you tell them. They take on the behaviors that you, yourself, exhibit. You can’t say, “Don’t dance on the table,” and then dance on the table and expect your kid not to get up with you.
Megan Gill: Right.
Christine Dickinson: You have to walk the walk in so many ways, and I think this might be a controversial thing. I’m not telling anyone that they should or shouldn’t, or should have or shouldn’t have, but I think that a lot of people do have children and just don’t at all look at themselves anymore. And maybe they think that’s an act of selflessness because now I’m responsible – maybe it’s probably, more realistically, the pressures that society puts on moms.
And how much this country loves to hate on moms, despite the fact that, you know, women are told that we should be baby machines and they just don’t take care of you or give you maternity leave. It’s probably everything. It’s probably all of the pressures that are put on us, but I think a lot of people end up as parents, and they really have not examined the things that they need to examine in order to create healthy humans.
Megan Gill: Yeah, I absolutely agree, wholeheartedly. And that’s obviously how trauma just gets passed down generationally. And I think that I’m really proud of our generation because I think we are one of the first that is exploring therapy on a wider scale and is taking the time to look inward and say, “All right, let me look at my own shit and maybe get my own life together before I have kids, or just settle for a man.” I mean, I think it’s clear that a lot of women these days are still single well into their 30s – hi, I’m one of them – because they are not going to settle for not being healed or not being on a healing journey and not being with someone who isn’t right for them, and I think we’re breaking some of these traumatic patterns that our parents didn’t have the tools to break or didn’t necessarily know how to break.
And I don’t know if that’s also just social media and the internet? It’s very fascinating, but I am proud of the work that the millennials are actively doing. And I don’t know, I guess I’m just saying that because I am one and I see this happening amongst our generation. I think Gen X is included in that in some way, and obviously the younger generations too. Yeah, I think we are getting somewhere, but yeah, you’re so right that mother-daughter relationship where you are looking at your mom, and you’re right, you are looking at her words, but you’re also looking at her behaviors.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah.
Megan Gill: I think that in a lot of these conversations that I’ve had and in a lot of my own
conversations just in the world, I think a very universal experience that a lot of women have had is being young and looking at your mom, whether it’s in the dressing room or at home, looking at herself in the mirror and not being nice to herself. Oh, that was a nervous chuckle because it’s so fucking deeply, deeply sad.
Christine Dickinson: Mm-hmm.
Megan Gill: Yeah.
Christine Dickinson: Yeah. And this is something – I’m so glad we’re having this conversation because I really had not examined these things until we started rehearsing this play. And it’s kind of at a point where it’s coming to a real head for me. And you know, I feel like I hear all of these people talking about their experience with it where they’re like, “Yeah, you know, and I endured all this stuff, and now I still struggle but I’m in a place of where I love myself and I’m able to take care of my body.” And I wish that I was there.
I think at this point, I think I’m gonna say I’m not there yet. The reality is I’m not in a very happy place with my self-image right now. I’m hopeful that this play and sharing this story and getting it out there and just speaking it out into the world is gonna be a good first step. And it’s something that I’ve now officially brought up twice in therapy. In the five years that I’ve been with my therapist, I’ve never brought it up. And this is now something that I’m able to bring up.
Yeah, I mean, I wish that I could, you know, come on here and share like, “Yeah, now I’m out of place of acceptance,” but I’m really not. And I think, yeah, a big first step of that is just calling it out, and I know that sounds like, “Oh yeah, first step is calling it.” Yeah, I said that a couple months ago and then two weeks ago I was crying in a bar bathroom because I realized I was the biggest in there, which was crazy. I’m like, okay, this is not – I was comparing myself to the other women at the bar who were all much younger than me, and I ended up crying in the bathroom and hiding for a really long time, and this was two weeks ago.
So, yeah, I mean, I think it’s a lifelong journey and I can’t really – I don’t know. I can’t really say that I’m in a super healthy mental space with particularly that, but I also have to be gentle with myself because the last five years have just been full-blown chaos for me, as I feel it has been for most people with the pandemic and everything. I feel post-COVID, everything’s been a fever dream. But yeah, I think the last couple of years of adulthood have just been very stressful, and there have been other things that have had to be front and center. And now that those things are all kind of taken care of, it’s like, all right, now it’s this thing’s gotta be front and center, so yeah.
Megan Gill: Thank you so much for sharing that, and what a lovely way to talk about that because, yeah, we can’t address everything at once, right? So I love that this is what’s front and center for you right now, and I know that working through this is only gonna take you to beautiful places. But I also just wanna share that I also firmly believe that we are never at a place of healed with our body or our body image or our relationship to our body, right? And I have to check myself a lot with this too because I’m like, “Wow, yes, I feel I’ve done so much healing and I’m in such a place,” and then I’ll turn around, and today I had a pretty bad body image day, man. It was pretty rough. And that happens all of the time. It’s just the ebb and flow of life, right? And I think that it’s just about getting the tools in your toolbox to be able to carry you through those bad days to then get over the hump to then maybe do it again two weeks later. Because that’s just the nature of life, right? And also I think it’s once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you come up to these body image roadblocks, I’ll just call them, within yourself, it’s like, “Well, that’s not going away now.” And maybe some of us have just been with ours for longer.
I’m really proud of you, happy for you. I hate saying, like, “I’m proud of you,” because that sounds so, I don’t know, oddly condescending, even though it’s not. But I just really love that you said that you were actively giving yourself grace throughout this process, and even when we come up against the setbacks and the bad days, that’s all we gotta do, give ourselves grace and remind ourselves that we are good and just question why this is coming up for us, right?
Christine Dickinson: Right.
Megan Gill: At least I do a lot of that, but I’m just really glad that you’re giving yourself grace, because sometimes that’s all we can do.
Christine Dickinson: Thank you for saying that. And it wasn’t taken in a condescending way at all. It made me very happy. So thank you.
Megan Gill: That’s good to hear!
Christine Dickinson: Yeah, it is a lot about giving grace to yourself, and I have a very hard time with that. I can go from here very, very quickly, jump off the cliff very, very quickly. Yeah, so it really is just about stopping and saying, “Why is this this way?” And I think a lot of it is where we live. I go back to Boston or Rhode Island or anywhere else, and I’m not confronted with the same amount of this as I am here.
Megan Gill: Yeah.
Christine Dickinson: I feel it’s a little bit more normalized in LA too. If you don’t like something, you just change it immediately without stopping and sitting with it. I don’t think that that means that people don’t feel the same way in other places, but I think that here we’re just so constantly confronted with it. So then stopping and acknowledging that, and then getting out of that sometimes to just go somewhere else for a little bit and change of scenery and seeing other perspectives and seeing how different it is in other places and how you’re just like – you can kind of get a break from it and take a step out and say, “Okay, yeah, no. That place –.” I mean, I like living here, I love LA but this place sometimes can get a little much with that sort of messaging. So I think acknowledging that that’s a reality here as well for me, has been very, very important.
Megan Gill: Absolutely for me too, 100%. I’m glad you called that out. I have one last question for you before we wrap things up that I’m really excited to ask.
Christine Dickinson: Oh, boy!
Megan Gill: I’m wondering what your favorite thing or things about your body is or are. It can be physical, it can be non-physical. It can be a combination of both. Whatever strikes you. I know I’m springing this on you.
Christine Dickinson: I guess this counts. The first thing that came to mind when you said that, I guess it’s kind of physical, kind of not, my nervous system. Historically, that has been my least favorite thing about myself. But now I’m like, I don’t think I would’ve written this play if my nervous system wasn’t like, “Ughhh,” all the time because it is, “Ughhh,” all the time. If you know me, you know that I’m like a meerkat. But yeah, this play, I think because of the heightened nature of where I am all the time, even though I know it’s important to zen out and meditate and be chill sometimes, that’s not really how I am naturally. So I think my nervous system being so crazy is just keeping me safe and kind of exploring that within the play and seeing how that pushes me to different points. I don’t know, now I see it as a little intuition giving me a little boop, message about where to go next. So, yeah.
Megan Gill: I absolutely love that. And your nervous system is beautiful because it is keeping you safe, right? How freaking cool is that? Oh my gosh. Thank you, Christine!
Christine Dickinson: Thank you!
Megan Gill: I’m so, so grateful that we were able to have this conversation, and I’m so grateful to you for being so open and vulnerable and for sharing so many things about your play and about yourself and about your relationship to your own body and some of the things you find yourself coming up against right now, because that is just not easy to talk about sometimes. So I’m really, really grateful to you, and thank you for being here.
Christine Dickinson: Thank you. I’m grateful to you. Thanks for having me!
Megan Gill: Of course!
“ But I will say, my own personal deep-rooted body image stuff didn’t really come up for me until I started rehearsing this [play]. I mean, I feel like every woman, really every person, has their own body image story. But mine didn’t really take a front seat until I started really working on this [play]. And I think it became really abundantly clear some of the things that I had been struggling with and pushing down for a really long time once I started confronting this in my work.”
- Christine Dickinson
Christine is an actor, writer and creative living in LA. She is originally from Rhode Island, where she attended university and received her BFA in acting. Christine has been performing onstage for over 20 years, and moved to LA to pursue a deeper relationship with creativity. Her original one woman show MOTHER workshopped in October of this year. She hopes to take it to fringe festivals around the world. When she’s not working, acting or writing, she’s probably spending time planning her next mini road trip, catching a new movie with her fiancé, or snuggling with her sweet rescue pup Levi. Learn more about her project MOTHER on Instagram @calling.mother
Follow Christine’s One-Woman Show, “Mother” on Instagram
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A couple of notes to ensure this is a safe space for my guests to share their intimate and vulnerable body image stories in:
* It can be easy to feel alone on your journey of existing in a body. I welcome the connection and support of one another in this space through considerate and curious comments.
* These conversations are quite nuanced, complex, and oftentimes very vulnerable. Remember that everyone has their own body image story, and while someone else’s might look differently than yours, I encourage you to keep an open mind and stay empathetic.
* Thank you for being here. By sharing this type of content, my hope is to inspire personal reflection and cultural questioning. Thank you and supporting me in exploring the effects of our culture’s beauty norms and body standards on human beings existing in today’s world.
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While I’m not a licensed therapist, registered dietician, or medical health professional and cannot speak to body image topics from a clinical, trauma-informed place, I am an expert of lived experience. I’m an academic of my own body, and I’m passionate about facilitating conversations with other humans about their relationships with their bodies. I believe it’s important to continue conversations about healthy body image in creative spaces as a means to heal individuals as well as the collective whole. But just know the information presented in this medium is not professional mental health advice or medical advice, and any questions or concerns you have should always be directed to your health providers.
