Too Close to Myself
Poem Review: “Instead of becoming a statistic I” by Lilia Marie Ellis
“Instead of becoming a statistic I” by Lilia Marie Ellis gives me a stomachache. Reading it feels less like following a set of words with your eyes and more like swallowing the poem whole, only for it to settle uncomfortably in your stomach. It’s not that it’s a bad poem. It’s because it feels too real.
“I thought it would fit but instead it made me feel like a statistic.”
The poem is told from the perspective of a person shopping for women’s clothing. They’re struggling with something, so they decide to choose action. Action in this context means ordering a vintage sweater. They put on the sweater and realize, somehow, it doesn’t fit. They imagined it would fit, but it doesn’t. Now they’re left to reason out why it doesn’t fit. Is it too small? Are they too small?
This poem is not about the complications of online shopping. It’s about the complications of identity, the complications that come with figuring out who you really are. Ellis nails this struggle with the perfect analogy: buying a sweater for the woman you want to be and realizing that something somewhere went wrong.
“I couldn’t tell which of us was too small, which also made me feel like a statistic.”
I typically like to keep the author and the story they wrote separate from each other in my reviews. I think stories and poems should be experienced and interpreted without pulling in the author. Sometimes people lose sight of great fiction because they insist on reading it as autobiographical. Just because someone wrote a story about cutting open a pig, it doesn’t mean that they actually did that or want to do that. The story should be viewed as its own thing. However, for this poem, I do want to bring in the author’s biography, which might help give the poem a little more context.
The first line of her bio states that Lilia Marie Ellis is a trans woman poet from Houston, Texas. While I don’t want to claim that this poem is indicative of her personal experience, I think it’s clear that this poem is about a trans woman. Refusing to become a statistic, the narrator calls herself a woman and buys a sweater to further solidify it to herself. However, when the sweater comes, she suddenly finds herself at odds with both the clothing she ordered and the “person I called myself.” It’s a heartbreaking moment.
“I thought it would fit. I had no reason not to.”
As a woman, I’ve been in something like this situation. You buy the slinky slip dress hoping to transform into a willowy supermodel, only to try it on and see you’re still your dumpy little self. Staring at yourself in the mirror like, “Just who do you think you’re fooling?”
Of course, this poem is more complicated than a cisgendered woman struggling against pressures to be different than she is. This poem is about finding yourself in the spaces between identities, between genders, between you and yourself. It’s about realizing suddenly that you’re not your body, and somehow you’re not what you want to be either. And feeling the comic tragedy of that “mistake.”
Read the poem below, then come back here and tell me what you think. Could you relate to the theme? What did it make you feel? This is a place to discuss the poem and what it says about the experience of identity. Be respectful. I do not tolerate hate speech.
