#HerHeroes: Rebecca Novak and the ambiguity of sugar

Edited by Tanmaya Ramprasad

Trigger Warning: Eating Disorder

Exactly one night before meeting with me, Rebecca Novak rips hair off her upper lip with sugary wax. “This is just a voice recording, right? Not a video?” she ponders via text. “I ripped some skin off, so it’s like a burn, and I was stressing.”

I assure her that our conversation would, in fact, be a recording. The following afternoon, we laugh about it. A childish glimmer swiftly catches in Rebecca’s eye. Though she’s entered my home in a loose tee and cargo pants, it soon becomes clear that performative art has influenced her daily style. “Not to blow smoke up my own butt, but I’m pretty good at doing makeup. I think it’s because I’m a little crazy. If it’s not perfect, I’ll wipe it all off. I’m crazy about my hair,” she adds, smoothing the loose waves which frame her face. “The fact that it’s down right now is insane. I like it up at all times. If there’s one little hair out of place, I’m like, ‘I can’t go onstage.”

Per Novak’s vocabulary, the term “onstage” is ambiguous; it could allude to dance, the sport for which she’d been trained competitively since the age of nine, or reference Musical Theatre, the undergraduate program she’s enrolled in at St. Lawrence College. Despite her fiery passion and forceful talents, the second year clarifies that performance wasn’t the lifestyle her parents originally urged her to pursue. “My mom wanted me to be a professional soccer player,” she admits. “When I was little, I played soccer like one of my brothers – [ironically, said brother is currently a striker for Canada’s Forge FC, whilst the other is “super into film”] –then I was like, ‘This is boring, I don’t like it’, and I started doing dance.”

Though first intended as a hobby, Novak soon began dedicating additional spare time to her craft. “I was training in jazz, tap, ballet, contemporary, acrobatics,” she remembers, ticking off each style with a finger. “It was about fifteen to twenty hours [a week]; at the most, it was twenty-four, including extra choreography practices.” She briefly describes lacking the moments of leisure enjoyed by her peers. “Which was fine with me, but then I wanted to take musical theatre. I went to my dance teacher and she was very intense about not missing rehearsal. And then she told me to pick… thankfully, now, I picked musical theatre.”

Unbeknownst then, the choice of acting would result in Novak’s participation in high school productions of Young Frankenstein (“I was, like, a villager” ), Bye Bye Birdie, (“I helped choreograph the show”), and, most notably, Mary Poppins, in which Novak portrayed Jane Banks, a principal role which the actress had been striving to land since the previous summer. “I even prepared the song,” she stresses, laughing. “I’m bad at auditioning songs. I get so nervous. I have no breath support, so I can’t sing. [The dance piece] I got a bunch of times, so I was confident about that.”

Though reassured of her performing abilities through rehearsal, Novak’s physical appearance began to inflict insecurity. The then-seventeen-year-old recalls the internal pressure to mold her physique to one expected of her eight-year-old character: “I started having this negative image of myself. I remember auditioning – I look back, and I wasn’t fat. But at that time, I thought, ‘You need to look like a little girl to fit this role. Teeny and cute.’”

With a bubbly voice and enthusiastic demeanor, Novak’s presence is effortlessly the ‘cute’ she describes. These qualities, undoubtedly, had helped her earn Jane’s role; in doing so, she’d involuntarily acquired an authoritative position in Mary Poppins’ ensemble. She speaks of motivating fellow cast members: “I have a generally good mood. When I talk to people, it’s not like I’m trying to pep them up. If someone’s late and someone’s not working hard, I feel like it’s not my place [to talk to them]. If they come late and I say, ‘That’s so disrespectful!’ and they have a reason, then I’ve just crapped on them.”

Novak then elaborates that extra-curricular commitments have the potential to heavily influence a performer’s energy. Referencing her schedule circa Mary Poppins, she muses: “We had rehearsals first period. I would go from school to work; I was working at a skating place, teaching toddlers. I would be home at ten and wake up. It was super busy, and I liked it.” She shrugs. “I like being busy.”

Novak’s eager obedience to these projects, combined with a developing eating disorder, were the deciding factors of her indulgence in a life-threatening lifestyle. “Your habits are so hard to break,” she reflects. “I came home from dance, I would eat and throw up. I would drink coffee all day long. I told [a friend] I was tired, and [they] gave me caffeine pills. I had to quit my skating job because I was so cold all the time. I would go in the rink with three pairs of pants on and four sweaters, and the entire night I would be shivering.”

“I knew it wasn’t right,” she emphasizes slowly. “Some people are in denial about being sick. I knew I was sick. [I had] to cover up so much. People would ask, ‘Are you losing weight?’ and I’m like, ‘Am I? Oh, I didn’t even notice.’ Obviously I fricking notice.” Novak laughs. Without context, a passerby would assume it’s carefree. “I analyze myself in the mirror every day.”

Though dire, this unfailing sense of self-regulation was the trait that ultimately influenced Novak to acquire professional help in becoming healthy. “I told myself it was getting too far,” she explains. “I told my mom I wanted to go to the doctor. But I knew that if I went to the doctor and she asked me to explain why I was there, I wouldn’t have words. I wrote down a list of fifteen things and I gave it to her. It was like, ‘I have dreams all the time that I binge and I wake up and bawl my eyes out because that’s so upsetting to me.’ [The doctor] looked at it, she looked at me, and said, ‘You know what’s wrong.’ I burst into tears and said, ‘I have an eating disorder.’ That was the worst day of my life.”

In contrast to the toiling months Novak had earlier mentioned, those proceeding the ‘worst day’ of her life, were painstakingly uneventful. Alongside reintroducing consistent eating to her daily routine, Rebecca was required to restrain from all kinds of physical activity: “When [someone] loses weight, [their] body eats all its muscle first. A heart’s a muscle. My heart was so small that it couldn’t support any physical activity or it would burst. That’s why eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.”

Such reason is also why Novak was deterred from auditioning for universities the following January. Undeterred by these challenges, Novak instead opted for the University of Waterloo’s Drama program, because an audition tape wasn’t required. “I was excited about it first,” she discloses, bouncing in her seat. “[My ex and I] just started dating before I went. I was very focused on him, and I made no friends at all. Which was the worst decision. I had auditioned for one of the Waterloo plays and I didn’t get a callback. I got really depressed….I was like ‘I need to at least audition for these schools, so I know I’ve done what I can do.’ I wasn’t even there for a month and I left. And then I got into [St. Lawrence College]. So I spent the year making money and trying new hobbies.”

Come the time of our interview, of these ‘hobbies’ is unaided baking to raise money for injustices such as Black Lives Matter and Lebanon’s Beirut explosion. “As someone who’s trying to save for university, and I don’t have a job right now…I wanted to do what I could,” Novak attests to her work. “I don’t always know what to say, and on my own, I wouldn’t have the funds to donate seven hundred dollars. If I give something in return, people who wouldn’t usually donate would be more inclined to.”

I question why Novak’s gift of choice was baking. She smiles sweetly; it’s not the mischievous grin of Jane Banks entering a candy shop on Cherry Tree Lane, but the smile of the bubbly, enthusiastic woman who’d accidentally burnt herself with sugary wax hours prior.

“I just like making. I like to make things. That’s how I show my love to people.”

• dance
• eating disorder
• mental health