I Learned to Take Up Less Space

I stopped talking in meetings. Not all at once. Gradually. The way you stop reaching for something after you’ve burned your hand enough times. I still showed up. Sat in the same chairs. Smiled at the same people. But I learned to hold my ideas a little longer before I said them out loud. Long enough that someone else would say them first and get the credit, and I would nod like I hadn’t thought of it twenty minutes ago. That felt safer. I told myself I was being strategic. I told myself I was reading the room. I told myself a lot of things that kept me small and employed. Nobody told me to shrink. That’s the part that’s hard to explain. Nobody had to. When you learn early that your voice costs something, you start budgeting. You start rationing. You save it for the moments that really matter, and then those moments come and you’ve been quiet so long you don’t trust the sound of yourself anymore. I got good at it. Taking up less space. Softening my sentences before they left my mouth. Adding I could be wrong and just a thought and maybe to ideas I knew were right. Qualifiers. Little apologies attached to the front of my opinions like a warning label. This woman has feelings. Proceed with caution. The thing they don’t tell you about silence is that it compounds. Every time you don’t say the thing, it gets harder to say the next thing. The gap between what you think and what you say gets wider. And one day you’re sitting in a room where you are the most qualified person present, and you are waiting. Waiting for permission. Waiting for it to be safe. Waiting for someone to ask for what you already know. That was me. I don’t say that with shame anymore. I say it with the specific compassion I wish someone had offered me then. She was just trying to survive. She didn’t know yet that survival and living are two completely different zip codes. I know now. And I’m done being small about it. My daughter will never have to earn permission to exist out loud. That’s part of my Herformation. And maybe… yours too.