Take up space

I never signed up to be quiet and unobtrusive.

Every single light, a sign of precious life. (NASA)

“You know,” she said, her ponytail whipping around as she turned to face me, “you don’t have to raise your hand to answer every question.”

Eleven-year-old me didn’t have anything much to say in response to that. I had been confused and disoriented by the worldview of this newly-arrived student who wore nothing but embroidered velour sweatsuits with false collars and seemed intent on competing with me. This was just more of the same.

Honestly, I didn’t know why I wouldn’t raise my hand to answer every question. It was up to the teacher to choose who to call on, right?

I’m not sure I changed my behavior all that much in response to my classmate’s attempt to...subdue me? Control me? But clearly, it made an impression on me because sixth grade was a long time ago, and I have not forgotten that conversation.

Sixth grade at York Middle School was tricky in a lot of ways. Our homeroom class had different teachers, but we traveled to their classrooms as a unit, stuck together for 180 days. It was hard not to get locked into specific roles and patterns of interaction that made everyone unhappy but were impossible to get out of, like a stepfamily on a much longer vacation than they ever should have undertaken.

It was the year that our school guidance counselor told my mother that I was “overconfident.” Ah, yes. Let’s make sure we beat down the confidence of a girl on the brink of adolescence just in case she has the nerve to feel good about herself.

It was also the year that I grew several inches, began my initial descent into puberty, and started to feel self-conscious. The school guidance counselor needn’t have worried.

One boy mocked me for my exuberant love of music in general and The Beatles in particular. Another brought up the topic of my leg hair with clear disgust.

The girls — the girls weren’t all that bad, actually. Our cruelty to each other would come later, in seventh grade. But there was still the remark about my class participation, and the experience of watching one of my best childhood friends cry daily over math that she didn’t understand while I was one of three (the velour sweatsuit girl, the kid who criticized my body hair, and me) who were working on more advanced math. There we all sat, trapped in the same room.

I learned, at the request of my sixth-grade teacher, to stop crowing about how easy this or that concept was to learn. Which was perfectly reasonable, but it didn’t solve the problem of what to do with my brain, which needed more interesting and challenging concepts to chew on. And it didn’t make me feel any less guilty about being able to easily do what my friend couldn’t.

In the coming years, I learned to hide what I was into. I attempted to dress and groom myself like everyone else.

To a degree, I tamped down my eagerness to engage, although I still probably came off as a know-it-all. I figured out how to fit in, at least in a provisional sort of way. I participated in the ridicule of people I called friends. I distracted myself with crushes that, perhaps by design, would never come to anything.

And by eighth grade, my first exposure to Algebra was like a faceful of cold water dumped on a peaceful sleeper. I didn’t really understand it, didn’t know why, and didn’t know what to do about it.

In high school, I began a process of rebuilding my confidence and my understanding of myself from the ground up. But this time, I was wary of putting myself out there. I didn’t want to do anything to cause myself to be criticized or ridiculed, whether openly or through a network of gossip.

It sort of worked, and also none of it worked. And I’ve spent my adulthood, as we all do, working to put the pieces back together so that I’m not living my life reacting against a nonexistent enemy — or in response to a snide comment made by a child more than thirty years ago.

What that means for me today is to allow myself to take up space. To reclaim my enthusiasm for topics I’m passionate about, my eagerness to participate in conversations, and my exuberant desire to create, share, and connect.

It’s not my responsibility to feel bad about making someone else feel bad because I happen to exist or as a result of exploring the fullness of who I am. It’s not my job to make people like me or to make sure they don’t not like me.

I never signed up to be quiet and unobtrusive. I never asked for my behavior and appearance to be scrutinized and picked apart. I did not consent to be constrained by someone else’s expectations of me or their desire that I not threaten their self-concept. Absolutely none of that is about me.

I’m done choosing relationships and seeking to belong in spaces that require me to hide, minimize, or mask myself. I am no longer the bewildered and easily influenced middle schooler who buys into other people’s interpretations of who I am over my own. That doesn’t serve me, and it hinders my ability to serve others.

You may think, as I did, that everyone is better off if you are a slightly subdued version of who you could be. Thus, let me say to you: Take up space. Be who you are, not just a corner of it, but all of it. And if that balloon was deflated somewhere along the way, surround yourself with the support, love, and acceptance you need to fill it back up again. When you expand to fill your true dimensions, we all benefit.