Shutting Up and Shrinking Down
How I’m Learning to Claim Space
My writing has been a bit preoccupied with transition and new stages, which stands to reason, seeing as how that is the space I am currently occupying. But the first rumbles of that internal conversation began long before the most recent changes that have found me moving through the motions of defining myself outside of motherhood. Turning forty-five this year deposited me squarely into my mid-forties, where I could no longer pretend I was just on the edge, just flirting with the idea. The invisibility that starts to creep in the moment a woman begins to age is no secret, and having been, for the past sixteen years, a woman without a defined career, I am no stranger to that feeling of invisibility, especially when someone I’ve just met asks what I do and their eyes glaze over the instant I tell them. So, I’ve found myself revisiting frequently a rumination on the idea of space, namely, filling space, and claiming space, specifically from the perspective of a petite, introverted woman.
I am no stranger to the meticulous and intentional internal pursuit of the things that have formed me over the years, habits that I’ve internalized and carried, even if they have nothing to do with me. Along the way, I stumble upon epiphanies, opportunities for personality reboots that present me with a chance to examine those habits up close, and to decide whether they are inherently a part of me or have been imposed upon me during any number of formative moments throughout my life. As time passes, it is evident that most of the ways I have come to define myself, now well into my adulthood, are measures of a person that are askew and tainted, maladies and distorted anxieties of the imposers. One of those is being made to feel small and insignificant while also being physically small. How much of that is my nature (introverted), and how much of that is nurture, or as the case may be, the lack thereof?
To truly nurture another, it is essential to breathe confidence and encouragement into them. It is done quite simply by building up. It is easy to wax lyrical with the analogy of the baby bird being pushed from the nest, the gentle prodding, come on, little one, it’s a scary world out there, but look, you have wings, rise above the fear, and revel in that unparalleled view. But how real is that analogy for most of us within our own experience?
I can hope that in modern-day parenting, it is more common than not to encourage children from the earliest moments possible to find their voice, hone their thinking, and speak their truth — in other words, to expand, to fill up, to blossom, to spread your wings, little bird. But that wasn’t always, and for far too many still isn’t, the case. There’s a dated expectation that remains pervasive to this day in some circles for children to be seen and not heard, and it is a damaging thorn in the side of our society. If you teach a child to virtually deny their existence when they are small, you can’t expect that to magically reverse when they are grown.
And so we find ourselves contending with a steaming pot of mature people whose hearts are still full of tiny seeds that were never allowed to germinate, grow, and burst into bloom. Those seeds become an irritant, an itch, a distraction of a life not lived, a desire not pursued, a hunger that remains unfulfilled. To count the ways we try to fill it would ramble much longer than this essay.
I am physically small. As a young girl and woman, my bone structure was frequently compared to that of a bird, and any muscle I’d built tossing hay bales and making cheese in my early twenties, quickly dissolved when illness consumed my thirties. The bleakest months of that time reduced me to a shell, barely ninety-five pounds, with joints so swollen I could not sit or stand without help. That summer was punctuated by compliments and exclamations of how amazing I looked. For the first time in my life, I was wearing a size zero, and I was being fed a steady stream of confirmation from the world at large that the smaller I became, the more attractive I was. My breasts shriveled until I had difficulty finding a bra that fit. I felt more invisible than I ever had before; my femininity, which had always been a highly defining attribute of my identity, disappeared.
In addition to my whisp of a physical stature was the fact that for much of my life, I was painfully shy with an irritatingly soft voice. If I tried to increase its volume, it sounded unnatural and forced. Over the years, whenever I attempted an enthusiastic cheer at one of my son’s games, it emerged as more of a squeak-screech that instantly forced me to clamp my mouth shut and whisper my cheers to myself — the mute soccer mom. Consequently, I also find it difficult to project my voice during conversations or to maintain ground in a debate once I’ve claimed it. It’s so much easier to just let other people win, especially when it seems obvious that it’s more important to them than it is to me.
I remember vividly the feeling of the smackdown when I was young and the inevitable shrinking that followed. I remember just as well the feeling of being so full or excited right beforehand, expanding, expanding, expanding, and bursting with whichever thing I really wanted to be heard or seen. I recognize how often throughout my life, the brilliant, bubbling, bouncy little self tried and tried, and tried again, to expand — only to be sharply reprimanded or criticized, or outtalked, or talked over, or simply dismissed, and then how I pulled back into myself so fast and so small as to make amends for my daring to command attention.
Over time though, I’ve discovered that the shutting up and shrinking down doesn’t come without a cost. When you’re uncomfortable taking up space in the world, your world is ever more internalized, to the extent that your reality can become a slightly, or sometimes massively, distorted version of the actual reality that you’re living through moment to moment. In that cramped space, rampant with anxieties, past wounds, and fear of future disappointments, it is nearly impossible to not continue to shrink in search of a feeling of safety and security, and so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle through no intention or desire of your own; it is simply a habit that has been imposed by your lived reality.
I have met women smaller than me who fill a room, who make you stop and take note. I marvel as they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people who are physically towering over them as if they don’t even notice and envy their steady voice holding space in the conversation. I want to learn that trick, how to expand, to take up space, not space that belongs to others, but the space that belongs to me. It is unclear, as of yet, how far I can stretch beyond the confines of my personality and physical size, but those learned and imposed behaviors can certainly take a hike. I begin haltingly, here, giving voice to it, not the squeak-screech voice of those soccer games, but this voice, the one that I am most familiar with, that requires nothing more than my thoughts flowing into space and time without a sound. It turns out that words don’t have to be spoken out loud to fill a space.
https://medium.com/modern-women/modern-women-december-writing-prompts-9f87214a2325
