Who taught you to take up less space

Tracing the shrinking habit to its origin and deciding whether it still applies.

You sit quietly, trying not to be seen or heard. Almost invisible to the room, for not wanting to create a fuss or displeasure. You have been told for so long to be seen and not heard that now you are neither. You are the peacemaker. The one who tends to the needs of others. The one who keeps the harmony by keeping yourself small.

I know this child. I was her.

Children should be seen and not heard. Said to me young enough that I absorbed it before I had any language to question it. An innocent enough expression, perhaps, from a different era of parenting. The life long impact is not innocent at all. I was the child who barely spoke as a toddler. My brother did the talking for me. I let him. I became the quiet one shy around extended family, careful in classrooms, watching rather than participating. The habit of making myself smaller arrived so early I stopped being able to see it as a habit. I thought it was just how I was.

The middle child who learned to be needed.

I grew up as the middle child. Not anyone’s obvious favourite. What I found somewhere along the way was that if I couldn’t be loved for who I was (simply and unconditionally as children deserve to be loved) then being needed was the next best thing.

I became the caregiver. The peacekeeper. The one who managed herself down to keep the harmony. This is hindsight and a little counselling, speaking. As a child you are not aware this is what you are doing or why. You are simply doing what works, what earns you a place, what makes you useful, what keeps things smooth.

The trouble with strategies that work in childhood is that they don’t come with an expiry date. They travel with you. Into school, into relationships, into workplaces, into the decades of your adult life still running, still shaping behaviour, long after the context that made them necessary has gone.

“The strategies that kept you safe as a child don’t come with an expiry date. They travel with you.”

School, and the particular cruelty of approval seeking.

School was not much better. Be still. Sit still. Don’t speak up. The approval seeking that had kept me useful at home turned me into the teacher’s pet at school. Which as any child who has been there knows earns you the particular cruelty of being teased for wanting to be good.

There is something uniquely painful about being punished for the coping strategy you developed to survive. The good girl trying to be liked by the authority figures because being liked by the authority figures was the safest available option and finding that this too made her a target.

What I learned across all of those years was make yourself manageable. Don’t take up more space than is comfortable for the people around you. The sentence that earns approval is always quieter than the one that tells the truth.

The adult version: the chameleon.

As an adult I have always been the chameleon.

Fitting myself into the relationship. Fitting myself into the workplace. Being the good girl trying not to cause conflict or disharmony. Accommodating myself to whatever shape the situation required. I was good at it. I had been practising since I could walk.

The truth that took me decades to see clearly the only one who was missing out was me. The true me. The version of myself that had opinions and edges and wanted things and would have said the uncomfortable sentence if she had believed she was allowed to.

She was in there the whole time. She just wasn’t getting much of a say.

“The only one who was missing out was me. The true me. She was in there the whole time. She just wasn’t getting much of a say.”

When the marriage ended.

After my marriage ended I spent a number of years rediscovering who I was. What I liked. What I actually thought about things when I wasn’t managing my thoughts down to something acceptable.

I am still doing this some twenty plus years later. That is not a confession of failure. That is an honest account of how long the unlearning takes when the learning started before you were old enough to know it was happening.

Travel helped more than almost anything else. The experience of relying entirely on yourself in a foreign country making every decision, navigating every difficulty, asking for help in a language you don’t speak, finding your way through something with no one to defer to. this builds a kind of confidence that cannot be given to you from the outside. It can only be earned from the inside by doing the thing.

Every time I came home from a solo trip I could see the discomfort in the people around me. Because I had changed the rules. I was no longer complying with the family structure in the way they had been relying on me to comply with it. The chameleon had developed preferences. This was inconvenient for everyone who had benefited from her not having any.

Scotland. Perimenopause. The unexpected gifts.

Moving to Scotland changed something too. Being somewhere that didn’t know the old version of me meant there was nobody invested in keeping me the size I had always been. I could be whatever size I actually was. The calibration that happens when you remove yourself from the context that set the original calibration is remarkable and available to anyone willing to change the context.

And then there is perimenopause. Not often listed among the positive side effects but I am listing it here. The hormonal shift of midlife does something to the need to perform. The good girl conditioning as it turns out was partly hormonal and the reduction of hormones removes the masking mechanism I relied on. What remains underneath when the hormones are different and the desire to manage yourself down for everyone else’s comfort has reduced is considerably more willing to say the thing plainly.

I will take it. I will take every unexpected benefit of being a woman in her fifties including this one.

“The good girl conditioning was partly hormonal. What remains underneath is considerably more willing to say the thing plainly. I will take it.”

The friends who let you be who you are.

There have been a handful of close friends across these years who have without knowing quite what they were doing helped with this transition.

They allow me to be who I am. Just me. No management required. No performance of the manageable version. They accept me as I am which is something I did not have enough of for a long time and have learned to recognise as one of the most valuable things one person can give another.

I am genuinely grateful for them. For the ease of being in a room where you do not have to monitor the size you are taking up.

What this is for.

I am writing this because I think a lot of midlife women who are carrying a version of the same thing.

Not necessarily from the same origin. The instruction to make yourself smaller arrives in different forms from different people, in different contexts. A parent’s throwaway comment. A teacher’s preference for the quiet child. A workplace that rewarded compliance and called it professionalism. A relationship that worked better when you didn’t have too many opinions.

The instruction was installed. It ran. Most of us followed it for longer than we needed to because we had stopped being able to see it as an instruction and had started believing it was just who we were.

It is not who you are. It is what you learned. Those are different things. And the learning that arrived before you were old enough to question it can be unlearned slowly, imperfectly, with a bit of travel and the right people and the unexpected assistance of perimenopause by a woman in her fifties who has decided it no longer applies.

Leaving behind the baggage of the past is, it turns out, incredibly freeing.

The space you take up when you stop managing yourself down is the right size. It was always the right size.

And then last week.

I went live on Substack.

Eight minutes. Unscripted. Just me, talking to whoever was there, introducing myself and this publication properly for the first time. The woman who spent her childhood trying to be invisible. The woman who learned so thoroughly not to have opinions that mattered that she carried the habit into every room she ever entered.

It was not perfect. It was a little messy. My voice was not entirely steady at the start.

Perfection was not required. It never is. It is in fact one of the things the shrinking habit uses to keep you quiet. The idea that you cannot put yourself forward until you are ready, polished, certain. Which means never. Which is the point.

The childhood programming said stay small, stay quiet, don’t put yourself forward. Last night I pressed a button and put myself in front of a camera and talked, imperfectly, about the thing I am building.

That is not a dramatic act. It is a small one. But it is exactly the kind of small act that rewrites the programming not in a single moment of triumph but in the accumulation of small moments where you choose differently than the rule would have chosen for you.

‘You do not rewrite the programming in a single triumphant moment. You rewrite it in the accumulation of small acts where you choose differently than the rule would have chosen for you.’

You do not need to be ready. You do not need to be polished. You do not need to have resolved all the old rules before you act on a new one.

You just need to press the button. Say the thing. Step in front of the camera. Send the email at full size. Describe the work without the qualifier in front of it.

Messy is fine. Imperfect is fine. A little unsteady at the start is fine.

The becoming does not require perfection. It only requires the next small step.

Go be gloriously you.

Jules

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