The Audacity to Take Up Space

The Audacity to Take Up Space

Or, how to stop apologising for existing in a world that has never apologised for itself.

There comes a point in every woman’s life when she looks in the mirror and thinks, What the hell am I so afraid of?

Not in a dramatic, cinematic way. There is no soundtrack, no wind blowing through her hair, no sudden understanding that she is the heroine of her own story. Usually, she is standing in the bathroom, half-dressed, late for work, wondering whether she has put on weight, whether she looks tired, whether someone noticed that she made a mistake yesterday, and whether the email she sent three hours ago sounded a little too aggressive.

Or perhaps not aggressive enough.

It is exhausting, this constant internal performance review. And the worst part is that nobody even pays us for it.

We spend years trying to become the sort of woman who is confident enough to be respected, pleasant enough to be liked, successful enough to be admired, attractive enough to be noticed, but never so attractive that someone thinks we are vain. Intelligent, but not intimidating. Ambitious, but not threatening. Independent, but still capable of making everyone around us feel needed.

In short, we are expected to be extraordinary, provided we do not make anyone uncomfortable by demonstrating it.

And then we wonder why we are insecure.

Perhaps the first step towards freedom is admitting that some of our insecurities are not entirely our fault. We have been raised, trained, encouraged and occasionally bullied into believing that our value is something to be negotiated. A little more beauty here, a little less opinion there. A little more patience, a little less anger. We learn to read a room before we learn to trust ourselves in it.

We become experts in anticipating other people’s reactions, often at the expense of understanding our own.

By adulthood, we can detect a change in someone’s tone from three rooms away, yet struggle to identify what we actually want for dinner.

A remarkable achievement for a species supposedly in charge of its own destiny.

The committee in our heads

The most irritating thing about insecurity is that it rarely announces itself as insecurity.

It presents itself as common sense.

Perhaps I should wait until I have more experience before applying for that position.

Perhaps I should let someone else speak. They probably know more.

Perhaps I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t want to create tension.

Perhaps I should stay quiet this time. It isn’t worth the argument.

And so we wait. We wait until we are ready, until we are certain, until we are better, until the timing is right, until somebody notices our contribution and offers us the recognition we are too uncomfortable to request.

We wait for permission from a world that has never promised to give it.

Meanwhile, someone with half our experience and twice our self-belief has walked into the room, made three questionable statements, presented them as facts and somehow become the person everyone is listening to.

We sit there thinking, How on earth did that happen?

The answer is not necessarily that he is more capable. Sometimes he simply has a lower tolerance for the possibility of looking foolish.

Perhaps that is the secret nobody told us: confidence is not always the result of knowing you are good enough. Sometimes it is the willingness to proceed despite the very real possibility that you might not be.

We confuse confidence with certainty. We imagine that confident women wake up knowing who they are, what they want and how to achieve it. They probably have excellent posture, immaculate kitchens and no unresolved childhood issues.

I suspect most of them are simply better at acting before their inner critic has finished preparing its PowerPoint presentation.

Because the committee in our heads never really goes away.

There is the Chairwoman of Catastrophe, who believes every mistake will destroy our reputation. The Director of Other People’s Opinions, who tracks the imagined disappointment of everyone we have ever met. And the Head of Historical Evidence, who insists that because we once failed at something, we are clearly unqualified to try again.

They are a very experienced team. They have been with us for years. Unfortunately, their performance has been mediocre, their working hours are unreasonable, and nobody has ever thought to make them redundant.

Perhaps it is time we did.

Not by replacing every negative thought with a motivational quote about believing in ourselves. Life is complicated enough without pretending that every woman is a queen, every setback is a blessing and every closed door is merely the universe redirecting us towards a better restaurant.

Sometimes a closed door is just a closed door.

Sometimes you were wrong. Sometimes you were unlucky. Sometimes someone else was better. And sometimes you were perfectly qualified but too afraid to put your hand up.

The important thing is to stop treating these experiences as a verdict on your entire existence.

You can make a mistake without becoming a mistake. You can fail at something without being a failure. You can be rejected without being undesirable, criticised without being incompetent, and disliked without being a terrible person.

It sounds obvious when written down.

So why does it take us forty years to believe it?

At work: stop asking for a smaller chair.

The workplace is an interesting laboratory for female insecurity because it rewards competence while often demanding that competence be delivered with a smile.

We are encouraged to contribute, but not dominate. To lead, but not appear controlling. To negotiate, but not be difficult. To be decisive, but remain open to being overruled by someone who has just discovered the subject five minutes ago.

And when we finally reach a position of authority, we may find ourselves wondering whether we deserve to be there.

Perhaps we were lucky. Perhaps someone made a mistake. Perhaps we will be exposed.

This is particularly exhausting because we rarely apply the same standards to other people. When a man makes a confident decision that turns out to be wrong, he may be described as bold, decisive or willing to take risks. When a woman does the same, she may find herself replaying the decision in her head for the next six months, wondering whether she should have consulted another committee, commissioned a study and sought the approval of three generations of colleagues.

We become our own compliance department.

But here is a question worth asking: if you have spent years earning your experience, developing your judgement and proving your ability, at what point do you intend to start believing the evidence?

How much more proof do you need before you stop behaving like an unexpected guest at your own career?

This does not mean pretending to know everything. Quite the opposite. Real confidence includes the ability to say, “I don’t know,” without feeling that you have surrendered your professional identity.

It means asking for the promotion. Naming your contribution. Challenging an assumption. Saying that a deadline is unrealistic instead of sacrificing another weekend to demonstrate your commitment. Correcting someone who takes credit for your work.

And sometimes it means saying nothing at all, because you have decided that not every battle deserves your energy.

The point is not to become the loudest person in the room. It is to stop assuming that you must become quieter to deserve a place in it.

You do not have to win every argument. You do not have to be liked by every colleague. You do not have to prove that you are both brilliant and harmless.

And you certainly do not have to apologise every time you express an opinion.

Try it sometime. Deliver a perfectly reasonable sentence without beginning it with “Sorry, but…”

It is astonishing how much oxygen becomes available.

At home: the tyranny of being a good woman.

If work teaches us to question our competence, family often teaches us to question our right to put ourselves first.

We become daughters, mothers, partners, sisters, carers, organisers, emotional support services and the people who remember that everyone else’s appointment is on Thursday at four.

We remember birthdays, preferences, allergies, grudges and the precise tone of voice that means somebody is upset but refuses to discuss it.

We manage invisible workloads that are so deeply embedded in everyday life that they become almost impossible to measure. And because we are good at managing them, everyone assumes that managing them is simply what we do.

Then, when we become exhausted, we wonder why we cannot cope.

Perhaps because we are trying to be indispensable to everyone and authentic to no one.

There is a particular kind of guilt that accompanies a woman who begins to say no. It arrives dressed as selfishness and speaks in the voices of people she loves.

You have changed.

You used to be more helpful.

You are making a fuss over nothing.

And the most effective weapon of all: After everything we have done for you…

Of course, family is complicated. Love involves compromise, responsibility and occasionally doing things we would rather avoid. Nobody is suggesting that personal freedom means abandoning everyone who needs us and moving to a remote island with a cocktail and a new identity.

But there is a difference between loving people and making yourself permanently available for their convenience.

There is a difference between being generous and being afraid that, if you stop giving, you will stop being loved.

That distinction can be uncomfortable to examine.

How much of what we do comes from genuine affection, and how much comes from a desperate need to be considered good?

How many times have we agreed to something while privately resenting the person who asked? How often have we said, “It’s fine,” when what we meant was, “I am running on fumes, and if one more person asks me where something is, I may disappear without leaving a forwarding address”?

We sometimes blame other people for taking too much when we have spent years teaching them that we will never refuse.

That is not to say the responsibility is always ours. Some people are perfectly happy to benefit from an arrangement that suits them, and they may not welcome our decision to change it.

But their discomfort does not automatically make our decision wrong.

A boundary is not a punishment. It is information.

It says: this is what I can give, this is what I cannot give, and this is where my responsibility ends.

The difficult part is allowing other people to be disappointed without immediately rushing to repair the situation.

Let them be disappointed.

Let them misunderstand you for a little while.

Let them discover that you are not an endlessly renewable resource.

You are a person, not a public utility.

And if someone only finds you lovable when you are useful, perhaps the question is not how to become more lovable. Perhaps it is why you have accepted such an exhausting definition of love.

The most difficult person to stand up to is yourself.

Work and family, at least, give us something external to push against. We can point to the unfair colleague, the demanding relative, the impossible expectation.

But what do we do when the obstacle is the person staring back at us in the mirror?

This is where things become considerably less convenient.

Because it is possible to spend years blaming the world for not recognising our worth while quietly participating in our own disappearance.

We minimise our achievements before anyone else has the opportunity to dismiss them. We reject ourselves before anyone else can reject us. We lower our expectations to protect ourselves from disappointment and then feel bitter when life fails to offer us more.

We call it being realistic.

Sometimes it is simply fear with an excellent public relations department.

There is comfort in staying small. Nobody expects too much from you. Nobody can accuse you of arrogance. Nobody can watch you fail at something you never attempted.

You can remain forever in the safe territory of potential.

Potential is a wonderful place to live. It is full of possibilities and entirely free of evidence.

Unfortunately, it is also where dreams go to become increasingly impressive stories about what we might have done.

So how do we get out?

Not through a dramatic reinvention. Not by waking up tomorrow as a woman who suddenly loves her body, commands every room, has immaculate boundaries and never checks whether anyone has read her message.

We begin by noticing the moments when we abandon ourselves.

The moment we agree when we want to refuse. The moment we remain silent because somebody might disagree. The moment we dismiss a compliment because accepting it would feel embarrassingly self-important. The moment we compare our ordinary, complicated lives with someone else’s carefully edited highlights and conclude that we have somehow fallen behind.

We notice, and then we practise doing something different.

Small acts of self-respect are not glamorous. They are often uncomfortable and occasionally very boring.

You say what you think, even if your voice shakes.

You ask for what you need, even if you feel ridiculous asking.

You stop explaining a decision to people who have no authority over it.

You accept a compliment with “Thank you” instead of immediately listing the reasons it is undeserved.

You wear the clothes you like rather than the clothes you think will make you look acceptable to a committee that has never actually met.

You take the opportunity before you feel completely ready.

And when you fail, you resist the temptation to turn a single event into a comprehensive assessment of your character.

You get up, learn what you can, and try again.

Not because you are fearless, but because you are tired of allowing fear to make every important decision.

Perhaps courage is not the absence of insecurity. Perhaps it is the decision that insecurity no longer gets the final vote.

The age of not giving quite so many fucks.

There is a strange freedom that can arrive as we get older. Not necessarily because we become wiser, although that would be nice, but because we gradually run out of energy for the exhausting business of managing everyone else’s perception of us.

We begin to realise that the people we were desperate to impress are often too busy worrying about themselves to notice our supposed shortcomings.

The colleague whose opinion kept us awake all night is probably worrying about their mortgage. The relative who criticised our choices may have spent thirty years making choices they themselves cannot explain. The person who thought we were too ambitious would probably have called us unmotivated if we had done less.

There is no winning a game when the rules change according to who is judging you.

So perhaps we should stop playing.

This does not mean becoming indifferent, cruel or recklessly self-centred. We still need kindness. We still need accountability. We still need the humility to recognise that our perspective is not the only perspective.

But kindness without self-respect becomes self-erasure. Humility without self-belief becomes self-doubt. And consideration for others, when it is never extended to ourselves, becomes a particularly sophisticated form of neglect.

We can be considerate without being compliant. We can be ambitious without being ashamed. We can be feminine without being fragile, assertive without being unkind, and uncertain without being incompetent.

We can change our minds. We can outgrow relationships, roles, expectations and versions of ourselves that once felt necessary.

We can disappoint people who have grown accustomed to our compliance.

We can even admit that we have spent years getting things wrong.

There is no shame in that. There is only the rather inconvenient task of deciding what to do next.

And perhaps that is the real work of becoming a confident woman: not convincing ourselves that we are extraordinary, but finally accepting that we do not have to be extraordinary to deserve an ordinary amount of respect.

We do not need to be the most beautiful woman in the room. We do not need to be the most intelligent, the most successful, the most accommodating or the most admired.

We simply need to stop treating our worth as a competition we must win before we are allowed to relax.

Because there will always be someone younger, richer, thinner, cleverer, more accomplished or better at pretending that their life is going wonderfully.

There will always be another standard, another expectation, another imaginary finish line.

If we insist on measuring ourselves against every possible version of a better woman, we will spend our entire lives feeling like an unfinished project.

And frankly, the world already has enough unfinished projects. Most of them have a budget, a steering committee and no realistic delivery date.

Perhaps we deserve to be something other than a project.

Perhaps we deserve to be a person.

A person who is allowed to be brilliant one day and mediocre the next. A person who can walk into a room without mentally calculating whether she is attractive enough, qualified enough, pleasant enough or young enough to justify being there.

A person who can say, “This is what I think,” without immediately adding, “But I could be wrong,” simply to make everyone else comfortable.

Of course, we could be wrong. We are human. Being wrong is part of the arrangement.

The point is to stop confusing the possibility of being wrong with the certainty that we are not good enough.

So the next time insecurity arrives with its familiar list of objections, perhaps we should listen politely, thank it for its contribution and carry on regardless.

It has had years to make its case.

It has offered very little in the way of a practical solution.

And it has certainly never volunteered to take responsibility for the life it keeps telling us not to live.

We owe ourselves at least that much: the chance to discover who we might become when we stop asking fear for permission.

Stand up at work. Speak honestly at home. Look at yourself without turning every perceived imperfection into evidence against your existence.

Take up space.

Make a decision.

Change your mind.

Say no.

Say yes.

Be wrong occasionally.

Be disliked by someone.

Survive it.

And when the familiar voice returns to ask whether you are sure you are good enough, do not waste another hour trying to convince it.

You have a life to get on with.

Besides, there is a certain irony in spending decades worrying about what everyone thinks of you, only to discover that most people are far too busy worrying about what you think of them.

We are all standing around, desperately trying to look as though we know what we are doing, while privately hoping nobody asks us a difficult question.

Which brings me to the final, rather liberating thought.

If you are going to spend your life being judged, criticised and occasionally misunderstood, you might as well do it on your own terms.

After all, you cannot please everyone.

You are not a bottle of wine.

And even wine, as it turns out, has people who prefer beer....

The real secret to confidence is not learning how to make everyone like you. It is learning to live with the possibility that they won’t — and realising that you can still have a perfectly good evening without their approval.

And if all else fails, remember this:

You spent nine months being the best thing that ever happened to someone, and you have been trying to impress people ever since.

Perhaps it is time to stop auditioning.

You were born without an audience. You can live without a standing ovation.

And if the world still insists on making a spectacle of you, at least make sure you get the royalties.