God Forbid She Takes Up Space in Her Own Life

God forbid she says no without a three paragraph explanation.

God forbid she cancels plans because she is tired, actually tired, and doesn't perform exhaustion convincingly enough for anyone to believe her.

God forbid she leaves a job, a relationship, a situation that was making her smaller every single day.

God forbid she chooses herself and doesn't spend the next four days feeling guilty about it.

She has spent years making herself easy to be around. Palatable. Agreeable. The kind of woman who takes up just enough space to be useful and not so much that anyone feels uncomfortable.

She is done with that now. Slowly. Imperfectly. But done.

The Training Nobody Admits To

Nobody sits you down and teaches you to shrink.

It happens in smaller moments. The time you got excited about something and someone laughed. The time you said what you actually thought and felt the temperature in the room drop. The time you needed something and were told, directly or otherwise, that your needs were inconvenient.

You learned. You adjusted. You got very good at reading the room and making yourself fit into it.

And for a long time you called that being considerate. Being low maintenance. Being the easy one.

It was not those things. It was self-abandonment dressed up in socially acceptable clothing.

What Choosing Yourself Actually Looks Like

It does not look like the version in the films.

It is not a dramatic speech. It is not walking away from everything in slow motion while a great song plays. It is not a single moment of clarity after which everything is different.

It looks like this.

It looks like saying no to something and sitting with the discomfort of having said it. Not explaining. Not following up with three alternatives to make the other person feel better. Just: no, and letting that be a complete sentence.

It looks like resting without justifying the rest. Without cataloguing everything you did first to earn it. Without apologising for needing it.

It looks like noticing when you are performing okayness for other people's comfort and choosing, just this once, not to.

It looks small from the outside. It is enormous from the inside.

The Guilt Is Part of It

She chooses herself and feels guilty until Thursday.

That is not a failure. That is what happens when you have spent years prioritising everyone else and you are only just beginning to redirect some of that energy back toward yourself.

The guilt is the old wiring protesting the new behaviour. It is not evidence that you did something wrong. It is evidence that you did something different. And different feels wrong at first, almost always, even when it is exactly right.

You do not have to be free of the guilt to keep going. You just have to keep going anyway. The guilt gets quieter. Eventually.

She Is Allowed

She is allowed to take up space.

Not because she has earned it. Not because she has suffered enough or worked hard enough or been good enough for long enough. Not because she has finally fixed the parts of herself that she was told needed fixing.

She is allowed because she is here. Because she is a person. Because taking up space is not a privilege to be granted by someone else's approval.

She is allowed to have opinions that are inconvenient. To want things other people do not understand. To change her mind. To rest. To leave. To stay. To be difficult on occasion. To be soft when softness is all she has.

She is allowed to be in the middle of figuring it out and still take up the full amount of space that belongs to her.

God forbid.

And yet.

rise · believe · fly 🪶

From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after.If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.