Taking Up Space
I've spent my life trying to take up as little as possible, and I am reassessing that habit.
I recently had a disagreement with someone that eventually devolved into me just yelling, “I’m sorry I’m not enough!” That feeling has chased me my entire life. I have always fought with the feeling of being insufficient in a world that so frequently tells me in no uncertain terms that I am. My needs are too much. My insights are unwelcome and unwanted. My intelligence is too threatening. My voice is too loud. My emotions are too powerful and too complicated.
As both an AFAB (assigned female at birth) person and as an AuDHD individual, I have spent a large percentage of my life trying to make myself smaller. The abuse I endured didn’t help. Not to mention growing up being socialized as a combination of “firstborn son” and “eldest daughter” made things even weirder.
The whole son/daughter thing is because my upbringing was weird in the sense that I was raised to behave in a lot of traditionally masculine ways (suppressing emotion, pushing through no matter what, keeping my emotions to myself, assertiveness, martial arts, aggression, extreme self-reliance etc.) while also having a lot of traditionally feminine values instilled in me (caretaking, being softspoken, being demure, deferring to male voices, and so on). It was a strange combination, but as a masculine-leaning non-binary person, it makes sense why I project a very male energy a lot of the time.
Why do I bring gender into this? Because it’s part of it.
The act of taking up space, for me, has always come with people in my life who try and stick me back into a smaller one because I make them uncomfortable. I’m not talking about being non-binary or queer either. I’m talking about just existing as a human being. Being AuDHD naturally comes with a lot of quirks and needs that aren’t necessarily welcomed or appreciated by people.
People near me know I tend to infodump to them on the regular. I either talk their ear off or am absolutely silent. There’s no in between. While I can moderate the flow of a conversation and participate, it’s a conscious effort at all times to run the metrics of how much I’ve talked versus the other person. I’m also focusing on things like how much eye contact I’ve had versus what’s appropriate. My facial expression is something I am moderating and ensuring is friendly and approachable. I have so many background processes.
Taking up space is something I am trying to teach myself to do. I am allowed to have needs. I am allowed to have expectations of others and of my space. This week, for example, I have been setting up a room in my home as an office. I am pushing as much of my “work stuff” off my home computer as possible and shunting it to my laptop, which is functioning as my work machine now. There are some things it can’t due since it’s not as powerful, but it absolutely is able to handle the lifting of a lot of what I manage (such as writing this article).
For so long I have crammed myself into as small a box as possible. I have put as many of my things into one location, tried to strip down my needs, and continually shrunk to fit the size of my enclosure. I’m now throwing the gate open and letting myself spill into other areas. The office move is a need because when I am at my desk I literally never stop working. I wander in and out of my work programs and mindset and never really turn off. As a result, I end up trapped in a burnout cycle that never quite heals.
Stopping that pattern of behavior is absolutely necessary for my mental health, and doing so is freeing me up to do things like actually enjoy my downtime. It will also help me focus on my work more since I can minimize distractions and instead put emphasis on things that are important to me. Things like imposing strict social media limits on my work computer, setting up “work mode” on my phone to block out my time and ensure I don’t end up distracted with notifications.
I’m also going to be drawing boundaries around my work time. I’m not going to be forever flexible and reachable for clients and intend on creating space and time when I am just available to friends for non-work interactions. I already have some of that with my gaming but I need to make sure I am more studious with it than I have been. It’s part of the experience of taking up extra space.
Just like my cat is currently taking up space on my desk and being completely in the way of my ability to write or work. He doesn’t try and make himself smaller for my convenience, and I just sort of work around him (or move him if I have to). I’m also not angry with him for it since him taking up space is literally why I have him. It’s the same with people. People are allowed to take up space and be present in an area, and we all need to work around that to at least some degree.
I know this blog post was kind of rambling, but I hope if nothing else you take away the fact that being you, and not shrinking yourself to be palatable to everyone else, is a necessary and valuable thing in life.