I have been small for a long time.
Not physically. In the way a woman learns to be small. The apologies before the opinions. The hedging before the knowledge. The shrinking that happens in certain rooms, not all rooms, not always, but the rooms where a woman with a strong view is received as a woman with an attitude, where competence reads as arrogance and directness reads as aggression and the simple act of knowing what you know and saying so requires a degree of social management that men in the same room are not required to perform.
I have paid the smallness tax for most of my adult life.
I paid it in the institution. I paid it in the committee rooms and the performance reviews and the conversations where I was told I was a strong candidate in the tone of voice that means: but. Where I was told I was too much in ways that were never said directly because saying them directly would have required an accountability that the room was not prepared to offer. Too direct. Too confident. Too clear about what I wanted. Too unwilling to perform uncertainty I did not feel.
I am done paying.
Not with anger. The anger has had its turn and done its work. Just with the plain and undecorated understanding that I am a woman at this point in her life who knows what she knows and is not going to pretend otherwise for the comfort of rooms that are made uncomfortable by women who know things. I will be kind. I will be precise. I will not be small.
I am allowed to take up the space my thoughts actually take up.
I am allowed to sit in a chair and occupy it fully. I am allowed to have a view and hold it without the apology that was supposed to make the view easier to swallow. I am allowed to be right in a room and not minimize the being right to protect the feelings of the people who are wrong.
This is the freedom I did not know was available.
Not the freedom from difficulty. The freedom from the performance of smallness. The freedom to be the size of myself, in whatever room I am in, for the rest of my life, without apology, without management, without the daily exhausting cost of being less than I am so that others can be more comfortable than they deserve.
I am here. I am this size. I intend to stay.
