There are rooms in this world built for diminishment. Not literally—though sometimes literally—but structurally, philosophically, in the unspoken dimensions of what is permitted and what is punished. I have lived in these rooms. I have made myself fit.
Some rooms teach survival before they teach dignity.
The first skill I learned was subtraction. I learned to fold parts of myself like laundry: neat, quiet, out of sight. My laughter, perhaps. The particular way my mind moved through problems, taking the scenic route when everyone else took the highway. The questions that came too quickly or cut too close. The intensity that made people shift in their seats.
I became fluent in the mathematics of smallness. Calculate the ceiling height. Measure the doorframe. Trim accordingly.
I didn’t collapse. I adapted, and adaptation just happened to look like shrinking.
I learned the choreography of containment: speak carefully, excel politely, succeed without taking credit for it. Don’t stand too far ahead, someone will call it arrogance. Don’t dream too loudly, someone will call it delusion. That was the unspoken curriculum: be remarkable, but never so much that it disrupts the ecosystem.
And I was good at it. That surprises people, but it shouldn’t. Survival always breeds competence. I learned to read rooms the way others read books, predicting which version of myself would be welcomed, which would be tolerated, which would trigger the alarm. I became a translator of my own existence, converting my native language into something more palatable, more digestible, easier to swallow.
Some structures only function if someone dimmer stands beside someone brighter. Sometimes that someone becomes you.
It’s strange how environments can survive on your underestimation of yourself, how they keep running on the voltage you never claim. How institutions, friendships, and systems can thrive on your dimmer switch. I think of the meetings where I held my tongue while someone else claimed my idea. The gatherings where I laughed at jokes that weren’t funny, where the punchline was always some version of me. The moments I practiced silence like a second language, fluent in all the ways to make myself less threatening, less visible, less than I was.
The strange thing about prolonged contortion is that you forget what your original shape was. You wake up one day and realize you’ve been holding your breath for so long that shallow breathing feels normal. That the crouch has become your posture. That you’ve been speaking in a whisper while calling it your voice.
There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from starving while being told to be grateful for crumbs.
But the fullness of who I was didn’t disappear when I hid it; it merely went underground, building pressure, waiting. Mine started as small rebellions—a thought I didn’t censor, an email I sent without softening every edge, a way I stopped apologizing for arriving. These felt dangerous because they risked the careful architecture I’d built.
The expansion, when it began, was not triumphant. It was terrifying.
A realization that survival and selfhood are not synonyms. Growth didn’t enter with fanfare. It arrived like a knock at the door from a future version of me: “We cannot live here anymore.”
Leaving those rooms required admitting I’d built a life inside them. It meant acknowledging what I’d surrendered, consciously or not, to stay safe, to stay employed, to stay loved, to stay. It meant standing in spaces that had once felt neutral and seeing them clearly for what they were: enclosures dressed up as shelter.
And then came the grief—unexpected and enormous. Grief for all the years spent making myself smaller. Grief for the parts of myself I’d buried so deep I’d forgotten they existed. Grief for the person who might have existed had she never learned to fold herself.
The realization that I’d gotten so good at diminishment that I’d taught others how to expect it from me.
But grief, I discovered, can crack you open in useful ways.
I didn’t leave the old environments by slamming the door. I outgrew the doorway.
My expansion wasn’t a quiet unfolding. The drywall cracked at a gathering I thought was safe—friends, music, the kind of night that should have felt like home. Instead, I became the joke. Laughed at for dancing the way my body wanted to move. Too much of one thing, not enough of another, a punchline dressed up as observation. The sound of my actual thoughts hitting the walls I’d built. The messy, unglamorous work of tearing out the low ceilings I’d installed myself.
I stopped going to places where I was the entertainment. Stopped sitting at tables where my presence was a curiosity to be commented on rather than a person to be known.
Removing myself from those tables didn’t bring immediate peace; it brought heat. The return of my anger—not as insight but as a force that made the people I love flinch because they were used to my coolness. The reclamation of my joy, which turned out to be louder and more disruptive than I’d remembered. I became a structural hazard to a life that only worked when I was small. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: some people preferred the smaller version. They’d built their understanding of me around my accommodation, and my expansion felt like a betrayal of an unspoken contract I’d never agreed to.
What came back wasn’t just confidence or self-esteem—therapeutic words that feel too clean for the mess of it. What returned was the full weight of my presence. The complexity of my thinking. The validity of my wanting. The things I’d spent years learning to minimize.
The interesting thing about growth is that it doesn’t ask permission; it asks participation. It asks for the courage to stop editing your light just to keep someone else comfortable. It asks: What happens if I stop bending the spine of my spirit just to fit the room? What if I stop negotiating with spaces that benefit from my silence? Who am I when I no longer audition for belonging?
I wish I could say I walked out of those small rooms and never looked back, but the truth is more complicated. Some of those rooms I’m still leaving. Some I return to out of habit before I catch myself. Some I’ve discovered I’m standing in only now, years later, when I notice that familiar ache of holding myself in.
What has changed is this: I know now what my full size is. I know the shape of my unedited thoughts, the sound of my uncensored voice, the force of my unmoderated presence. And once you know that, once you’ve felt the relief and power of full expansion, the cost of contraction becomes unbearable.
There are still environments that ask for smaller versions of me. The difference is that now I can see the ask for what it is. Some seasons still require me to bend, but now I bend knowingly. I never mistake the posture for my identity. The awareness doesn’t make it easier—sometimes knowing I’m performing the diminishment makes it sting more sharply than when I believed it was simply who I was.
My full height is the truth. The bending is strategy.
Because here’s what I learned in those rooms: they needed me small not because I was too much, but because they were too little. Too fragile, too rigid, too committed to their own narrow architectures to expand. What I thought was my excess was actually their scarcity.
Brilliance isn’t ego. Brilliance is oxygen. Some environments run out of air when you start breathing properly.
I am still learning to trust my expansion. To believe that the space I take up is space I’m allowed to occupy. To understand that the people and places that truly matter will not ask me to fold myself into something more convenient.
And on the days when I catch myself shrinking again—because I will, because unlearning is never linear—I try to remember this: I survived the small rooms. But I was never meant to stay in them.
I lived in those rooms long enough to learn their lessons. I’m building new rooms now.
The architecture of smallness taught me how to fit. The architecture of expansion is teaching me how to live.
