There is a reason so many of us say we want more and then hesitate the moment more becomes available. Whether that’s more visibility, more responsibility, more honesty, more desire, more expression, more life. It sounds so simple when we say it out loud; “I want to be seen.” “I want to share more.” “I want to stop hiding.” “I want to go bigger.” “I want to finally let myself be who I am.” But.. the moment life opens a door, something in us suddenly becomes very committed to shrinking. That can look like delaying the post, softening the opinion, calling our own dreams unrealistic before someone else can shoot it down. Sometimes it looks like staying in rooms that we’ve outgrown because it feels familiar or telling ourselves we’re being humble but what we’re really feeling is fear.
That fear that keeps us playing small can look very polished and it’s quite deceiving. It can look thoughtful, strategic, chill, self-aware, and even responsible. Smallness rarely introduces itself as fear and often introduces itself as practicality. That’s part of why it is so easy to stay there because we can always rely on thinking/saying/feeling:
“Maybe later.” | “Maybe when I’m clearer.” | “Maybe when I have a clearer sign.” | “Maybe when I feel more ready.” | “Maybe when I know exactly how it will land.”
Underneath all of those maybes is often a quieter truth: small feels safer. When you play small, you do not have to fully risk being seen or test your gifts in real time. You also don’t have to find out what happens when people actually notice you. You alsoooo don’t have to face envy, judgment, projection, misunderstanding, or change. You don’t have to grieve the identity you built around being overlooked, underestimated, or in waiting AND you also don’t have to confront the fact that the life you want might actually be available to you, and that you would then need to meet it. That is the part people do not talk about enough. The unfortunate truth is that sometimes we avoid expansion because it boldly asks us to stop rehearsing our lives based on old scripts and to start inhabiting them. That request can get our internal sirens going off.
Playing small is often a look into our relationship with safety. For some people, smallness began as intelligence. It was the strategy that kept the peace, it was how you stayed liked, how you stayed chosen and protected. Maybe you learned early that being too loud, too expressive, too opinionated, too brilliant, too emotional, too attractive, too ambitious, too much in any direction came with consequences. So you did what you needed to do to stay safe, you adapted. You learned how to lower the volume on yourself and to become digestible. Trust, I get it and that adaptation may have been helpful at some point. I mean, it may have even made you successful in some environments. Eventually, the same strategies that once sheltered you can start to suffocate you, it can start to shrink you. The hard part about that is that the ‘shrinking’ can be confused for ‘your personality’ at that stage.
Maybe you start calling yourself ‘reserved’ when what you really are is ‘restrained’ or you start calling yourself ‘low maintenance’ when what you really are is ‘disconnected from your desires’. Maybeee you’ve called it ‘being private’ but it’s actually ‘being scared of exposure’ or my favorite one: calling yourself ‘realistic’ when you’re actually ‘pre-rejecting your own expansion.’
I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve confused my ‘playing it small’ for a self concept. This is why taking up space is deeper than posting more online, speaking louder in meetings, charging more, wearing the outfit, or saying the thing. Those actions do matter, but they are not the root. The root is your willingness to survive being fully in contact with yourself because taking up space means letting yourself exist without constantly editing your impact. It means letting your truth take up room before it has unanimous approval. It means allowing your desires to matter before they are convenient for everyone else. It means being willing to disappoint the version of you who learned how to stay safe by staying hidden. Honestly, it can feel incredibly vulnerable, hence the playing small.
There is also another reason playing small feels easier that I didn’t understand at first: playing small keeps us free from the weight of our own potential. Mhm, read that one again cause it got me too. Look, as long as your life is mostly unexpressed, it stays romantic and it stays theoretical. Your gifts remain protected by possibility just like your ideas remain untouched by reality and your power remains something you speak about in private rather than something you have to embody publicly. Potential is beautiful, but it is also a hiding place if it’s never in the room with you.
A lot of people are deeply attached to the promise of who they could be because becoming that person requires loss. It requires the loss of excuses, the loss of invisibility, the loss of old narratives, the loss of being the one who almost did it. There is grief in taking up space because every expansion asks something else to die. It requires killing the people pleaser inside of you, same with the hyper-palatable act we put on, the one who keeps waiting, the one who only speaks when being understood is guaranteed. Essentially self-erasure .. with some goodness.
Thing is, at some point, the pain of staying small starts to outweigh the fear of being seen and that’s when a person begins to shift. Being honest about how much energy it takes to withhold yourself or to make yourself easier to handle. Take a second and think on it (and be honest), how much of your life has been built around avoiding discomfort rather than actually living? The honesty part is what breaks the spell.
Once you can admit that smallness is not always humility, wisdom, timing, or discernment, you can begin to ask a more useful question:
What am I protecting myself from by staying hidden?
The answers can vary and range from rejection to change to success to being misunderstood. Whatever it is, that is the real work. Taking up space begins with becoming more available to the truth of what you actually want, more available to the range of what you can hold, and more available to the discomfort that visibility sometimes brings with it.
It asks you to stay present when your life begins to meet you at a larger scale than you are used to inhabiting. From there, taking up space stops being something theatrical and starts becoming something embodied. It can look as simple as saying the thing clearly the first time, letting your work be seen before it feels finished, asking for what you want without building a case around it, or allowing yourself to be excellent without immediately softening that excellence so that it lands more comfortably for someone else. Over time, it becomes a practice of learning that being visible and being safe do not have to exist in opposition to one another because that is really what this is: a practice.
I can guarantee the following if nothing else: you do not become someone who takes up space overnight. You become someone who can tolerate being seen a little more each day. You tell the truth in one conversation where you would have once minimized yourself.
Sometimes it begins quietly: you share the idea instead of holding it back or wear the thing you almost talked yourself out of wearing. It can look like you submitting the pitch before you can over-prepare it into disappearance or you allow a room to register your presence without rushing to soften yourself for its comfort. The small start can be you stop treating your desires like interruptions to whatever everyone else is already doing. Over time, the nervous system starts to recognize that expression is survivable. The body adjusts and the self learns it does not collapse when it’s being witnessed. Life begins to reorganize around honesty instead of avoidance. That is the moment when space changes and stops feeling like something that has to be granted to you and starts feeling like something you are allowed to inhabit. The shift is subtle at first, but it matters, because it changes where authority over your life actually lives.
People can encourage you all day long, but if somewhere inside you still believe your fullness is inconvenient, arrogant, or too much, you will keep adjusting yourself down to a version that feels easier to manage. Taking up space begins when you stop waiting to feel fully permitted before existing as you are. It often starts with the quieter realization that your life cannot really meet you while you are still retreating from it and that the smallness that once protected you may no longer be where your actual life is happening. Your life tends to live in the moments where you allow yourself to be known rather than interpreted at a distance. It’s where your work carries your name without apology, your voice sounds like your voice instead of the version you think will land best, and your body is allowed to take up the room it naturally takes up. It’s when and where you stop negotiating away parts of your depth, ambition, sensitivity, brilliance, or desire just to remain easy to receive.
This kind of expansion is rarely dramatic. Always remember that it is usually quieter than people expect and more honest than it is impressive. It’s more for you than anyone else and that’s what it’s meant to be. What it asks is that you stop collapsing yourself in advance of being met. Over time, that shift changes the texture of your life, because you begin to move through it as someone who no longer assumes their existence has to be reduced in order to belong inside it.
Big hugs,
Marr.