You Do Not Have to Earn the Right to Take Up Space

TL;DR: Girls are conditioned from childhood to earn their space — to be exceptional, agreeable, or useful before they are allowed to simply exist loudly. That conditioning has a cost. Here is what it looks like, where it comes from, and what a warrior queen who refused every version of it can teach you about your own life right now.

The Thousand Small Lessons

Nobody sat you down and said: you need to earn the right to exist. It was subtler than that. It was the 'shh, do not be so loud' at family dinners when your brother's volume went unchallenged. The way your opinions in class were met with more scepticism than the boy who said the same thing two minutes later. The relative who called you 'too much' in a tone that made it clear that was not a compliment.

It was the exhausting internal calculation every girl learns to run: am I being too much right now? Too loud, too emotional, too ambitious, too direct, too visible? The calculation is automatic by the time you are twelve. By the time you are sixteen, it is a reflex.

And it is costing you more than you realise.

What 'Making Yourself Smaller' Actually Does

Research on adolescent girls consistently shows that the suppression of authentic self-expression — saying what you actually think, wanting what you actually want, occupying the physical and social space you actually need — is directly linked to lower academic confidence, higher rates of depression and anxiety, and poorer decision-making in relationships.

When you learn that your presence requires justification, you also learn that your needs are negotiable and other people's comfort is not. You become skilled at reading the room for what is acceptable and performing that version of yourself. You become less skilled at knowing what you actually think and feel — because you have been editing those things since before you were old enough to name what you were doing.

The girl who has made herself small for long enough stops knowing what she actually wants. That is the deepest cost. Not the lost opportunities — those are visible. The invisible cost is the disconnection from your own interior life.

How to Start Reclaiming Your Space

Notice the reflex before you act on it. Before you soften your opinion, apologise for your presence, or edit yourself into acceptability — pause. Notice the impulse. Ask: is this genuinely necessary, or am I just performing smallness out of habit? You do not have to override the habit immediately. Just naming it is the beginning.

Practice the unedited version in safe spaces first. A journal. A trusted friend. A community like this one. Saying the real thing in one safe space at a time gradually makes the real thing feel less dangerous. It was never actually dangerous. It just felt that way because you were taught it was.

Let other people manage their own discomfort. When you take up your appropriate space — speak your opinion, decline something that does not serve you, disagree with someone in authority — some people will be uncomfortable. That discomfort is theirs to manage. It is not your responsibility to preemptively shrink yourself to prevent it.

Find the women who take up space without apology and watch how they do it. Not to copy them exactly — but to internalise that it is possible. That the world does not end. That the discomfort passes. That what is on the other side of taking your space is far better than what is on the other side of permanently giving it up.

She Walked So We Could Run: Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi

In 1858, a 22-year-old queen tied her infant son to her back, took the reins of her horse in her teeth, and fought the British East India Company's forces at the siege of Jhansi. When the city fell, she did not surrender. She broke through the enemy lines at night and led her remaining forces to Gwalior, where she continued to fight. She died in battle. She was still 23.

Rani Laxmibai — Manikarnika Tambe by birth, renamed Lakshmibai upon marriage to the Maharaja of Jhansi — had been told by the British colonial administration that her kingdom was not hers to rule. When her husband died without a biological heir, they invoked the Doctrine of Lapse to annex Jhansi. They offered her a pension and told her to leave.

She said — in words that have been recorded and repeated for over 160 years — 'Main apni Jhansi nahi doongi.' I will not give up my Jhansi.

She trained an army that included women. She learned to fight on horseback, to use guns, to strategise under siege conditions. She had been trained from childhood — unusually for the era — in combat, horse riding, and physical discipline. When the moment came that demanded everything she had, she had it.

General Hugh Rose, who commanded the British forces against her, described her as the most dangerous of all the rebel leaders. A British general. Describing a 23-year-old woman. As the most dangerous person he faced in the entire rebellion.

What Laxmibai refused was not just the British annexation of Jhansi. She refused the fundamental premise that she did not belong in the space she occupied. That her authority was not legitimate. That a woman's power was contingent on male approval or colonial permission. She refused every version of that premise with her life.

You are not being asked to fight a colonial army. But you are being asked — every day, in a hundred small moments — to decide whether you belong in the spaces you occupy. To decide whether your opinions deserve to be said, your ambitions deserve to be pursued, your needs deserve to be met.

Laxmibai already answered that question. The answer is yes. Always yes.

What is one space in your life where you have been making yourself smaller than you need to? Tell us in the comments. This is a safe place to say it.

— Daughters of India