On Taking Up Space
It’s a Monday in late March and I’m spinning around in my chair in the PhD study room, lip-synching to Susannah Joffe’s “Shit Out of Luck” as my flowing white sleeves billow in the artificial breeze. Fragments of sunlight stream through the window at odd angles, their path impeded by the architectural mishap of this building’s design. I’m six months into my PhD, and as cliché as it sounds, I don’t know how the time passed so quickly.
In the early days, I was so deliberate. I had rules for myself, like never pass up an opportunity to socialise, take everything slowly, work for eight hours a day. The rules faded over time, whether from ease or exhaustion.
Before I started my PhD, it was my entire personality. I had one goal, and it sustained me for years as I fought to make it happen. The question I so rarely get to answer is: what happens after you achieve your goals? Getting into a PhD programme is just the beginning, and for me the goal was the fracture of my old life and the creation of this new one. The goal was the opportunity, and I knew that what came next was not something I could plan for.
There’s a certain listlessness that follows achievement. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow now paves the path to your next destination, but you are still on the road. The journey never stops. After each goal comes a new one. For me, one of the biggest changes has been my confidence levels. In order to get into this PhD, I had to believe in myself so strongly. I had to advocate for myself and prove that I deserved to be here. Self-doubt was not an option. Now that I’m here though, I have doubts aplenty. Not doubts about the PhD itself, I believe in myself in the long term. But the smaller insecurities crept back in. The usual cacophony of social ineptitude and academic anxiety, the day-to-day struggles that are oh-so-human if I take a step back and remove my self-consciousness from the equation.
Part of the listlessness comes from the lack of a unifying goal. I have big goals, but they are further away, harder to achieve. They remain safely in the realm of the hypothetical while I inhabit my inner world for days or weeks, embraced by fantasy that is free from struggle or sacrifice. I have spent most of my life in a fantasy world, whether that be writing novels, reading them, or creating intricate daydreams to play in the background of my brain as I go about my daily life.
Every few years I stop and ask myself what I need in life, and I always come to the same conclusions: love, friendship, feeling comfortable in my body, an academic outlet, and a creative one. There were years where I had only one of these things, and now I have at least half. But when the creative outlet is lacking, my brain falls off kilter. All my intensity, all my flare and drama, it needs a vessel.
The other day, I sat on the grass in Gordon Square Gardens, gossiping with a friend, looking behind myself every two seconds because I was paranoid someone I knew would overhear. Later on, I told her how moving to London made me feel like I was coming back to life. Sometimes I underestimate how little of myself was left in those last few years in Glasgow. I thought I grew out of the messier parts of myself, that my complacency was maturity. It wasn’t maturity, it was depression. My frontal lobe did not finish growing one day and transform me from a messy bitch who loves drama into a mature, sensible woman. It was depression. I gossip with friends old and new, and it all comes back to me. The thrill of having a story to tell. It takes me back to talking my friends’ ears off about a juicy new crush, or saying “don’t tell anyone but…” and passing along the stories from a friend of a friend in hushed voices. It’s not *great* that this is what makes me feel most like myself, but God it’s good to be reminded that I am in fact a passionate person, messy and dramatic and capable of taking up space.
It all comes back to the spaces I’m afraid to occupy. Taking up space is inherent in creativity. I remember the old days (I say as if I am 72 and not 27), watching the other members of my improv group, how comfortable they seemed in their bodies when they were performing. I think I had that comfort too, once. Comfort with silliness, comfort in filling the space around me. Creativity is so often associated with discomfort, with excavating the painful parts of oneself. But for me, it has always been a way of taking up space. Why else would I still be writing blogs at this age? The attention-seeker buried within me lives on.
I’ve been writing my current novel for over two years now, and I don’t know what to do with it. It started out with such a simple premise, and was a way of exploring parts of myself that didn’t get much screentime in real life. But for much of those two years, I had little inspiration from the world around me. The world-building was heavily influenced by my resentment of Glasgow, and by frequent conversations with my boyfriend about fascism. During that time, I didn’t know what was missing from my novel. It’s hard to find creative inspiration when you are not going out and living your life. The biggest change in my life since moving to London is that I am surrounded by people again. Even through all my layers of awkwardness, I have friends here, I have a life here. I feel human here. That is what my novel was lacking.
As I grow further from the greyness of Glasgow, I forget that it is still the reason for the dullness and insecurity that lives on within me. I see the shadows, the darkness within myself, and I assume it is a character flaw. Over the past six months I have slowly begun to unravel the grey threads from my tapestry, replace them with colourful strands. But the picture still looks grim, if you’re unaware that it’s a work in progress. Every so often I look back at old photos, distant versions of myself with her dyed hair and purple clothes. Google Photos asks me if I want to remove the greyness from Glasgow, brighten the photos, alter my memories. I lie to myself enough as it is, I don’t need technological assistance.
Oh, you thought the greyness was a metaphor?
The depths of my camera roll are an uncanny place. I have always looked a little bit off, in one way or another. Hair dyed too dark; clothes too bright. As I get older, I puzzle out the answers. Colour theory explains most of it. But when I looked back at these photos recently, I had to laugh. I realised that the reason I used to dye my hair dark brown and dress in all black is because those are traits I find attractive in other women, not things that suit my colouring.
I spent most of my late teens and early 20s trying to make myself physically and metaphorically smaller to be palatable to men. I felt like I was simultaneously too much and too little, never quite the right amount of woman, person, object. I didn’t feel like men viewed me as human, and I didn’t feel like my body or appearance belonged to myself. I was performance rather than person. I knew on some level that I was queer for much of my life, but it was a hypothetical that I could easily repress. And even when I felt comfortable identifying as bisexual when I was 24, it took so long to undo my mental programming around male validation and approval. Allowing this part of myself to exist and take up space slowly shattered the glass cage around me. The language of my queerness is still an ongoing negotiation, and labels don’t always account for the nuances of each person’s attractions or lack thereof. But acknowledging and accepting my queerness healed something within me. It changed the way I view myself. I spent so much of my life hating my appearance. Hating my height and my body shape, the way women are taught to do. But when you look at another woman and realise all the things you find attractive about her are things you hate about yourself, it makes you take a long hard look in the mirror. You picture yourself through someone else’s eyes. There is nothing more attractive than women who take up space, so why am I afraid to?
I started writing my current novel a couple of months after acknowledging my queerness. It’s a fantasy novel set in a fictional world and is centred on themes of magic-loss-as-metaphor-for-climate-change, art-as-a-liberatory-practice, and the-ever-growing-rise-of-fascism, but it’s ultimately about the fact that I find 30-something-year-old women in academia really hot. When I started writing this novel, my intention was to satirise my 20-year-old self, to exaggerate her intensity towards older women, to critique the power dynamic that comes from putting someone on so high a pedestal that you forget they’re a flawed human. The novel has changed so much that those themes are all but lost. Instead, it feels like an empty shell, a realist portrait of my misery in Glasgow, fleshed out in all its shades of grey.
I feel alive in London, and suddenly I can see my novel coming back to life too. Sure, my storytelling urges slip out in gossip and 10-minute voice notes to my friends. But a story is a story, and I finally have a good one to tell. For the first time in so long, there is a voice in my head demanding to take up space.
