Take Up Space And Live
A health crisis can make you think about a lot of things.
Earlier this year I had a health scare. I’ll write about that later. Once I have more perspective on it. It’s part of why I’ve been posting less often here. For now I’m OK, being treated, recovering well, exercising again, travelling, and living life normally.
And, as you can imagine, I’m tremendously grateful for the love and support of friends and family. And the wonders of modern medical science.
It’s a bit of a cliché that these kinds of experiences make us think hard about our lives. The choices we’ve made. The people around us. How we spend our time.
That happened to me.
In particular, I found myself wondering about the space I take up in the world.
The pandemic shrank our lives. My life has continued to feel small ever since. Things got back to normal on the surface. Airports, cinemas, and restaurants are part of life again. But there’s this kind of shadow over everything. Like the way the air feels turbulent after an argument or a fight. We might have normality, but we don’t have peace.
I still haven’t unpacked my life since leaving Tokyo in 2019. And my social and professional world is smaller. I guess we all shuffled our decks and threw away the jokers.
Brené Brown suggests that the names of the people who really matter to us can fit on a postage-stamped-sized piece of paper. Bob Goff is even more blunt, saying it’s six or seven because that’s all that fits around a hospital bed.
But those of us in the arts crave a bigger space than that intimate circle of love. We yearn to make a dent, a mark, or at the very least a scratch in the cultural landscape. We want to take up space.
But some of us have been denied the space we deserve. Subjected to prejudice, be it racism, sexism, or some other kind of phobic hatred, we’ve been told that we don’t belong, that we need to be silent, invisible, or simply gone. We might’ve had people in our lives who made us feel small. Or grown up in a culture that presses down on us. The tall poppy that needs to be cut. The nail that needs to be hammered down. The black sheep. The outsider.
Taking up the right amount of space is something I’ve struggled with since returning to Australia in 2022. When I lived in other places, I was the foreigner, and it was my task to learn the local customs. I calibrated myself and found my space. But now that I’m home, I can’t figure out how people queue or why they don’t. There doesn’t seem to be a correct side of the footpath. Voices are always loud, and phones are always ringing and on speaker. And in a hypermasculine culture, conflict will always be near the surface and freedom of thought will always be feared.
Being entitled to take up space carries with it the responsibility to allow others to take up their space as well. But if everyone goes through their lives taking up as much space as possible all the time, then our edges constantly crash against each other. It’s a harsh, loud, and violent way to live.
We have old-fashioned and unpopular words to describe this. Decorum, grace, propriety. The language of respect. This was the stuff of manners and courtesy. Of a shared sense of responsibility for making society better.
It was also connected to an ideal of freedom. If we make room for everyone, then everyone can express themselves. We no longer talk about manners, and yet society feels ever more conformist. I look at my own generation, Gen X, the so-called rebels, and we all dress the same, decorate our houses the same way, and so often listen to the same music we listened to as children. How did we become fossils?
Freedom today seems to be something more like “do whatever you want”. But “do whatever you want” isn’t really the same as freedom if social friction is pushing us towards conformity and sanding off everything about ourselves that makes us feel special and unique.
Do whatever you want is also a terrifying moral disposition to take towards life. Look at our public sphere today: the shameless greed, the unapologetic lying, the pillaging of intellectual and creative property to train so-called artificial intelligence, the accelerated pressure on natural resources in denial of the present reality of climate change, the refusal to put our full weight behind ending sexual abuse and domestic violence, and the acceptance of genocide. We need more morality, not less. We need some lines that cannot be crossed. A lot less grey. And a return to the core ideas of human rights, namely the space for everyone to live and thrive.
We should take up our space with verve and gusto. And in a way that allows others to take up their space also. Not either/or. Both/and. We should be able to step out into the world without needing to step on anyone while doing so. As the poet Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I was prone, when younger, to seeing the people who wanted to deny me space as pure villains. To be sure, they were. But now it is easier to also see their pain. The jealousy behind the jesting, the feelings of inadequacy that fuelled the attempts to control, the fear that led them to force others to conform. They couldn’t regulate themselves, and so they tried to regulate others. They hated what they saw when they looked inside, and so they directed their hate towards everyone else, especially anyone who seemed “different” .
It’s amazing where our thoughts go when our health feels fragile. All these ideas spiralled through my mind as I took up exactly one seat of space in a hospital emergency waiting room. Hours alone to replay experiences, to compare living in different countries, to contrast the way different people I’ve met took up space in their lives and made it possible for others to do the same. All while wondering how much longer I would be taking up space in this world and what to do with that time.
Life is tension. Decisions with imperfect knowledge. Movement with imperfect bodies. We try to thrive in a culture that doesn’t quite fit and around people who don’t always understand us.
It can be tempting to give up and live small. But I have something left to offer the world. And I can’t do that if I don’t take up some space as well. The right amount. Without apology.
Later, I drove home through a quiet late-autumn night. I felt relieved that my prognosis was not terrible. But I was still facing uncertainty about what subsequent tests might reveal. And I knew that recovery might take its own time.
