There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from making yourself too small for too long.
You know the feeling. You have a thought in a room full of people, and you swallow it. You have an ambition that feels almost embarrassing in its size, so you trim it down before you share it with anyone. You achieve something remarkable and immediately deflect the compliment because somewhere along the line you learned that taking up space — real, unapologetic space, was not something people like you were supposed to do.
This is a human experience. But it lands with particular weight on African women and men who grew up in environments where humility was demanded, ambition was policed, and the loudest thing you were permitted to be was useful to others.
Where the Shrinking Begins
It rarely starts with a single dramatic moment. It starts early and quietly. A comment about a child who asks too many questions. A classroom where confidence in some is called leadership, and the same confidence in others is called arrogance. A home where certain dreams are celebrated, and others are quietly discouraged before they have a chance to grow.
By the time most of us reach adulthood, the shrinking is so deeply habitual that it no longer feels like a choice. It feels like personality, and like who you are.
But it is not who you are. It is what you were taught, and what was taught can be unlearned.
What Shrinking Actually Costs You
We talk a lot about what people gain when they play small — safety, approval, and the comfort of not making anyone uncomfortable. But we rarely talk honestly about what it costs.
It costs you your ideas. The ones you never shared because you talked yourself out of them before they had a chance to breathe.
It costs you your relationships. Because when you cannot be fully yourself with someone, what you have is not intimacy, it is performance.
It costs you your time. Years spent becoming who everyone else needed you to be, while the person you actually are waits patiently in the background, hoping you will eventually come back for them.
And perhaps most painfully, it costs you your sense of what is possible. When you spend long enough making yourself small, you begin to believe that small is all you are capable of.
Reclaiming Your Space
Reclaiming your space does not mean becoming loud, aggressive or difficult. It means deciding, quietly, firmly, and with full awareness, that you are allowed to exist fully. That your thoughts deserve to be spoken, that your ambitions deserve to be pursued, and that your needs deserve to be named.
It means speaking without apologising for speaking. It means writing the book, starting the business, and having the conversation you have been avoiding. It means sitting at the table without spending the entire time wondering if you deserve to be there.
It is not a single decision made once. It is a decision made again and again, every time the old habit of shrinking tries to reassert itself.
A Note to the Person Reading This
If you recognise yourself in any of this, or if you have spent years being carefully, exhaustingly small, I want you to know something.
The world did not become better because you made yourself less. The people who benefited from your smallness were not made greater by it. And the version of you that you have been quietly suppressing, the one with the full voice and the large dreams and the unapologetic presence, they have not gone anywhere.
They are still here. They have always been here.
And they are done waiting.
What is one space in your life where you know you have been shrinking? Share in the comments, let’s talk about it.
