Waiting for permission

I raised my hand in a meeting last week. A casual meeting. No formal structure, no talking stick, no agenda. Just people chatting around a table. And I raised my hand.

Nobody said anything. They just looked at me and waited. Which was kind. But also. I’m forty-seven years old.

I go to a women’s circle once a month. It’s in my joga class, a super cosy place with my joga teacher, candles, dim lights, the whole thing. And I am completely fine there. I talk. I cry sometimes. I feel like a whole person.

Because the rules are explicit. You sit in a circle. One person speaks. When she’s done, the next person goes. You know when it’s your turn and you know when to stop. There is no guessing.

Everywhere else I am lost.

At meetings I interrupt people because I can’t tell when there’s a gap. Or I don’t speak at all because I can’t find one, the time where it’s ok to speak. It happens that I zone out when too many people talk at once and then someone asks me a direct question and I have no idea what the last ten minutes were about. At someone’s barbecue I say something too heavy for the vibe and watch faces rearrange, and than I don’t get invited anymore. Or I sit in a corner and someone comes over to check if I’m okay and I say I’m fine. Neither of us believes it. I learned to live with lonaliness. That’s a lie. I try to live with loneliness as if I have a choice.

I spent years calling this anxiety, you know ever since I was a child. My therapist called it anxiety. And it is, partly. But anxiety doesn’t switch off the second someone hands me a clear role. Put me in charge of the event and I’ll talk to everyone in the room. Give me a presentation slot and I can hold a crowd. The fear isn’t about speaking. It’s about not knowing when I’m allowed to.

I think I never absorbed the unspoken rules for when you can take up space. Other people seem to have got them through osmosis. They just jump in. Mid-sentence sometimes. And nobody minds. I have been watching people do this my whole life and I still don’t understand how they know.

The cruel part is that this waiting looks like not caring. Like I have nothing to say. It looks passive, maybe even aloof. It is the opposite of those things. Inside the silence I am composing eleven things I could contribute and discarding all of them because nobody asked.

I’ve started doing something small. When I catch myself waiting, I say in my head: I don’t need permission. Sometimes I even believe it. Last week I spoke in that meeting without raising my hand and it felt like shoplifting. Like I was getting away with something illegal. Nothing happened. Nobody was bothered. The world kept turning.

But the feeling didn’t go away. That little lurch in my stomach that says: you spoke without being asked. You took up space that wasn’t allocated to you.

I don’t have a fix for this. I have the sentence I repeat and the lurch I ignore and the slow, grinding work of convincing a forty-seven-year-old nervous system that it is allowed to exist without an invitation. Some days I manage it. Some days I sit with my hands in my lap.

I think a lot of us are sitting with our hands in our laps.