Taking Up Space: Finding Our Place in a Hostile Galaxy (or Maybe Just Escaping to a Safer One)
I used to think “taking up space” meant being loud, confident, and unapologetic. The kind of woman who walks into a room like she owns the lease and possibly the moon. Turns out, that version of bravery is optional. Some days, especially lately, bravery looks like getting out of bed. Some days it looks like taking your kid to daycare while scanning your surroundings, faces, and vibes…running background threat assessments you never asked to be certified for. Some days it looks like wanting to pack a bag, grab your family, and quietly evaporate into another country, another timeline, or universe where trans women aren’t treated like a political threat.
Being afraid does not mean you are weak. It means you are paying attention. I don’t have the luxury of abstract fear. Mine is logistical. It’s calendar-based. It’s the kind of fear that asks, “How fast can we leave?” and “What does safety look like for my child?” and “How visible is too visible right now?” The world keeps telling us that bravery means staying put. Standing firm and never backing down. Never leaving. As if leaving is cowardice or somehow a moral failure.
That framing is bullshit.
Fear is information. Fear is your nervous system doing math faster than your conscious brain can. Fear is the part of you that loves yourself and your people enough to say, “Something is wrong here.” When fear hits our nervous system, we only think that the 2 types of common responses, fight, and flight, exist. Turns out, just like the gender binary, that’s false. There are actually multiple common fear responses; fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop (or shutdown).
Fight mode comes out as anger, arguing, defensiveness, or pushing back to regain control. Flight mode is the urge to escape to avoid the situation, over-busying yourself, procrastinating, or disappearing emotionally or physically. Freeze mode can feel like getting stuck: your mind goes blank, your body won’t move, and words don’t come out. Fawn mode is about staying safe through connection; people-pleasing, apologizing, agreeing, or becoming extra “easy” so conflict doesn’t happen (especially common when someone has experienced trauma). And flop/shutdown is what happens when overwhelm hits a limit: numbness, dissociation, exhaustion, or collapse. Your body essentially pulls the plug to protect you when it feels like there’s no way out. Knowing these other types of responses exist in my body has helped me get over my struggle with giving myself ‘permission’ to currently survive while I look for the exit.
We are taught that leaving means shrinking. That fawning is a form of weakness or complicity. But always having to face your fear isn’t what makes you brave. Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is what you do while fear sits next to you, tapping its foot, reminding you that the stakes are real. Sometimes, you get to choose how to respond to that fear sitting next to you (see response modes above ☝️).
We typically only hear about the folks that stay and fight. History books only write about the Marsha P Johnson’s of the world. It instills this guilt in me that says I have to stay and fight for a better future here. But historically, marginalized people have frequently survived by moving. By adapting and finding safer ground. By choosing life over symbolism. Like black Americans moving away from the Jim Crow south to other cities like Chicago, LA, NYC, or my hometown, Detroit. Or, the current migration of over 400,000 transgender people moving to safer areas. I should preface that safety doesn’t have to mean physically moving to another location. There are many of us that do not have the privilege to be able to pick up and move their life somewhere else. Safety can also be smaller, like leaving a relationship, a church group, or just choosing to stay home today. There's this pressure in queer communities, especially trans communities, to be visible all the time. To be activists all the time. To never back down, never hide, never compromise. While I agree that visibility saves lives and that representation matters, I also believe that safety allows us to take up more space. No matter how big or small that safety may be, you can't take up space if you're not safe. Or more accurately, you can, but you'll likely destroy yourself in the process. When you are safe, you can breathe. When you can breathe, you can build. And building is one of the most radical ways to take up space there is. You are not abandoning the fight by choosing safety. You are preserving yourself so you can exist long enough to continue the fight for the long haul. Safety allows us to stare fear in the eyes and say “You don’t get to end me”.
Safety isn't cowardice. Safety is strategic. Safety is how you survive to keep taking up space. When I choose not to wear my brave pants every time I leave my house, I'm not disappearing. I'm calculating. I'm making sure I live to plant my flag another day. Astronauts don’t prove they are brave by taking off their helmet in the vacuum of space. That’s not bravery, that’s suicide. Bravery is calculated risk-taking. It’s knowing when you need protection and not being ashamed to use it. My trans siblings who are moving to safer states right now? They're not running away. They're taking up space somewhere that will let them breathe. My friends who are going stealth for their own safety? Still taking up space! We all don't all have to be martyrs to matter.
My Coping Mechanism Involves…Aliens?
Honestly, I have a love/hate relationship with sci-fi. It can either captivate me or have me arguing at the screen or book. When I walk into a book store, my first instinct is to find the biographical section…not fiction. But more recently I have been feeling the gravitational pull from the sci-fi section. Even if a book or a show is a dud, I will tend to see it through now. I think that reason is becoming more clear now as I am searching for the exit. My default coping mechanism in times of intense stress is to mentally eject myself from the current reality. Give me a spaceship, a warp drive, a hoverboard…anything to help me escape to some galaxy far far away. But back here, on Earth, in this particular timeline, the reality is shifting my interests. Every single public interaction feels charged. Do I speak up? Do I stay quiet? Do I correct that misgendering, or do I just let it slide to avoid a confrontation? The internal calculus is exhausting. And sometimes, "taking up space" feels like a dangerous proposition. It feels like putting a target on your back when all you want to do is blend in, to become a ghost in the machine, to make it through the day without incident.
Sci-fi is an escape, yes. A way out when reality feels too sharp, too loud, and too hostile. But it’s also something else. It’s a rehearsal. A type of thought experiment. A place where difference is not only expected, but necessary. In sci-fi, the crew is typically never one thing. It’s rarely one species, one culture, one body type, one way of being. Everyone is strange to someone else, and somehow that’s the point. Survival depends on collaboration across difference. Progress depends on letting everyone exist fully, not just the ones who fit neatly into the dominant narrative. Every alien. Every android. Every augmented human. Every being that doesn’t quite belong anywhere else. They are all taking up space. Sci-fi lets us imagine a future where our existence is not debated, legislated, or explained away. A future where being different is not a liability, but an asset. A future where no one is asked to disappear for the comfort of others. When the present feels unbearable, imagining that future is not childish. It’s survival.
There's also something deeply appealing about the idea of wearing a protective barrier between you and the hostile environment trying to kill you. Space will literally make your blood freeze and your lungs explode. It is fundamentally incompatible with human life. And yet we looked at that and said, "Bet. Let me just build this really cool helmet and go anyway." That's what being trans in 2026 feels like to me…and we are only a week in! The environment is hostile. The atmosphere is toxic. The pressure is trying to crush you from all sides. So you build your helmet. Your helmet can be your community, chosen family, a therapist, HRT, or your chosen name, all of it creates this protective barrier that lets you survive in places that weren't built for you. Helmets are not a weakness. They're technology. They're innovation. They're how you take up space in impossible places.
Space is the ultimate metaphor for both distance and belonging. The moon is far away. Untouchable. Safe from a lot of the nonsense happening down here. And yet, when we planted a flag there, it wasn’t about ownership. It was about presence. About saying, “We were here. We did this. We exist beyond the limits we were told to accept.” An astronaut is anonymous. You can project yourself into it. Or not. It can be aspirational or comforting or quietly defiant. It doesn’t demand anything from you. It just reminds you that there are other worlds, other possibilities, other ways to exist in order to take up space.
We’re All Astronauts Now
If you are like me, reading this and feeling scared or torn about staying or going, you are not alone. If you are planning to stay, I hope you find strength, community, and moments of joy that remind you why. If you are planning to leave, I hope you find safety, relief, and the space to exhale fully for the first time in a long time. Every trans person, every queer person, every marginalized person trying to exist authentically in a world that doesn't want them…we're all just astronauts wearing our helmets, breathing our own air, surviving in hostile environments. We're all planting flags in impossible places and saying, "I was here. I existed. I mattered." And yeah, sometimes we need to retreat. Sometimes we need to get back in the shuttle and return to base, catch our breath, remember why we're doing this. The astronaut who ignores their oxygen levels doesn't win; they just die. The astronaut who monitors their resources, who knows when to retreat, who takes care of themselves, that's the astronaut who gets to plant more flags.
If you're exhausted from being brave, if you just want to escape for a while…I see you. Your survival is still resistance. Wear your helmet when you need to. Retreat when you must. Find your Starship, your rebellion crew, your TARDIS…whatever vessel carries you through the hostile environments of daily life. We are allowed to imagine futures where we are safe.The universe is vast and mostly empty, but we're here, filling it with our messy, complicated, beautiful lives. We are allowed to choose ourselves. Even if we have to go to the moon to do it.
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Hire The Dolls
I've been in corporate America long enough to know how the game is played. Fifteen years of conference rooms, performance reviews, and carefully worded emails have taught me exactly how much you can say before people start getting "uncomfortable." And honestly? It’s exhausting making everyone comfortable while i’m out here just trying to survive.
The numbers don't lie, and they're fucking grim. According to the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, found an 18% unemployment rate among trans respondents, up from 15% in 2015, while general population rates were much lower (e.g., 8% non-trans adults in a 2022 KFF survey). The same survey found that more than one-third (34%) of trans people are experiencing poverty. For trans women of color, every single statistic gets worse. These aren't abstractions or talking points for me. These are people I know. People in my DMs asking if my company is hiring because they've been job searching for eight months. People choosing between rent and hormones. People sleeping on couches because their family kicked them out and they can't afford first and last month's deposit.
You want to “Protect the Dolls”? Get us housed. Get us employed. Get us healthcare that doesn't require us to drive three hours and pay out of pocket because insurance won't cover it. Because here's the thing about equity versus just protection: protection is reactive. Equity is structural. Protection says "don't hurt us." Equity says "give us the same shot at stability everyone else gets."
I kept thinking about Rosie the Riveter. That whole "we can do it" moment when women had to prove they could handle jobs everyone swore they couldn't. And Christ, that's exactly where we are today. History repeats. Except this time we're not just proving we can do the work, we're proving we deserve to exist in the building. That we can use the same bathroom without it becoming a federal case. That our names on our email signatures won't cause some VP to have a meltdown. That we're not a "liability" or a "distraction" or whatever euphemism HR uses this week. We're doing the work while watching companies plaster rainbows everywhere in June and then go dead silent when another state passes legislation to erase us. We're doing it while calculating exactly how out we can be without losing everything we've built.
I've watched this play out in real time. I've seen incredibly talented people passed over because the hiring manager had "concerns." I've watched companies tout their diversity initiatives while somehow never quite getting around to actually hiring more trans people like me. I've sat in meetings where leadership congratulated themselves for having pronouns in Slack profiles while doing absolutely nothing to address the fact that our healthcare plan excludes trans-related care.
This is why I keep coming back to equity. Not equality…equity; which addresses the fundamental barriers that keep us from accessing the same opportunities as everyone else. It means fixing hiring practices that screen us out before we even get an interview. It means healthcare that covers what we actually need. It means housing policies that don't allow discrimination. It means pay equity and advancement opportunities and not having to be three times as qualified to be considered half as worthy.
If you're trans and you're struggling right now, if you've been job searching for months and getting nowhere, if you're exhausted from having to prove yourself over and over, I need you to hear this: you're not the problem. You're not broken. You're not unemployable. The system is designed to keep us out, and that's not on you. You've been doing everything right in a structure built to make you fail.
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Shape Shifter: A Reflection On Becoming
Every single day of my life, I'm assembling and reassembling the face I show the world, trying to figure out which pieces are safe to display and which ones need to stay hidden in the box. That's what "Shape Shifter" is really about. It's about survival. It's about the exhausting dance we do when we can't afford to be ourselves.
I've been staring at this design for a week now, the one I call "Shape Shifter." It's a human face made entirely of puzzle pieces, each one holding a different feature, a wing tipped eye, lips painted bold, an ear, a brow. Some pieces fit together. Others hover at the edges, not quite connecting. The outer perimeter remains incomplete, deliberately so. Above it all, the title itself is fractured, the letters separated like they're still searching for their place.
People keep asking me what it means. The truth is, I created it because I'm tired of explaining myself in words. I'm forty years old. I'm a mother. I'm queer. I'm trans. Every single day of my life, I'm assembling and reassembling the face I show the world, trying to figure out which pieces are safe to display and which ones need to stay hidden in the box.
That's what "Shape Shifter" is really about. It's about survival. It's about the exhausting dance we do when we can't afford to be ourselves.
The Art of Code Switching
There's this term that gets thrown around a lot in social justice circles: code switching. It refers to the way people alter their behavior, speech, or appearance depending on their environment. For many of us in marginalized communities, it's not a choice…it's a survival mechanism. I learned to code switch before I even had the language to name what I was doing.
When I walk into a public restroom, I run through a mental checklist. Voice pitch. Posture. Eye contact. How I'm dressed that day. Whether I remembered to cover the stubble I can't quite afford to have lasered away yet. I calculate risk in microseconds. Will someone clock me? Will they say something? Will they do more than say something? These aren't paranoid fantasies. These are questions based on lived experience, on news reports, on the stories shared in hushed tones at support group meetings.
The puzzle pieces with shades of pink know how to navigate certain spaces. The pieces with shades of blue know how to navigate others. I'm constantly swapping them out, reading the room, shapeshifting into whatever version feels safest in the moment. It's exhausting. It's also necessary. According to the 2024 U.S. Transgender Survey, nearly half of transgender people reported being verbally harassed in public spaces within the past year because of their gender identity. More than one in ten reported being physically attacked. These aren't abstract statistics to me. They're Tuesday afternoon at the grocery store. They're every time I need to use a public facility. They're the reason I sometimes choose not to leave my house at all.
So I shift. I adjust. I balance the shapes that let me move through the world with the least amount of friction, the smallest target on my back, but also allow me to breathe. Here's the thing nobody tells you about constant shapeshifting…you start to forget what your actual shape is.
The Weight of Definitions
One of the puzzle pieces in my design has heavy eye makeup. Another has a traditionally "masculine" brow. They sit side by side, neither one canceling out the other, both part of the same incomplete face. I did that on purpose because I'm so damn tired of the binary.
"What makes a woman?" "What makes a man?" These questions haunt me, haunt all of us, especially in the middle of the night when I can't sleep because I'm scrolling through news articles about another piece of anti-trans legislation. The lawmakers writing these bills seem to have very clear answers. A woman is XX chromosomes. A woman is a uterus. A woman is whatever they've decided she is, and anything outside that narrow definition is a threat that must be legislated away.
But then I think about the women I know. Cis-women who can't have children, women with hormonal imbalances, women who bleach their facial hair, women who are tall or broad-shouldered or deep-voiced, women who never wear makeup, women who do. Are they not women because they don't fit every stereotype? Of course not. So why is the measure different for me? I spent years trying to perform femininity "correctly." I watched makeup tutorials until my eyes crossed. I studied the way women moved, spoke, gestured. I practiced a different laugh. I bought clothes that hurt. I apologized for taking up space. Still, it never felt like enough. There was always another box to check, another standard to meet, another way I was failing at being what others expected a woman to be.
The puzzle pieces in "Shape Shifter" don't match conventional expectations, and they're not meant to. The lips sectioned off to have lipstick and no lipstick isn't a mistake or a compromise. It's the reality of gender expression for many of us. It's the acknowledgment that these categories we've been handed are far too small to contain the full spectrum of human experience. But the world demands we squeeze ourselves into them anyway, and suffer the cognitive dissonance of that requirement. Being torn between authenticity and safety, between self-expression and survival is part of what the incomplete face represents.
The Ongoing Process
Here's what I wish someone had told me before I came out: being transgender isn't a journey with a destination. There's no finish line where you finally become yourself and then get to rest. It's an ongoing process of discovery, adjustment, and rediscovery. It's rebuilding yourself piece by piece, and sometimes having to start over when pieces don't fit the way you thought they would. It’s the incomplete puzzle in my design. I'm not finished. I might never be finished. I'm trying to make peace with that.
I came out in my thirties, after decades of trying to make the wrong puzzle pieces fit. I was married. I had a good job. Close friends. I had built an entire life around being someone I wasn't. Coming out meant detonating that life. It meant watching relationships dissolve. It meant explaining to my family why their child was changing, knowing they would never fully understand. It meant starting hormone therapy and feeling my body finally begin to align with my internal sense of self while simultaneously grieving everything I was losing.
People think transition is about physical changes, and yes, there's that. But the harder work is internal. It's unlearning decades of shame. It's building new neural pathways around self-worth. It's figuring out which parts of yourself were genuine and which were just survival mechanisms you mistook for personality traits. Some days I feel like I'm making progress. I look in the mirror and slowly begin to recognize the person looking back. Other days I feel like I'm assembling myself from scratch all over again, trying to remember which pieces go where. The shapeshifting isn't just external anymore. It's internal too. That might be the most exhausting part of all.
The Cost of Visibility
The statistics on transgender mental health are devastating, and they're getting worse. According to The Trevor Project's 2023 National Survey, 41% of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered suicide in the past year. Let that sink in. Nearly half of trans kids thought about ending their lives. It's not because being transgender is inherently traumatic. It's because of how we're treated. It's because of the legislation that frames our existence as dangerous. It's because of the rhetoric that paints us as predators, threats, and moral panics. It's because kids are watching adults debate whether they deserve basic rights, healthcare, and dignity.
When I was working on "Shape Shifter," I read about yet another state proposing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Then another proposing restrictions on bathroom access. Then another trying to make it illegal for teachers to use a student's chosen pronouns. Each new bill felt like another puzzle piece being forcibly removed from the design. Not just from the abstract design, but from trans people's ability to exist safely in public life. The American Psychological Association has documented the direct correlation between this legislative environment and increased mental health crises in transgender communities. When you're constantly told you're a problem to be solved rather than a person to be respected, it takes a toll. When you have to spend mental energy calculating risk just to exist in public spaces, it accumulates. When you watch your government debate your right to healthcare, to education, to use a bathroom, it grinds you down, piece by piece.
I think about this when I look at my own kid. I think about the world they're inheriting. I think about what it means to be a trans parent trying to model resilience when I'm barely holding myself together some days. On occasion I find myself breaking into tears while holding them. I think about the fact that my visibility, which I am fighting so hard for, now feels increasingly dangerous. That's what the missing pieces represent too. The parts of ourselves we can't show because it's not safe. The aspects of our identity we have to keep hidden to protect ourselves, our families, our livelihoods. We're incomplete not by choice but by necessity.
The Future
I created "Shape Shifter" because I needed to externalize what's been living in my head for years. I needed to show what it feels like to be constantly assembling and reassembling yourself. To be multiple things at once; feminine, masculine, somewhere in the middle, or none of the above. Visible and hidden, complete and unfinished. To be exhausted from the performance but unable to stop performing because the alternative is too dangerous. The design isn't beautiful in a conventional sense. It's not meant to be. It's fractured and incomplete and full of contradictions. That's the point. That's the reality for so many of us.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to: even incomplete, even fractured, it's still a face. It's still a person. The puzzle pieces might not match society's expectations, they might not form a conventional picture, but they're mine. They're me. I'm still here, still shifting, still surviving, still trying to find the pieces that fit. I'm forty years old. I'm a mother. I'm queer. I'm trans. I'm tired of apologizing for being all those things at once. I'm tired of hiding pieces of myself to make others comfortable. I'm tired of the constant calculation of risk. But, I'm also still here. Still creating. Still claiming space. "Shape Shifter" is my way of saying, "‘this is what survival looks like for me’. This is what it costs to exist in a world that doesn't have space for me. This is the ongoing work of becoming myself when myself doesn't fit the predetermined categories. This is what it means to be incomplete but still whole, still valid, still deserving of dignity and safety and the right to simply exist.
The puzzle isn't finished. Maybe it never will be. Every piece matters, even the ones that don't match, even the ones that society says shouldn't be there. Especially those ones. I made "Shape Shifter" because I needed to see my own reflection, fractured and incomplete as it is. Because I needed to remind myself that shapeshifting for survival doesn't make me less real. I needed something tangible to point to when people ask why I seem so exhausted, why I can't just "pick one" and stick with it, why being myself is so complicated. I’m just trying to assemble myself in a world that keeps insisting I use the wrong pieces.
If this post inspired you and want to support me as an independent artist, consider purchasing the t-shirt to show your support.
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