Nobody Ever Told Me I Was Allowed: A Lens on “Take Up Space” by Raymond Sjolseth

I was a guest on Resonance X, the podcast hosted by Raymond Sjolseth, when he told me a story I haven't stopped thinking about. It involves a ballet studio, a welcome bag, and one sentence that gave him chills: "Feel free to take up space."

That story became a song, "Take Up Space," from his album "Take Up Space". Read through the lens, the lyric holds one of the clearest portraits of how separation gets installed and how it can be reversed that I've come across in music.

The Welcome Bag

Ray took his nine-year-old daughter to a new ballet studio because she was ready to level up. A young woman greeted them, handed his daughter a welcome bag, gave them a tour, and showed her the room and the instructor. Then she added that his daughter should feel free to take up space.

Ray's reaction was immediate. He told me he thought, "What did you just give me permission to do?" Then he sat there silently rehearsing the phrase while his daughter settled in to watch.

I asked him how she took it. Ray said she barely noticed. It was natural to her, because she'd always had that permission. He never did, and his own upbringing leaned the other way.

One Sentence, Two Receptions

Same room, same words, two completely different ears. To the daughter it was ordinary hospitality. To her father it was a permission slip, and a permission slip tells you something. A rule must exist somewhere for permission to be needed.

In my work I describe the long stretch of human history before civilization as a time when belonging came with being born. Nobody issued it, so nobody could withhold it. (I wrote about that stretch in What If Humanity Were a 400-Page Book?.) What replaced it didn't arrive as a decree. It arrived as small instructions, repeated over years. Wait your turn. Don't be too much. Make yourself easy to have around. None of them cruel, all of them reasonable, and together they teach a person how much room to take.

I love the direction this lesson traveled, too. The younger person's ease showed the older one what he'd been missing.

Rehearsing the Sentence

Notice what Ray did in that studio. He repeated it. "Take up space. Take up space." He said it over and over in his head, and once he got home it began turning into a chorus that says it over and over again.

That detail matters to me, because repetition is how the separate view gets installed in the first place, a mechanism I traced in We've Always Had the Flint Blade and Spear. What gets built through repetition can be rebuilt through repetition. Ray's song does exactly that, one line at a time, for himself and for anyone who sings along.

Reading the Lyric

Here's where I get to do something I'm excited about. I'm going to share what I think is happening in Ray's lyric, and then I'm going to ask him. Let's see how close I come to the intention behind it. I'll have Ray on Connective Creativity soon to talk it through, and I expect he’ll tell me what I caught and what I missed!

The song opens with the absence: "nobody ever told me that I was allowed." I think what he might be pointing to is an unspoken rule that had been running for years, and the opening line is him naming it. It reads to me as a report, with no complaint in it.

Then Ray seems to become his own welcome desk: "I'm telling myself now the thing I never heard." The studio gave him an invitation, and I’m pretty certain that the song carries it further, to "I don't need anyone's blessing." I think they belong to the same arc, with the invitation cracking a door open and the song walking through.

The chorus is where I don't see any ambiguity. The dance studio moment offered permission, and the chorus is the sound of him accepting it. "I'm gonna take up space" is the yes. Then come the lines I most want to celebrate: "no more disappear / I am done with shrinking / I belong right here."

Each of those three lines names something the permission undid. The disappearing, the shrinking, the sense of not belonging. A man who sat in a ballet studio watching his young daughter while quietly rehearsing a sentence is now saying it out loud, and then adding that he's staying.

The verse that puts being whole ahead of being seen suggests to me that wholeness looks the same with an audience and without one. Mari and I keep coming back to that idea for our podcast.

And the phrase about taking back "the room I gave away of my own soul" makes me wonder about Ray’s perspective on how a room gets given away. I think it may rarely happen in a single decision. It tends to go in inches, taught by repetition and rewarded as good manners, so I'm curious to hear Ray’s thoughts behind how the song reverses it, all at once or, one small step at a time.

The one thing I'm curious to ask Ray is whether "I belong right here" feels to him like something he just earned or something he remembered. Through the lens, I'd say belonging was always the starting condition. I'd love to hear how it feels from the inside of his experience.

Try Ray's Question

Ray's first thought in that studio was a question. Try it on yourself this week.

First, picture someone handing you a welcome bag and saying, "Feel free to take up space." Notice what happens in your body before you think about it. Chills, a smile, a flinch, nothing at all?

Second, finish Ray's line in your own words: "The thing I never heard is ______." Then say it out loud, once, to yourself. What would change if you believed it?

Keep the Conversation Going

Listen to "Take Up Space" by Raymond Sjolseth on Spotify, and notice which line lands in your chest.

If you'd like to understand why a single sentence can reach so far back into a person, The Lens That Changes Everything walks through how these perceptions get built, and how they come undone. Ray will be joining Mari and me soon on Connective Creativity, where I'll find out how my reading of his lyric matches what he meant, and what I missed entirely. We'll share that conversation here when it's ready.