Asha and I sat up until the small hours on Sunday to binge the final three episodes of Tip Toe.
If you haven’t come across it yet – it’s Russell T Davies’ new Channel 4 drama, set in Manchester’s Gay Village, about two neighbours who’ve lived side by side for 15 years while the world around them gets uglier and uglier, until everything unravels into something you can’t look away from, even when part of you wants to.
I’d been championing it right up until the last episode. The performances are something else – Alan Cumming and David Morrissey doing career-best work, both of them. When the ending came, I sat with Asha for a while not quite knowing what to do with what I was feeling.
It wasn’t just that I was moved, or angry, though I was both. It was something older than that. Something that lives in a part of me that I don’t always have easy access to – the part that’s been paying attention since long before most people started caring about any of this.
I’m old enough to remember Section 28. I wrote about it as a journalist, deeply closeted, doing my best to cover LGBTQIA+ issues with integrity while absolutely terrified about what would happen if anyone worked out that I was one of them. I marched when I came out. I remember the emergency services calls I’d make in my early career – one in particular where a house had been firebombed because two women lived there, and the firefighter who told me they’d brought it on themselves. I remember Matthew Shepherd. I remember interviewing people about hate crimes and then going home unable to talk about why it had affected me the way it had.
Asha and I have been together since 1998, and the landscape we’ve built our life in hasn’t always been welcoming – we’ve had abuse in the street, been followed by strangers quoting scripture at us because someone caught us squeezing each other’s hand for a second, I’ve been physically backed up against walls, received death threats, had to go into hiding. None of that is ancient history.
So when I watch something like Tip Toe, I’m not watching it the same way everyone else is watching it. I’m watching it as someone who has lived a version of the story being told.
When that ending came – that particular line, that particular question left hanging without any counterweight – I didn’t feel seen. I felt that old, sick, familiar thing: the weight of a world that has never quite decided whether people like me get to exist without conditions attached.
I’m not going to pull the drama apart here, because that’s not what this space is for. What I want to talk about is something that’s been sitting underneath all of it since Sunday night – something that applies to everyone reading this, wherever you’re coming from.
The calculation.
Leo – the character at the heart of Tip Toe – spends the whole series running a calculation that I recognise in my bones. How much of myself can I show here? How loud is it safe to be? How much space can I take up before it costs me something? If I push back, what happens, and if I stay quiet, what happens instead? How do I move through this space without making someone uncomfortable enough to make things harder for me?
That calculation is exhausting. It’s a tax that gets levied on anyone who has ever felt that their full self might be a bit too much for the room.
Here’s what I want to say to you – reading this, probably at a kitchen table or on your phone somewhere, running your own version of that same calculation about your business:
You are doing it. I’d be astonished if you weren’t.
Maybe not about your identity. Maybe it’s the opinions you water down before you post them because you don’t want to put someone off, or your prices kept lower than they should be because charging what you’re worth feels dangerous and presumptuous. Maybe it’s the values you leave out of your content because they feel like a risk, or simply how visible you allow yourself to be – how often you show up, how fully, how honestly – with a story running underneath that says smaller is safer.
I spent years in that place. Useful, warm, professional – but not quite all of me, not quite all the time, because all of me felt like something I needed to ration carefully.
What shifted it – gradually, not all at once, and not without cost – was understanding that the version of me I’d been protecting the world from was actually the version of me that could do the most good in it.
The people who need you most are not looking for the managed version. They’re looking for the real one – someone who’s been somewhere hard and come back with something worth saying, who shows up as a whole person and gives the people around them permission to do the same. When you make yourself smaller, you don’t just limit yourself. You limit everyone who needed to find you and couldn’t, because you were too busy trying not to take up too much space.
Something to try this week.
Where are you running the calculation? Get specific – is it your prices, your opinions, your story (the real one, not the edited highlights), your visibility on a platform you’ve been putting off, the offer you keep meaning to make but don’t, because what if? Write it down, and then ask yourself what would become possible in your business, and in your life, if you stopped treating your full self as a liability.
You don’t have to have the answer right now. Just keep the door open instead of closing it the way we’ve been taught to close it – fast and efficiently, before anyone notices it was ever ajar.
It’s Pride Month, and whatever that means to you personally, the spirit underneath it – the hard-won, still-not-finished act of refusing to shrink yourself to make others more comfortable – belongs to all of us. The world will always have opinions about how much space you should occupy, and whether you let it set the limit is entirely up to you.
#UnleashYourAwesome