If you haven't listened to Lily Myers' spoken word poem "Shrinking Women," you can listen here or read a transcript here. It's only about three and a half minutes long, and it'll change your life. The first time I heard it, I cried all over my laptop. Like ugly, Kim-K-would-be-proud cried.

To quickly summarize it, Lily Myers' slam poem is all about women's place in society. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, there's a lot more to it than that. It's a moving piece that sounds like music that exemplifies something that all women know: Women are taught to be less. Yes, to be less, you read that right. In size and in opinion and in every aspect of our lives.

This week, I wanted to break down some of the lines of the poem and talk about what they mean and why it's important to recognize this behavior in society and in ourselves.

Myers opens the poem by talking about her mother.

"Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass. She says she doesn't deprive herself, but I've learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork. In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate."

This is a behavior I have noticed in the women in my life and a behavior I have found myself imitating. Every woman in my life is dieting or has dieted, my own mother included. Every woman in my life is constantly conscious about her weight and how she looks to everyone else, regardless of whether or not she is happy. I don't think they know if they're happy or unhappy because they have been taught for so long to be unhappy. Body positivity is not a big practice in most families.

She then talks about her father.

"She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she's 'crazy about fruit.'"

These lines are interesting to me. As her mother learns to take up less space, her father takes up more. Not just physically, though, because he speaks for his new girlfriend, who is also learning to take up less space (thus her diet). He takes up the space she cannot have, but he also says that words she cannot say.

Then her brother Jonas steps onto the scene.

"My brother never thinks before he speaks. I have been taught to filter. 'How can anyone have a relationship to food?' he asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs. I want to say: we come from difference, Jonas, you have been taught to grow out, I have been taught to grow in. You learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much. I learned to absorb. I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself."

This section really illustrates how much we learn from our parents. It's a perfect example of what saying things like "he's a growing boy" can do. Jonas has learned from his father how to wax while his sister wanes, to borrow her earlier metaphor. But it's taken a step farther with her brother: He takes more space in a conversation as well. He has learned to speak his mind, while Lily has learned to keep to herself.

She later reflects on how these dynamics not only affect her home life, but her school life as well.

"I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word 'sorry.' I don't know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza..."

This is the part of the piece that speaks to me the most. I also start all of my questions in class with the word "sorry." But why? Why am I not entitled to my space? It all circles back to how women are raised by women seeing how little space our mother take up, and how little space we are allowed to have.

Women are allowed in every aspect of society - college, the workplace, the military - but our mindsets haven't quite caught up. We are unsure of ourselves in these places we have so long been barred from entering.

So thank you, Lily Myers, for articulating so clearly something that I have always known to be true, but could never find the words to explain. Thank you for shouting about silence and showing women everywhere that it's okay to feel this way, but you can change these feelings by acknowledging them. I refuse to apologize for asking questions in class anymore. I refuse to make my body image my number one priority.

I refuse to shrink.