Same Crowd, Different Fire

Crowds, coherence, and the energy we choose to carry

This is Part 3 of a four-part series on identity, culture, and what watching Woodstock 99 cracked open in me decades later. This one’s about the rooms we choose, and why the same ingredients can produce chaos in one and coherence in another. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 if you’re just joining.

Twenty thousand people at the Tacoma Dome is not a small number; it’s packed full.

We’d already heard the opening act. Then a presentation. Then a forty-five-minute pause before the headliner came out, and it was getting late, and the room was full of families with young kids who’d been there a while. And the collective mood in that room was patience. Joy. People happy just to be there, waiting together without a hint of the edge you’d expect from twenty thousand tired bodies in one space.

I remember standing there feeling that energy land in my own body, and thinking about the contrast. What would it feel like to be standing in the middle of Woodstock 99 instead of here? Same basic ingredients, in a way. A crowd. Music built to move a body. A stretch of waiting before the headliner came out. And yet one produced anarchy and the other produced this: patience, connection, hope you could feel in your chest. And yes, these two events were different in real ways too. The water was $6 this time instead of $4. Still outrageous.

That’s when it hit me. Our individual energy feeds the collective, and the collective energy feeds right back into us. It’s a loop, not a one-way street. Which means the room you choose to stand in isn’t a small decision. It’s shaping you as much as you’re shaping it.

I know both sides of that loop. I know what it’s like to get swept up in the energy of a crowd and find myself doing something I’d have sworn I’d never do, caught in a current bigger than my own discernment. And I know the other side too, the side where I wasn’t sweeping; I was being swept over. Being taken advantage of as a woman. Feeling powerless, and knowing, with total certainty, that nobody was going to believe me if I said anything, and the stress of trying to speak up about it was more than just quietly trying to deal with it on my own at eighteen years old.

That feeling was everywhere in the late nineties and early two thousands. Women just quietly carried it. And when it happens to you, you go looking for the reason, because a reason feels safer than randomness. What did I do wrong? What did I do to invite this? Was it the dress, the shoes, the makeup, the smile I gave a stranger that I didn’t mean as an invitation at all? So you start turning yourself down. Not because you stopped loving who you were when you were fully expressed, but because being fully expressed apparently gave someone else permission to take what wasn’t theirs. And once you learn that lesson young enough, it doesn’t just fade when the moment passes. It follows you into every room you walk into for years.

That’s the real cost. Not one bad night. A permanent flinch.

But here’s what I know now, decades and a lot of reckoning later. I am allowed to take up space. Whether that means dressing exactly how I want, speaking exactly what I think, or building a life and a business that doesn’t shrink itself to make anyone comfortable, that is my decision to make. Not anyone else’s. You don’t get a say in who I am simply because my existing near you makes you feel entitled to something. I still get to be me. Whoever that looks like. And it doesn’t require your approval.

That’s the discernment that experience in the Tacoma Dome reminded me of, standing in a room built on something other than chaos. You get to choose which rooms you give your energy to now. Not out of fear of the wrong room. Out of respect for what you know your own energy is worth.

If you’re a woman around my age, maybe in perimenopause, maybe just waking up to how much time you’ve spent managing everyone else’s comfort instead of your own, I see you. And I want you to know something. It’s time to take the fucking blinders off.

Not someday. Not once things settle down. Now, while you still have decades of fully expressed life ahead of you.

I work with women who are done shrinking. Women ready to reclaim their power, embrace the parts of themselves they were taught to tone down, and build a business and a life that doesn’t require anyone else’s approval to exist. If that’s you, let’s talk.