As I thought about Pandora I found myself reminded of all the times that circumstances in life have started to overwhelm me, and the awful feeling of helplessness. In some tellings all that is left in Pandora’s Pot, once the chaos is unleashed, is Hope. I found that deeply relatable.
Though female friendship has always been very important to me, (women supporting women is practically the Milk & Moon brand in one slogan!) The absolute necessity of it really hit home during the pandemic. All the ways in which my girlfriends have one held another together as we’ve navigated the curveballs of the last few years and their different impacts on all our families have been so life-giving. I could get quite emotional. Friendships for me ( and all of us I guess!) had to become very intentional and the ways in which we communicated and spent time together had to change.
You might think I’ve always been this body positivity advocate. Afterall, my face and my body are all over my website. All over my instagram. Daily, unfiltered on my Instagram stories. People often say to me ‘you are so confident! - I could never do what you do!’ and I kinda have to shrug it off because I certainly don’t feel like the person they are describing.
FEMINIST SECRET SANTA GIFTS UNDER £10
So really you can’t go wrong with an enamel pin, truly the most perfect secret santa gift of all time. These are all less than £10 and 3 for 2 , cos if I learnt anything about Christmas gift marketing I learnt it upstairs in Boots.
So, without further ado, here is my ultimate list of your friends, workmates, besties, and gal pals and what to buy them to make them feel seen.
Now I have been banging on about how Rest is For Rebels, on social media, on t-shirts, on badges, since my first surgery in 2018. I have been on this journey of learning how to rest -intentionally- since my life was turned upside down back then. And I am discovering in this season that this learning is lifelong. Over the past few years I made a pretty good go of learning how to rest so I can DO more. I certainly learnt that if I wanted to be in any way ‘productive’ I had to honor my body’s need for rest. What this actually looked like was doing as little as possible physically so I could work myself relentlessly while sitting still.
It's one of those phrases that has exploded all over everything. You want a self love club t shirt? A self love club sticker? A self love club instagram post? A self love club tattoo? Internet feminism has got your back. Amazing how quickly even our own relationship with ourselves can be repackaged and sold back to us at profit.
I’m not sure where I learnt it from, but a deep belief that I keep coming up against in my own psyche is that it's GOOD to be independent. That relying on other people or asking for help is somehow shameful or a failure. Big sister syndrome? Being a single mum? That doing IT ALL is the goal and doing it all MYSELF is the standard. When I started Milk & Moon I was terrified that anyone would realise that I had no idea what I was doing.
SO the Taking Up Space version of myself, the imagined future me that I have been working toward doesn’t exist. It’s taken a bunch of surgery, a pandemic, the sudden end of all the ‘activity’ that is ME, the closure of the spaces I was taking up for me to start to learn this.
When I first made a Take Up Space pin it was because these words really resonated with me. It was a promise to myself, a forward motion. I was in the middle of a season where I knew that redundancy from my job was approaching. My youngest child had just started school. My life was changing and so was I.
The fight for women’s rights globally is an urgent movement. The list of ways in which women are not just unequal in the world, but marginalised and subject to violence is as long as history itself and reaches across all cultures. Perhaps because of this vastness, Feminism is itself a broad movement. One person’s feminist ideology can be so very different from another’s and yet all sit under the banner that is ‘Feminist’.
