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.
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.
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.
Is there anything more cringe than a “welcome to my blog” blog? But we all have to start somewhere. So I’m swallowing the cringe and jumping in.
I don’t get a LOT of trolling on social media. I get the usual amount of creepy d*** pics in the ‘others box’ that seems to be the tax you pay for being a woman who dares to be online.
