Sharing and Taking Up Space: Why We Shrink, and How to Stop
For anyone who has learned to make themselves small, quiet, or convenient.
The Tube, the pavement, and the art of squeezing In
If you travel on public transport in any major city, you already know the choreography.
You sit on the Tube or the bus, and the person next to you has their knees spread wide, claiming half of your seat alongside their own. You feel the familiar, automatic contraction: you pull your knees together, tuck your elbows against your ribs, and pull your bag onto your lap. You might let out a quiet sigh, but mostly you make yourself compact. You spend the rest of the journey carrying physical tension in your thighs, shoulders, and jaw, simply to avoid confrontation or unwanted physical contact.
You see the same dynamic on the pavement. A few years ago, several women documented playing a game dubbed ‘patriarchy chicken’: walking down a crowded street at a normal pace and refusing to automatically step aside for oncoming men. The result, almost universally, was repeated shoulder collisions.
On the surface, these seem like minor everyday irritations. But our physical posture is rarely just about etiquette. It is a direct reflection of how power, privilege, and social hierarchy are experienced in the body. How much physical and emotional space we feel entitled to occupy is learned long before we are conscious of the lesson.
Why certain bodies learn to shrink
Shrinking yourself might seem like a character flaw or a lack of confidence, but it is an intelligent, learned survival strategy.
Resilience Is Not Just A Personal Trait
For anyone who needs their team to be more resilient.
Lunchtime yoga
Picture a scene that plays out across public and third-sector organisations every month.
A leadership team is grappling with brutal budget contractions, rising community demand, and staffing shortages. They are at their own limits, desperately trying to keep essential services afloat. Meanwhile, frontline caseworkers and project managers are burning out, absorbing secondary trauma, and calling in sick with stress.
Tension mounts. Staff raise concerns about unmanageable workloads and the lack of time to process emotionally demanding casework. The leadership team, feeling defensive and constrained by forces beyond their control, looks for a way to support their people that doesn’t require money they don’t have.
The response arrives from the top down: a memo reminding staff that they need to be more resilient, accompanied by a checklist of self-care tips, an employee assistance helpline, and a reminder that lunchtime yoga is available on Tuesdays.
Navigating personal and political grief in a time of chaos and change
For anyone dealing with personal or collective grief, and wondering where all the feelings are supposed to go.
The song and the slow glide
'I don't know if we were meant to carry so much grief in one body… Yet, we are not alone.'
These words are from a song by Alexandra/Ahlay Blakely that I have sung with others at song circles, protests, and community gatherings. Groups assemble to process sorrow that feels too vast, frightening, or unfathomable to hold in isolation. The song includes a section that is essentially a tuneful wail, created to reconnect us with the messy, loud, and physical reality of mourning.
Reclaiming ritual, authentic expression, and communal grieving can be a form of resistance to the legacy of Victorian Britain, where emotional repression and sanitised mourning rituals became the default expectation.