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.
‘Nothing about us without us’ – addressing tokenism, conflict and exploitative practice in work with experts by experience
For anyone commissioning or running work with experts by experience.
I recently heard a young adult involved in service design describe what it felt like to be brought into consultation meetings with senior leaders: she called it being asked to ‘put on the show’.
She was referring to the familiar request to share personal stories on demand: talk about the impact of the hardship she had faced, recount private struggles to a room of professionals, or provide emotional resonance for decision-makers.
Involving the people closest to a social issue in designing, delivering, and evaluating services – often described as ‘co-production’ (collaborating as equals with service users) or working with ‘experts by experience’ (people whose authority comes from having lived through the challenge) – is now fairly standard across social services, public bodies, and charities. When done well, it shifts institutional power and leads to services that make a real difference.
And yet, after twenty years in participatory work, I see the same systemic pitfalls recurring. Co-production fails in five predictable ways - here they are, with counter measures you can actually implement.
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.
Third sector burnout: How can we build sustainable services and treat helping professionals as people first?
For leaders and managers in charities and public services.
Across the charity and public sectors, many professionals are at their edges, resources are strained, and the divide between leadership and frontline teams is widening. Staff are often asked to stretch caseloads and boundaries to breaking point. Words and phrases like ‘burnout’, ‘dehumanising’, and ‘taken for granted’ dominate conversations with exhausted, disappointed workers.
Charities and not-for-profits being asked to do more with less is not a new phenomenon. But the pressures have intensified, and a crucial aspect of how this plays out is the way that those in the driving seat choose to allocate resources, design workloads, and communicate with their staff. The picture can look bleak, but there are choices to be made and space to be taken: re-imagining how we work together to bring about sustainable, meaningful change for service users and the workforce alike.
Collective Psyche, Myth and Ritual
For anyone feeling disoriented by the stories our culture tells in a crisis – and looking for grounding that feels real.
Humans are hard-wired for connection. We evolved as pack animals who relied on safety in numbers, but we're also compulsive meaning-makers. When a crisis hits and the world stops making sense, the stories we tell ourselves determine whether we pull together or turn on each other.
Throughout human history, sharing stories around a fire helped our ancestors create a common identity, honour those who came before them, and navigate an unpredictable environment. Our ability to imagine together allowed us to build shared symbols, rules, and communities.