Ep. 39 | The Magick of Soft Rebellion

Take What You Need. It’s Okay To Go Slow.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about soft rebellion — the kind of quiet, grounded resistance that comes from slowing down, listening to your body, and refusing to perform the hustle culture version of “success.”

This one weaves rest, cyclical living, post-pandemic shifts, unlearning hustle culture, anti-diet work, and the tenderness required to live in a world that constantly tells us to go harder, do more, shrink more, be less.

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Transcript

Melanie Knights [she/they] (00:00)
Hello friends, hello my plus size pals, hello everybody, welcome back to a brand new episode of The Culture of It All. This is episode 39, The Magic of Soft Rebellion. Now, this is actually a topic or a theme that didn't make it into the Autumn issue of full volume. was originally, it was an original idea, it was on the draft. I even wrote.

an article or a section for this. But I, at the time I was feeling a little bit crunchy around how to, how to really discuss this through the lens of diet culture, through the lens of anti-diet culture. Now, personally, I think that rest and slowing down is very much part of divesting from diet culture. Because for me personally, diet culture is all about hustle. It's all about

working your ass off, it's all about staying motivated and having all this willpower and doing all the things. And diet culture itself, if we're talking about, you know, a system that wants us to have, wants to tell us there is one way to have a body, that body is very much about falling in line with all the other systems of oppression. It's about working hard and being a cog in a machine. It's about contributing towards

the economy contributing towards, you know, consumerism and capitalism and the patriarchy. It's about being quiet. And I started to think about rest and this time of year. And I think it's a really, really important conversation we need to have because at this time of year, as we head into December, the general overwhelm, stress and busyness is it's a lot. It's a lot.

Even for someone like myself who finds a lot of magic at this time of year, I do really enjoy it and I like the cooler weather. There's still this general overwhelm, this simmering of stress and needing to be busy, this expectation of not just what I can do but who I'm going to be for everyone else.

I know that certainly felt true when I first became a parent. I wanted to do all the things. And I can tell you that after 11 years of doing Elf on the Shelf, our elf is going to be retiring this year because you know what? The elf's tired. The elf is very tired. ⁓ And has run out of ideas. I'm impressed we went on for so long. But it's things like that. It's, there's so many things that we started.

when our child was young, that I wish I had approached differently, I wish I had known what I know now. It's not too late, they are getting older, and it means that we can adjust how we approach this holiday season.

This year, I'm certainly focusing more on pre-loved items, re-gifting, using things like cards and wrapping paper and things like that that I already have. And for me, all of that contributes towards this idea of softness, this idea of rebelling against these systems.

I've seen a lot of conversations recently about cancelling Christmas

or more so changing the way in which we approach this holiday season, changing the way in which we might buy new things rather than buying secondhand or pre-loved or even making gifts this year. And I think that all of this very much plays into, you know, the end of year messaging. I mean,

even when I think about the amount of Black Friday emails I've had and it's not even Black Friday. Hell, here in the UK we don't celebrate Thanksgiving, it's not a holiday, but we have jumped on the Black Friday train and the amount of brands I see sending out emails months in advance, weeks in advance.

And even that can be very overwhelming as a consumer. It can be really overwhelming and I think it contributes towards that feeling of like, I need to be doing this, that and the third. This feeling like I haven't accomplished enough, that I'm behind. And inevitably at this time of year we'll be like, I can't believe it's almost December, I can't believe it's almost the end of another year. And we'll be right back there in January saying that we've got whole year ahead of us.

I know that I, over the years, have definitely...

participated in a little bit of a shame spiral around not doing enough, not making it magical enough, not socializing enough. I've had really high expectations of what I want things to be like and then felt really disappointed when it doesn't match up. And that's something I've had to...

Just accept and unlearn and realize that.

These expectations that I have, inevitably, I don't have control. And the idea that I have control over situations, or the idea that I can control how everyone's going to feel, or I can create this magic and it's going to just... It's gonna override everything else, is unrealistic.

As I navigated a post pandemic landscape within both my personal life and my business, I found myself slowing down. During the pandemic, especially that first kind of six to nine months, I threw myself into my business. I didn't have anything else to be doing. My husband was working, but very minimally. My kid wasn't in school and was very young at the time. And so...

I just had the time to work on my business and a lot of things fell into place because of situations and opportunities that arose and I was able to say yes to.

And I was really busy, really busy. And at the time I thought that it was exactly what I wanted, until I burned out really hard at the end of 2020 and realized that everything I had, everything I'd achieved, everything I'd created, it wasn't really what I thought it was going to be. And actually I was just really scared. I was really scared of losing it all. I was really scared of...

not wanting the thing that I had told myself I wanted for so long. I was scared of admitting that perhaps I didn't want to run my own business. At least not in that capacity. And I found myself slowing down, I found myself saying no, I found myself advocating for my needs, and leaning

into cyclical living, that was something that I had never heard of before. A friend of mine, a very dear friend of mine, I had only met her at the beginning of 2020 and she was at the time running a business that focused on cyclical living for business owners. And so it was looking at how you approach the tasks within your business.

and how you could use your own cycles and energy to help you achieve those things. And I'm really grateful for our friendship, but I'm also very grateful for the work that she was doing because because of that, you know, in the last five, six, almost six years, I've really learned to listen to my body. And I think it's a really, it's been a very helpful tool to have alongside.

Intuitive eating alongside my work as I've divested from diet culture. You know, last week we were talking about body trust and I think for me knowing my own cycles and knowing my own, you know, daily, weekly, monthly cycles and even throughout the seasons what I personally need and when I'm feeling more creative, when I have more energy, it's, it's been really helpful.

It's also really, it's a little bit soul-destroying to know that I only have probably a good maybe 16 days every month where I really feel like I can achieve anything. The rest of the month it's like, we'll see.

But at the same time, when we get to the autumn and winter, it is the time when I feel most comfortable with myself, with my body. I feel more creative, I'm more inspired, but there's just generally more things I want to do. And I find myself often in the autumn and winter feeling like I'm running out of time, feeling like I'm behind because...

I often will overcommit and find myself trying to do all the things.

and,

One of the things I've noticed is how much more willing since then I am to rest. And I do see rest as an act of resistance, but it's also a privilege. Yes, we all deserve to rest when our body and mind needs it, but...

I guess I'm curious to know whether we know what rest looks like for us as individuals, but also do we have the capacity to rest?

And so slowly as I was dialing into my own energy levels and my own cycles, there was this sense of rediscovery, something I had already been, I guess, doing with my fashion and style. I talked about this in episode 37, I believe, as I started to dye my hair and slowly reclaim some of the things that I had lost over the last 20 years. But post pandemic, it felt as the world started to open up.

It felt like this new chapter. I felt like I had been ripped open and all of a sudden I had, I just, I'd seen things that I had never paid attention to before. I'd realized how much my privilege had kept me ignorant and safe and oblivious.

I don't think it's any coincidence that at the same time I was starting to consider giving up dieting. I think that all of these things worked together. I don't think they work in isolation. And as I realised that I couldn't go back and I had to figure out what this new

like path forward was going to be.

It was a new chapter, but it was also in some ways I was navigating a new body, ⁓ or a changing body. There were a lot of things that I realized I was going to need to navigate after 2021 that I hadn't dealt with previously. And I don't really know why.

For example, one of the things always stands out to me is that I was very aware in 2022 I was going on holiday and I was like, I'm gonna need to ask for a seat belt extender

I don't even know if I knew seatbelt extenders existed prior to that,

this was something that I was suddenly very aware of. I knew that I was going to need to ask for a seatbelt extender on that trip and I found resources and I read up and I became more and more confident asking for a seatbelt extender but

You know, I was navigating this new chapter with this body, a softer body, a nourished body, a body that was living outside of restriction and diets, and it had changed.

And I think, again, all of these systems work together and so it's no surprise as we divest from one, others start to crumble. And whilst I do see rest as something that we are all deserving of, I started to play with the idea of softness. How can we apply softness? Because softness itself is rife with anti-fat rhetoric.

if we're talking about softer bodies.

And how we apply softness to our actions? To ourselves, to our body, to our mind. Because hustle culture has taught us over the last decade or so, the rise of social media, it's taught us to go hard or go home, right? It's told us not to wear our busyness as a badge of honour whilst telling us that we're never doing enough.

We've seen it more and more with the kind of quote unquote showreel, right? Seeing people's best parts of their lives and not seeing the reality. And so seeing only those Instagram worthy pieces has led us to believe that we're not doing enough, has led us to feel like we're not enough.

And all of this really, you know, feeds into diet culture, feeds into, for example, the body positivity movement, or not the body positivity movement as it should be, but what became body positivity on social media. Again, seeing smaller bodies contorting themselves to show that they have these perceived flaws, the things that for those of us in larger bodies, we have naturally, and that we don't have to contort.

to have to be told still that this is the, you know, this is the worst part of myself, but look, I'm putting it online for you all to see because I'm normal. I'm just like everyone else. The harm and damage that does. And this is a part of recognizing the way in which these systems and the way in which anti-fat rhetoric

plays a part in our ability to look at these situations, to look at these channels, right? The way we consume content, the way in which we learn, and being able to notice that it is continuing to feed the system. It's not allowing us to take a step back. It's not allowing us to be enough.

in that moment is telling us that we always have to do more.

And I guess in some ways softness is similar to the concept of romanticising, you know, your life or your business or your home, whatever it might be.

Softness feels more achievable for me. To romanticising. Softness feels...

Like there's less expectation. It feels personal and unique and compassionate and it's not for the likes.

And that's not to say that people who romanticise their lives are doing it for the likes, but I feel like romanticising has become a bit of a buzzword. And I think... yeah, you tell me, what do you think? I personally feel like softness just...

It feels gentle. It... it feels like me. And as a fat person, leaning into my softness really feels like rebellion. Right, it feels like a form of resistance. There's a magic there.

There's a magic to be able to, you know, challenge the status quo, middle fingers up, destroy the systems that are holding us back, but also being able to do it with a softness. Because let's be honest, capitalism, the patriarchy, the diet culture, they all want us to be hard. They want us to be distracted, they want us to be divided, they want us to be angry at the wrong people.

But softness requires facts. It asks us to consider if we have all of the information that we need in order to make decisions.

Softness brings us together in rage, in community, in resistance, in creativity.

Whereas when we're in the pursuit of thinness, it distracts us from paying attention. It distracts us from what is going on in the world. It leaves us hungry. It leaves us with less energy.

I know that when I was spending so much time and energy and resources focused on taking up less space, not just physically, but you know, very much physically, I wasn't paying attention to what else was happening. In fact, I would avoid it at all costs because taking up less space, being in a smaller body was everything.

It was every bit, it was all I had the energy for.

It took up all of my time and all of my resources. It was my sole focus.

And hustle culture distracts us from paying attention as well.

It keeps us in this cycle of busy, tells us that we're never doing enough. Hustle culture and diet culture very much are entangled. There is an intersection between the two and I talked about this way back in the early days of the show. I will link to this, the episodes, it's a two-parter and I will link to that in the show notes. But I've talked about this before that

Hustle culture and diet culture do not work in isolation. You know, they thrive off of one another.

whether it's through convenience or whether it's keeping up a certain appearance or what it looks like to be successful, because again, that contributes towards thinness, whiteness, ableism.

And as we come to the end of a year, there's so much of this messaging.

All of the marketing, all of the emails, all of the sales,

the push for us to spend money, the push for us to consume more.

The push for us to feel bad about ourselves, to feel bad about what we haven't achieved, whilst also thinking about everything we're supposed to achieve next year. You don't need it, but this is your permission slip. You do not have to finish this year strong. You don't have to finish this year strong. You don't have to spend the next four or five weeks trying to tick off all of the things that you didn't achieve. You don't even have to look at the things

that you might have not achieved if you don't want to. You don't have to have your next year planned out. You don't have to start in January. You don't need to buy a planner or a journal.

You get to choose.

When I started a business in 2016, I was introduced to lot of things like mindset work and personal development and even productivity tools. Things that I guess had always existed around me, but I didn't know anything about them. I wasn't using that language. I wasn't talking about it. I wasn't reading books about them. I wasn't investing in courses. And unfortunately, I guess, depending on how you look at it, those things...

are an inevitable part of starting a business. They say that if you want to figure out who you are, start a business. boy, that's true. ⁓ Unfortunately for me, and for so many people I know, we found ourselves investing our resources into people who were really forming these kind of cult-like business coaching systems and courses and programs.

And one of the things I really struggled with is, you know, the way in which these programs were designed to, designed to kind of work throughout the year. So, you the idea was that you would start in January and you would work in 90 day or quarterly increments. And I tried this for years and I struggled so much to work in that way.

I struggled because I had a kid in school who... whose schooling didn't match up with, you know, my desire for three month working periods, and so I struggled if they had a week off from school. I didn't really get to work as much. And so then I was playing catch up and sometimes it felt like I never ever caught up.

At the same time, January, I've discovered, January and February for me are really slow months in terms of how I feel, in terms of what I can kind of quote unquote achieve.

And I've kind of come to the conclusion that I don't want to start my kind of new year and planning what I want to work on or achieve for the year. I don't want to do that in December. I start it in December. In fact, I probably start it in November, but I actually don't like to plan everything or have it all kind of in place until

end of February.

And that's okay. But it took me a really long time and a lot of spiralling and many years of doing the same thing over and over and over again, only to constantly feel like I was behind. To constantly feel like I was failing. That I wasn't... I wasn't made for this. I wasn't able to do these things. When in reality, it's just that I was pushing myself to work in a way that wasn't right for me.

And the point of all of this is that, you know, whilst we exist in this, in a society that will spend the next five weeks telling us that it's time to finish the year strong and to, you know, figure out what your goals for the next year and your intentions are, what your word of the year is, you don't have to do any of those things unless you want to. And by not doing them, it doesn't change anything. You can, you can decide these things whenever you want.

you can choose to do these things at any time of the year when you want to just because it's not it's not all over the TikTok or social media just because not everyone's not talking about it doesn't mean that you can't choose to do it in May or September whenever you want.

It took me a really long time to recognise that. And again, going back to what I was talking about earlier.

kind of learning about my own cycles and figuring out what was right for me really helped me to

accept that this is how I need to work, this is how I need to create, and that there are always going to be times of year when I am feeling more creative, there are times when I'm going to feel like I just need to rest or take a break.

And we're all different, and that's okay. And I think the same is said for, you know, listening to our own bodies. We are all different. And the things that nourish us are going to be different. What softness looks like for each of us is going to be different.

But as I said, I think it's.

It's such a beautiful way of being able to honour our bodies and lean into what we need. And I've said it before here on the show, but I think asking ourselves what we need in any given moment is one of the most powerful tools that we can have, one the most powerful questions that we can ask ourselves. So to wrap up this episode, my question for you, listener.

is to reflect on what you need less of this season.

Not what you need more of, but what do you need less of this season?