Legally Clueless

What if the life you really want begins after the age you were told you should have everything figured out?

In this episode of For Mannerless Women, Adelle sits down with Sally Sawe, Co-Founder and COO of The Partnership Agency, for a beautiful conversation about ageing, starting again and giving yourself permission to build a life that is entirely your own. Approaching 40, Sally walked away from a long-term relationship and began questioning the definition of a “full life” she had inherited. Did it have to include marriage? Children? Could she define it differently for herself?

Then at 53, after 20 years at WPP Scangroup, Sally made another huge pivot: she co-founded her own advertising agency. What began with five people working from a garden has since grown to a team of more than 100.

In this conversation, we talk about:
• Starting again at any age
• Why ageing can bring more confidence, not less
• Being happily single and child-free
• Defining a full life outside marriage and motherhood
• Leaving relationships that no longer serve you
• Learning to enjoy your own company
• Building self-trust and listening to your inner voice
• Starting a business in your 50s
• Beginning again after 20 years in one career
• Letting go of ego when you have to start small
• Why experience becomes an advantage as you age
• Giving yourself permission instead of waiting for it from others

Sally’s Mannerless Message is simple: “Be as ungovernable as you can be.”Give yourself permission to change your mind, begin again and live your life fully.

CONNECT WITH SALLY SAWE
The Partnership Agency:
https://www.instagram.com/thepartnershipagency
https://thepartnershipafrica.com/
Sally Sawe:
https://www.instagram.com/sally.sawe

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For Mannerless Women is a Legally Clueless Africa production creating space for honest, shame-free conversations about African womanhood. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode of Season 6, and share this conversation with a Mannerless or almost Mannerless woman in your life.

Leaving a harmful relationship is one thing. Staying gone can be another battle entirely.

Inspired by Ann’s story on the Legally Clueless podcast, this week Adelle explores what it actually means to choose yourself while trying to leave an emotionally abusive or harmful relationship and in the days, weeks and months after you’ve walked away. Because going back doesn’t make you weak.In this episode, we unpack why you can know someone is hurting you and still miss them, the role attachment and intermittent reinforcement can play in keeping us connected to harmful relationships, and why shame isn’t a useful tool for helping women leave.

Adelle also shares 8 practical ways to keep choosing yourself, including therapist Atsede Scarseth’s advice to create a “reality list,” use a 24-hour rule before making contact, remove easy access to an ex, ask yourself what you actually miss, and allow grief to exist without interpreting it as a sign that you should go back.

Plus: why you need a “don’t go back alone” system, how replacing the routines of a relationship can help you rebuild your life, and why returning to someone who hurt you can be treated as information rather than evidence that you’ve failed.

In this episode:
• Why leaving a harmful relationship can be so difficult
• Why going back does not make you weak
• Trauma bonds and intermittent reinforcement
• Making a reality list for moments of nostalgia
• The 24-hour rule when you want to reach out
• Removing easy access and creating boundaries
• Asking yourself what you actually miss
• Why missing someone doesn't mean leaving was a mistake
• Building a support system that doesn't shame you
• Replacing the routines your relationship once occupied
• What to ask yourself if you do go back
• Rebuilding self-trust after a harmful relationship

Therapist mentioned:
Atsede Scarseth:
https://www.tiktok.com/@atsedescarseth 

If you are experiencing abuse, coercive control, stalking or threats, please consider creating a safety plan and reaching out to a trusted person or domestic violence support service. Leaving an abusive relationship can sometimes increase risk, and you do not have to navigate that process alone.

Keep up with Legally Clueless Africa:
Website: https://legallycluelessafrica.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/legallycluelessafrica/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LegallyClueless
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@legallycluelessafrica

New episodes of the Mid Week Tease every Wednesday.

After eight years of loving someone, what happens when you finally find the answers to the questions you’ve been asking all along?

In the final part of Ann Wachera’s story, we pick up after another painful breakup with the man Ann once believed she would marry.Ann tries to move forward. She blocks him. Unblocks him. Goes to therapy. And eventually, the two find themselves back in each other’s lives.Then one day, he comes to Ann’s apartment. When he steps away to move his car, he leaves his phone behind.Ann knows the password. She opens WhatsApp.And what she finds forces her to confront the truth about the relationship she had spent eight years trying to understand. There are multiple women, including women Ann had questioned him about while they were together. There are conversations, photographs and eventually admissions that make Ann question not only who this man was, but who she had become inside this relationship.

In this final chapter, Ann reflects on betrayal, waiting until marriage, the difficulty of letting go, the questions she still has, and what healing looks like when part of you still loves the person who hurt you. Ann’s story also leaves us with a bigger question: what does it mean to choose yourself when you have spent years choosing someone who repeatedly did not choose you? This is the final part of Ann Wachera’s three-part story.

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SHARE YOUR STORY WITH US
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What if the shame you carry about your body was never yours to begin with?

In this episode of For Mannerless Women, Adelle sits down with Connie Tipis, clinical psychologist and Co-Founder & CEO of Double Dee’s Lingerie Kenya & Uganda for a conversation about body shame, body confidence and learning to come home to ourselves. Connie shares how growing up fuller-busted changed the way she moved through the world. She stopped swimming, covered her body and learnt very early that having breasts could attract judgement, assumptions and shame.

That experience would eventually lead her to co-found Double Dee’s and spend the next decade having intimate conversations with women about our bodies from inside fitting rooms across East Africa. Adelle and Connie talk about the ways girls learn to hide their bodies, the striking differences Connie has observed between Kenyan and Ugandan women, wearing beautiful underwear for yourself, mirror work, taking pictures of the body you have today, and why caring for your body can look very different when the goal becomes health and longevity rather than making yourself acceptable to other people.

IN THIS EPISODE:
– How body shame begins for African girls
– Growing up fuller-busted and being sexualised early
– Why body shame can stop girls from participating in sports
– How our upbringing shapes our relationship with our bodies
– What Connie has observed about women in Kenya vs Uganda
– African traditions around women’s bodies, sexuality and pleasure
– Wearing lingerie for yourself, not somebody else
– Mirror work and learning to actually look at your body
– Why you should take pictures of yourself now
– Choosing strength, health and longevity over appearance
– Connie’s reminder to become a “selfless, selfish woman”

RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Double Dee’s Lingerie — Kenya & Uganda
https://doubledees.co.ke/
The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
https://www.darkoathewriter.com/sex-lives-of-african-women
Seeking Sexual Freedom by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
https://www.darkoathewriter.com/seeking-sexual-freedom

Share this episode with a mannerless or almost-mannerless woman in your life.
Follow Legally Clueless Africa and subscribe to For Mannerless Women wherever you get your podcasts. #ForMannerlessWomen #AfricanWomen #BodyImage #BodyShame #BodyConfidence #AfricanPodcast

This week on The Mid Week Tease, Adelle is looking at 10 of the worst pieces of advice women are given, in her opinion.

From being told to reduce your financial ambitions so you don’t intimidate a man, to submitting for the sake of peace, enduring because “marriage is hard,” putting your career second, maintaining your appearance so a man doesn’t cheat, and being told that ultimately, every woman needs a man. Some of this advice is so familiar that we rarely stop to ask where it came from or who it actually benefits.

In this episode, Adelle explores how much of the advice women inherit about love, marriage, motherhood, money and ambition can quietly ask us to shrink, serve, endure and perform in order to fit comfortably into patriarchal expectations. We get into:
Why women are still encouraged to make themselves smaller so men don’t feel intimidated.
The difference between respect and submission in relationships.
Why “keep your marriage private” can sometimes become dangerous advice.
How “men are just like that” shifts responsibility from men onto women.
The invisible labour hidden inside the idea that women are “the heart of the home.”
Why female endurance is so often romanticised as strength.
Why a man's fidelity is not a woman's responsibility to manage.
The expectation that a woman’s career should be the flexible one once family enters the picture.
Why motherhood should be a choice not an inevitable destination for every woman.
And the bigger question underneath all of it: what choices would women make if having a man wasn’t treated as one of the greatest validations of our lives?
Adelle also reflects on some of the advice she received while married and asks whether some of what previous generations passed down as wisdom may actually have been survival strategies for navigating systems women did not design. Because we can honour the women who survived using those strategies without deciding that we have to inherit them.

Connect With Us:
Website:
https://legallycluelessafrica.com/
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/legallycluelessafrica/
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@LegallyCluelessAfrica

New episodes of The Mid Week Tease are out every Wednesday.