Soft Rebellion

I have been thinking a lot about how little we touch each other anymore. Not in a romantic way. Just… as people.
We don’t really hold hands with our friends anymore. We hug quickly and pull away. We are careful not to mess up someone’s makeup, stain their clothes or get too close for too long. And if someone is particularly touchy-feely, there is sometimes this unspoken suspicion around it. That they must be secretly attracted to you or have a crush. That they flirting or even like women.
I don’t know when the change happened but somewhere along the way, we seem to have reserved physical intimacy almost exclusively for romantic relationships. And I get it. Boundaries matter. Not everyone likes being touched and nobody should ever feel forced into physical affection. Lol and some of us are on the spectrum so physical touch may be uncomfortable. But I also wonder whether we have overcorrected to the point where we are becoming physically distant from one another.

We often talk about how emotionally stunted men are because they have been taught not to express tenderness, vulnerability or affection. But are we becoming physically stunted too. Are we risking becoming illiterate in the language of touch because we’ve removed it for the sake of convenience, course correction, and avoidance of discomfort.

I have been thinking about this for a while but my recent encounter with my I recently had with my soul sister, Pale, really broke me open and gave me the language to articulate my feelings around this. She embraced me so tenderly this weekend and all my defences just fell away. Lol we both just started crying.

So in this episode, I talk about touch, platonic intimacy, why physical affection has become so sexualised, and whether we need to find our way back to being physically close to one another again. Maybe we all just need to hold each other a little longer.

Keabetswe is a soft rebel at heart!
She has gone against the grain - breaking boundaries by speaking out about difficult experiences that usually stay hidden for the sake of preserving a family image, isidima, and figuring out who she is loudly, without fear or the pressure of societal expectations.
My personal favourite is how Kea invites her cross-generational family - her mother, daughter and friends, including her in-laws and a friend’s mother — to bear witness to her brave storytelling as she reclaims her identity.
The work she is doing through her journal, Letters to Her, is awe-inspiring. She takes painful personal experiences and turns them into practical lessons, while giving herself permission to leave some of it behind and embrace a new journey that requires her to return to her true identity.
She is getting ready to get married and join a new family. She has pursued a career and achieved external accolades, but none of these things have given her the peace of mind she has been looking for. She has also battled postpartum depression, which eventually became part of a much bigger journey of breaking free from the shackles of her past.
Kea had resigned herself to being shy and quiet - withdrawn and not letting people in. Her own mother and friends have, at some point, testified to not truly knowing her. But she came to realise that many of those personality traits, and the way she kept people at a distance, were connected to a past she had been carrying alone. It was a past that the people around her did not often talk about, and in turn, she felt like she couldn't talk about it either.
Now, she is a beautiful, confident, kind, humble and bright light. She shares that light with the people around her, and I truly wish you get to experience some of it as you listen to this episode.
Letters to Her is available for sale and you can click on the like below to place your order: https://forms.gle/oaxjM5pxgvswGZ2cA
Keas' IG profile: miss_pruu_mogale (Keabetswe MmaNdhlovu Mogale)

In this episode, Phumza talks about her passion for empowering young women from the weight of family responsibilities. She shares her experiences of inheriting family responsibilities from her mother and siblings, and how she sacrificed her food allowance to try and make ends meet at home, deferred vacations, and lacked interests and hobbies because of the weight of family responsibility; responsibilities that other family members did not necessarily share.
Eventually, she had to take a step back and draw hard boundaries with her mom, who had enabled some of the behaviour from her aunts and cousins. Moving out of home, something I also deeply resonate with, became one of those boundaries she drew for herself. But drawing those boundaries came with its own consequences.
There is the tension it creates with family members, the guilt, and the difficult reckoning that perhaps you're no longer lovable because you dont' add value in the ways you once did, even when those ways were costing you pieces of yourself. For Phumza, therapy became an outlet that offered support to help cope with the reckonining, and so did speaking out and starting an empowerment to help others who may be navigating a similar path.This is a conversation about black tax, family responsibility, self-sacrifice, therapy, boundaries and what it means to choose yourself without abandoning the people you love.

I've been overthinking sharing the few episodes I've got so far with guests. So much of this journey hasn’t gone according to plan, but I’m choosing to trust the process and take the leap anyway.On this episode, I speak to Amanda - a fellow rebel I met through social media. I've seen so many parallels between her experiences and mine, andI wanted to share some of the the conversations we have with you guys. It is not perfect, it is messy but it is beautifully human. We touch on various themes that are close to my heart - being bullied as a kid because you are different, the complexities of romantic relations, divorce in families, going to therapy, and finding love again. Entrepreneurship also makes a feature in this episode but I hope to explore this some more in future episodes.

I hope you enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed having the conversation. And as always, let us know what you thought of this week’s episode.

Man, this was a really difficult one to record. I'e never had to be vulnerable in real time. It' always after the fact because I don' feel so threatened once I'e dealt with whatever challenge I' facing at the time. And whether people' judgement comes or nt, barely makes a difference when I'e reconciled with that particular challenge.

This season, however, I' doing things differently. I will bring you guys along in real time because I can no longer wait to be okay before I create and put an episode out. Creating and recording my thoughts is part of my healing journey, and how I sometimes make sense of the world. The other added benefit, and a big part of the reason for recording my thoughts is finding people who reasonate with my experiences.

I get to learn from each and everyone of them and feel less alone when they too share their experiences. This is all to say, please feel free to drop a comment and share about your journeys too my soft rebels. This is a safe space for all of us.