Season Three - Episode 1 - Life went a bit feral

This episode opens up the conversation about identity, responsibility, and how easily women can disappear inside their own lives while holding everything together for everyone else.

Expect honesty, humour, a little chaos, and the beginning of a bigger conversation about how women find their way back to themselves.

If you’ve ever sat in a Tesco car park drinking coffee just to get five minutes of peace… this one’s for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to a brand new season on the Fearless FM podcast. I'm Becca Jane Stevenson, an advocate for women, a burlesque loving menace, creative gremlin, and mother to five. I have literally zero interest in helping women remain small and acceptable. I care deeply about them becoming more honest, more powerful, more visible, and more themselves. So here we are. We talk identity, confidence, boundaries, motherhood, healing, and all of those brave little rebellions that bring a woman back to life. So here we are, episode one, and I am calling this Life When Slightly Feral. And it has been a minute since I dropped the last episode. In fact, I think it's probably been around eight months, if not longer. And if you have been here before, you've listened to the episodes. Maybe you're listening to the podcast while you're doing the dishes, or driving back from the school run, or maybe even sitting in a Tesco car park drinking a cup of coffee in peace before you have to go back into the chaos. So, first of all, hello again. I am really glad that you are here. And if you are new and you've just stumbled across this podcast, welcome to this little corner of the internet where we tell the truth about life, about identity, about being a woman, running a business, and occasionally finishing off your child's leftover toast crust because you can't remember the last time that you made yourself a hot meal. Now, you might be wondering where the hell did she go? Where the hell did Becky Jane go? Because the podcast did go quiet, and there's always like this weird pressure, isn't there, online to come back with some beautifully packaged explanation. Like I took some intentional time for myself to reabline with my purpose. No, that's not what happened. What actually happened is life went slightly feral. Life was definitely lifeing. So let's just start with the obvious one, shall we? I have a feral fucking family. I'm not gonna lie. And if you're a mother listening to this, then you already know exactly what that means. Children everywhere, noise everywhere, someone always needing something, someone always losing something, someone always asking where something is that has been in the exact same place since 2017. So you know the drill. Now, layer on top of that an absolute shit show that is the sun system right now, and if you know, you know, it is forms, meetings, phone calls, advocating, being that parent, more forms, more meetings, more telephone calls, trying to advocate for your trial child whilst also trying not to lose your own damn mind in the process, it has been wild, and that's before we're also trying to wrestle like an octopus made of paper. So, yeah, that's been happening. Then we had uh a wedding. So because apparently life thought it would be funny, I also decided to book, plan, and organise and pull off my own wedding whilst also getting my ass back into therapy. It has been like Feral just doesn't cover it, I don't think. So, like it's one of those things that it all sounds like even the wedding, it all sounds lovely when you say it out loud, and then you realise you're essentially planning a large-scale event while also running a household, while also holding on to your business with your fingernails, like, but we did it, and we said I do, which still feels slightly surreal, despite the fact we've actually been together like 16 years. It's it's kind of crazy, and then because the universe clearly thought that I wasn't busy enough, we went on what I can only describe as a disaster of a family moon, those holidays where you imagine everybody's looking happy and relaxed in the photos, yeah, it wasn't that either. So I was like literally at a point at the end of last year where I was like, if you don't laugh at the absolute circus that your life can become, you're gonna sit and cry or probably go and curl up in a corner in the fetal position, rocking backwards and forwards, right? But yeah, life really did life, and between all of that, I was also gallivanting around the country. London, Newcastle, Birmingham, back and forth like a fucking travelling circus. And then this might be my favourite part of this story, is somewhere in the middle of all of that chaos, I joined a burlesque troupe. Now, more about that in another episode, but I joined burlesque dance classes because obviously if life's gonna go fucking feral, then we may as well just lean all the way in, right? So if you've been wondering why the podcast disappeared for a while, then this is the very honest answer. Life happened, big life, messy life, loud life, beautiful life, overstimulated Becky Jane, and I did need to step away for a moment and breathe inside it all down tools because I think by November, and again, this will be something I unpack on another episode. I started to feel really negative, I was feeling really just drained and burnt out, and I thought I'd experienced burnout before, and that was not something I wanted to repeat, but this was on a whole nother level. And like, if we get a bit serious, jokes aside, like I was really starting to feel quite negative and quite resentful, which that's not me, and every opportunity when it was coming up in conversation, it was just kind of spilling out, and I hated it, so I realized I needed to take a big step back, um, and just be with myself to be in that messy middle to actually hear myself and listen to what it was that I needed, and there is something that I've learned over the years, over many years of repeated cycles of chaos, is when life gets loud and responsibility is just continually stacking up and stacking up, when everything is happening all at once. Sometimes the most powerful thing that you can do is actually to pause, not to quit, not to disappear forever, but to take that sidestep just long enough so that you can come back to yourself. And I think there's a big fear for a lot of women that if they stop, if they pause, if they have a breather, if they step outside of responsibility for more than five minutes, we realise just how much we become or have become addicted to being needed, to always having the answer to something, always fixing something, always needing to be there for something that we've done it for that long that stepping outside of that is really uncomfortable. And questioning who am I when I'm not being needed, who am I when I'm not doing all of the things? And I think this addiction to being needed, it it almost like it suffocates our identity in such a big way, and that's something that I want to talk about a lot more on this podcast moving forward, because so many women are living inside of this constant hum of responsibility, running a household, running a business, holding things together, being the one that everyone relies on, and somewhere in all of that, like I say, they start to feel like they've lost their spark a little bit, not not feeling broken, just feeling like they're a shell of themselves, like they're not doing things for themselves that they used to, you know, and the truth is that it doesn't even mean that there's something wrong with them, that there wasn't there wasn't anything wrong with me. It just often means that we're carrying too much, we're holding so much for others because we have such a capacity for compassion and care and love and and nurturing that we're spinning a lot of plates, you know, earlier when I talked about the circus act, like we we're carrying a lot for a very long time, and nobody because we do that, because we kind of exude this superhuman strength. Nobody thinks to say, Are you okay? Do you want me to take some of the load off? Do you want to share that heavy load? Do you want to carry it together? So, joking aside, this podcast moving forward is going to be a space where I'm going to be talking honestly about things attached to identity and responsibility, what it means to come back to yourself, how we as women actually disappear inside of our own life. So we're functioning very, very well, and we're carrying things and we're doing the thing, and we're responsible and we love and we nurture and we do all those things. But actually, if we sat down with ourselves and said, Do I feel fulfilled? Do I feel happy? And it is a question that even like six months ago I couldn't answer because I didn't feel that way, and it started making me wonder how many other women are mistaking functioning well and having their shit together as feeling fulfilled and having a fulfilled life. And I want this podcast to be about that and how, like, more importantly, how we find our way back. So, not in some perfect or Instagram-worthy version, but like how you find your way back to life, like a real one, the one where you're doing the dishes and you still like kind of exude being at peace with yourself instead of thinking about what you've got to do next. The one where sometimes you have to hide in the bathroom for five minutes of peace while cramming a chocolate bar down your throat, like the one where you're driving home from the school drop-off, and think surely life was not supposed to feel heavy. Like, you don't have to burn your life down to find yourself again. Like, I thought that's was what was gonna happen to me, and again, more on that in another podcast episode. And it got to like three months into this really uncomfortable space I was in. I was I was healing from the burnout, and it took being surrounded by a specific circle of people to actually feel all systems kind of powering back on again and feeling lit up again. So you don't need to burn everything down, you don't need to have this identity death, you know. We simply just have to start noticing where we're leaving ourselves behind, where we're making those choices to deprioritize ourselves and start gently calling yourself back, start gently bringing those parts of yourself back online. So, like I said, if you are here and you've been listening for years, or you have just found the podcast today, I am really, really glad that you're here. So make sure you pull up a chair. We've got lots to unpack in these episodes, and if nothing else, I promise that you are going to realise very, very quickly that you are not the only one living a life that is just fucking feral at times, and honestly, feeling less alone with things can change everything. Thank you for tuning in, and I am so looking forward to diving into episode two with you all.