Shame on You. So, why do I feel shame?
It has been a while since I’ve been to a demo in London. The last one I remember was cold, before Palestine Action had been labelled a terrorist organisation. Yesterday felt different. Yes, it was warm and sunny, but it wasn’t just the weather.
When I arrived in Parliament Square, around 1,200 people were protesting peacefully, holding signs, demonstrating against the genocide in Palestine. All ages, all walks of life - but what struck me most was that many were retired.
And what struck me even more was their bravery.
I sometimes think I’m brave. I’m not.
These people knew they would be arrested, yet they showed up anyway. Many told me they had “less to lose”; they were past working age, with a secure home. But that can’t be true. They are still putting themselves into terrifying situations. Being surrounded by 8–10 police officers (mostly men), picked up and carried to a van… and that’s only the beginning. Some admitted they were scared. And yet, they still came.
And I realised: I didn’t.
On paper, I could afford to be arrested. I don’t have a “proper job” to lose. But the truth is, I’m scared. Not only of the police, but of the weight of social respectability. The voice that says: don’t step too far, don’t be rude, don’t disrupt, don’t make a scene. That voice is so ingrained that even when I said “Shame on you” to an officer carrying away an elderly woman, it was me who immediately felt shame.
The officer laughed. I shrank.
Respectability is a story that lives deep in the body. It keeps us compliant. It keeps us polite in the face of injustice. It makes us more afraid of breaking rules than of staying silent.
As a Sociology and Politics teacher I once spoke about Gandhi, Mandela, the suffragettes, people once branded criminals, later remembered as heroes. Statues of them now stand tall in Parliament Square. Yesterday I watched elderly women being carried past those statues, arrested for standing on the right side of history. And I felt how tightly I am held by the invisible hands of respectability.
This is why I move.
Movement is where I shake off those hands, where I loosen the shame stitched into my shoulders, the obedience that stiffens my spine. It’s not about alignment or getting it right. It’s about reclaiming agency, about choosing how to stand, how to breathe, how to act.
I don’t have it worked out. I still feel the pull of ‘being respectable.’ But movement where I’m invited to move without instructions gives me a way to practise something else. A way to remember that my body is mine, my choices are mine. Perhaps, overtime what my body sees as risky will change and as my movement grows more bold (and less pleasing), so will I.
And maybe that’s where change begins - not only in Parliament Square, but in how we move and in how we reclaim ourselves from the grip of respectability.