I Could No Longer Stay Quiet

FIRST PUBLISHED 29th April 2026

I started With Shaking Hands because I could no longer contain it.

The rage. The grief. The watching. The knowing. The gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be, and the feeling of standing at the edge of that gap with no bridge and no ladder and no way across.

I am a woman in my late forties. I live in the Lake District, in one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I spend a significant amount of my time furious about the state of it. Not the landscape. The world. The system. The way things are arranged and who they are arranged for and who gets ground down in the process, generation after generation, quietly, persistently, as if that is just the natural order of things.

It is not the natural order. It is a choice. And choices can be unmade.

I have spent most of my life processing things privately. Carrying weight that had no name. Swallowing things that needed somewhere to go. There are experiences I have had and things that I have moved through, that are part of what brought me to this. The clarity that comes with age, with survival, with finally being able to see the whole machine clearly, every cog and lever, who it was built for, who it was built to keep in their place.

I wrote about this once, in a poem. I said:

You will know your own mind like you never have before.
Need their approval less than you ever thought possible.
It took me almost fifty years.
I hope it takes you less.

That is where With Shaking Hands was born. In that almost fifty years. In what it cost. In the determination that it should cost the next generation less.

With Shaking Hands began in early 2025 as a poetry platform. Words came first, the way they always do for me, tumbling out faster than I could catch them, about everything from the weight of motherhood to abortion rights to the rising far right to a man in a car park who made my eleven year old daughter wipe the glitter off her face. Poetry that was honest in a way I had never quite allowed myself to be before. Raw and specific and unafraid to say the thing.

In Spring 2026 it moved into art. Because words were not enough anymore. Because some things need colour and texture and scale. Because there is a particular kind of statement that can only be made visually, that can only be felt when it is hanging on a wall in front of you and you cannot look away.

The work is feminist. It is political. It is personal in ways that are also universal, because that’s the thing about women's experience. It’s both. Always both. The most intimate grief and the most collective one, sitting in the same body at the same time.

I am building this because the powerlessness is real and it is overwhelming and I refuse to let it win. Because art is a form of resistance. Because having something on your wall that says what you actually believe, that reflects back who you actually are and what you actually stand for, is not a small thing. It is a daily act of defiance. A quiet refusal to decorate your life with things that mean nothing.

I want to build a community here. People who see it and recognise it. Who feel the yes when they look at the work. Who want their homes and their spaces to reflect the things they believe, not just the things that match the sofa.

If that is you, you are in the right place.

This is With Shaking Hands. Too much in my head, so I write. So I paint. So I refuse to be quiet.

Come and be loud with me.

With Shaking Hands

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