The Reframe: Why Amja Unabashedly Exists As It Does

Episode 4  ·  Unabashed Conversations with Amja Unabashedly

THE REAL NEW YEAR

There is a moment in March. If you have ever noticed it, you will know exactly what I mean. It is when the air changes quality.

Not just temperature. Quality.

Something softens. Something that was held tight in the earth begins to release itself, like a thawing. So, I have stopped pretending that January is when I begin things.

January is when I make notes. I sit with the residue of what has passed and try to understand it. Or I choose not to. But Spring, the Spring Equinox, is when I actually begin. It is that precise fusion when light and dark hold equal weight. Then the light plans its dominance. The beginning feels less like an act of will. It feels more like a natural inevitability.

Nature does not force renewal. It arrives at it. Slowly, structurally, with the kind of patience that humans often mistake for stillness.

Just like the bulb does not decide to bloom. It simply does what it has always been preparing to do since the fall of leave in autumn. The conditions become right and the becoming happens.

I have been thinking about that a great deal this March. I have been thinking about what I have built in this season of my life. It has felt less like a decision I made, and more like something always already forming beneath the surface. Waiting for the conditions to be right.

The Spring Equinox as the real new year.

I offer that as an invitation, not a doctrine. If you have ever felt like January starts you too early, this is for you. Perhaps you begin before you have properly rested. Before the thinking has had time to settle into knowing. Perhaps the equinox is your beginning too.

ON THIS MONTH, SPECIFICALLY

March is International Women's Month and I want to sit with that for a moment, not perform it.

Everything built inside this brand grew from women's lives. The frameworks, the methodology, and the language of narrative came from them. The language of leadership and creative reclamation also emerged from women's lives.

Not in abstraction. In lived, often unwitnessed, frequently undervalued experience.

In the experience of women navigating systems that were not designed with them in mind. Carrying harm they were never meant to carry. Finding voice in conditions designed to silence it.

The roots of this work are in women's stories.

That is not a marketing line. It is simply the truth of origin.

This work exists because of women, because of what they endure and what they build in spite of. It exists because of what becomes possible when someone finally holds space. A space for the full complexity of who they are.

That acknowledgement belongs at the beginning of this entry.

Because what follows is the story of a pivot, and the pivot, too, grew from women's lives.

THE STORY OF THE PIVOT AT AMJA UNABASHEDLY

For years I worked in what is known as the VAWG sector, Violence Against Women and Girls.

It is work that holds extraordinary people doing extraordinary things under conditions that should not be asked of anyone.

I want to be clear about that before I say anything else.

This is not a criticism of that sector.

It is a naming of something structural that exists inside it.

The gap between what is needed and what is resourced is not a failure of the people doing the work.

It is a failure of the systems that are supposed to fund it.

These are the numbers as I understand them, and they have not left me since I first held them:

• Over one million VAWG-related crimes are recorded every year in the UK
• In 2023, specialist services received £8.4 million from the Home Office fund
• In 2023, specialist services received £8.4 million from the Home Office fund
• n 2022–23, over 60% of refuge referrals were declined
• 14,000 survivors remain on the Rape Crisis waiting list
• There is no ringfenced funding for Black and minoritised women's specialist services

One million crimes. Eight million pounds. Sixty percent of women seeking safety turned away.

Source: Home office VAWG Support Fund, 2023. Women’s Budget Group - Funding For VAWG. Rape Crisis England and Wales, 2025. End Violence Against Women Coalition, 2023.

I am not asking you to feel outrage on my behalf.

I am asking you to sit with those numbers. Understand what it means to do transformative work inside an under-resourced system. Imagine what it costs the people who stay. Consider what it costs the women who need the services. Consider those who cannot access those services. Consider what it means when someone like me eventually has to choose differently. I believe deeply in that work and gave years of myself to it. The tool was a cost I could no longer bear.

The pivot was not a retreat from the values.

It was a decision to take the values somewhere where the resource exists to hold them properly.

Everything I understand about harm came from that work. Its complexity and intersections came from that work. Its particular weight for Black and minoritised women came from that work. I learned about its presence in organisational systems as well as personal lives there.

The know was not left behind.

I reframed it innto frameworks,  methodology and practices. The frameworks now inside Amja Unabashedly™, including the SSCS framework, were born then. The narrative alignment work was also born from those years. These are practices that allow the thinking to move further. They reach different rooms and can be sustained.

That is the honest story of why Amja Unabashedly™ exists as it currently does.

Not because I walked away from something.

Because I walked toward the version of the work that could be held.

WHEN ART KNOWS BEFORE YOU DO

There is a collection of artwork I made some years ago called “Seasons of Resilience”.

I made it before I had the language for what was coming.

Before the pivot had a name.

Before I could articulate what I was moving through.

The art knew before I did.

Art holds the truth of where you are before your conscious mind has caught up with it. It reaches below the narrative you are telling yourself and pulls something more accurate to the surface.

This is not mysticism. It is simply how creative intelligence works. It moves laterally and associatively. It moves before language has organised the experience into something that can be contextualised.

Seasons of Resilience named the journey in images. The deliberate release falling like autumn leaves, not because the tree has failed but because it must. The protective contraction —winter’s hibernation as wisdom, not absence. The sealing and tending of what is forming underneath before it is ready to be seen.

And then the emergence.

The flourishing that feels less like a decision and more like inevitability. Like a Spring Goddess stepping into a season that was always waiting for her.

That collection was made from one life moment. It now speaks to this one. And it will speak to moments I have not yet lived.

That is what art does.

It does not expire.

It travels forward.

It finds new meaning in new contexts.

NOTHING LEFT BEHIND. EVERYTHING REFRAMED.

When I extended the work into a new room, the door behind me stayed open. I moved from the VAWG sector into organisational and leadership spaces.

I reframed it.

The human-centred practice came with me.

The understanding of harm, systemic, interpersonal, organisational came with me.

The knowledge of what it costs a person to carry invisible weight inside visible leadership roles came with me.

The art practice, not as metaphor but as methodology, came with me.

The frameworks came with me.

The accumulated wisdom of years spent alongside women navigating the most difficult circumstances human experience offers came with me.

All of it entered a room where the resource exists to hold it properly.

Amja Unabashedly™ is not in a rebrand.

It is a REFRAME.

And the original text is still fully present in everything that comes out of it.

The community strand of this work found its own home too. Let Art Be Your Becoming™ is the independent community group I co-founded. It is where the grassroots and creative reclamation work continues. It is separate from this practice. It is its own entity. It has its own governance. But it was grown from the same soil.

THE UNABASHED TRUTH

Not everyone showing up in leadership is okay.

The CEO in the boardroom may be carrying something that has no name yet. It might be a grief, a diagnosis, a relationship that is ending. The founder building something significant may be doing so from inside deep exhaustion. They may have simply learned to wear that exhaustion as capability.

The single parent who is also the leader is common. They are also the person who must hold everything together publicly. Privately, they are just trying. They are not an exception.

They are everywhere.

And the shame so many of them carry matters. It is about the gap between who they appear to be and what they are actually living through.

That shame was never theirs to carry.

The systems that produce that shame are my focus. Some leadership cultures reward performance over presence and visibility over depth. Some reward efficiency over humanity. Those are the systems I am here to work with.

Not to tear them down.

To help move them toward something that makes room for the full human being inside the leader.

A Beginning

The Spring Equinox arrives and something tilts.

Light and dark hold equal weight for a moment.

And then the light begins to increase.

This entry marks a beginning as much as it reflects on what has passed. The pivot is done. The reframe is made. Spring has arrived, not as metaphor, but as actual season. Actual atmosphere. Actual light through the window as I write this.

If you are reading this and standing at a threshold, this is for you. You may be in the winter of something. You may be in the quiet patience of early spring before the first colour appears. Then this entry is for you as much as it is mine.

And if you want to stay connected to the conversation then see below:

The becoming is already happening.

Even when you cannot yet see it.

Even when the conditions feel impossible.

It always was.

If you want stay conn