Yet again I’m late to the ‘TV gold’ party… very late this time. Only now have I finally heeded my friends’ calls to watch the incredible ‘Top Boy’. Of course, I. Am. Gripped.

The rest of the world will know this, but just for the record, Top Boy tells a story set in the materially impoverished Summerhouse estate in London. It’s the story of a community of people trying to look after their loved ones, trying to make something better of their lives, and trying to get a piece of the success, wealth and status afforded to others born into more comfortable circumstances. Some of the community deal drugs, and fight one another for the right to monopolise the market. It’s a fight to the death for survival, and for the opportunity to grow, to become something more. It is multi-layered; savage, very very sad, and also very beautiful, poignant, full of heart and dignity. A truly epic tale of this being human told brilliantly by the writers and cast.

Amongst the many compelling characters, one, ‘Jaq’ particularly grips me. She is a loyal and trusted General in this street army. Although she is as brutal as her position dictates, she also offers inspiration to women living in this ‘man’s world’ of ours. Jaq is never pushed around, never diminished by men. She is intelligent, capable, excellent at her job. She looks after herself and lives on her own merits. She hasn’t adopted the female archetype of a carer, sacrificing her own talents and ambitions to support others to reach theirs, though she will put others before herself when she chooses this as her right action. Given this, Jaq isn’t underestimated; her quality, character and performance is recognised by the men. Jaq probably appreciates this respect, but more importantly than that, she is free to be herself.

So why is the story of Jaq grabbing me right now? How do I see my life reflected in her gaze? It’s worth us noticing carefully when our heart points us in a direction. None of us has a heart that points randomly. Instead, our hearts point directly at that which we need to investigate and resolve in order for us the grow. The cutting edge of our current developmental process we might say.

The received order of things has been that women should be defined by men;  their worth, their place. The best way to do this, of course, is to have women define themselves through the male gaze, and pass this on to their daughters directly, equipping the girls they love with a readiness to live in the world as it has been constructed. Attempting to help their daughters to do as well as they can… considering.

The woman as unacknowledged, self-sacrificing carer of others is just one of the archetypes handed on. Another of note is the woman as mild, sweet and understanding. Given this, one consideration for women and girls is to explore anger. Do we feel our anger? Can we recognise it in ourselves when it arises? Or perhaps we are following the received instruction not to notice it, or to explain it away as ourselves being simply mistaken or unreasonable. Exploring anger, we find different forms within its folds. For example, there is the anger which attempts to defend us against that which we feel threatened by. The threat of being ashamed, ashamed by not being good enough, being rejected, being abandoned. When we identify with the experience of being shameful, we when become threatened, there is an anger which provides a psychological defence against the world of relationships and the pain of what can happen to us within them. We humans all suffer these forms of shame. We all find our vulnerability frightening. We are all tempted to defend ourselves from this pain and fear, and anger offers one form of defence. Our work with this kind of anger is learning to bear the vulnerability of relationship and the pain of shame, but without identifying with it as the definition of us. Through this work, we further and further resist the temptation to enact this threat-based anger in the world.

Another kind of anger which requires another kind of work is a rooted anger. This isn’t the anger upon which we lean to defend ourselves against the threat of being shamed. This is the anger which arises as a healthy and proportionate response to poor treatment. The anger of ‘no’, of ‘stop it’, of ‘respect me’. This is a very important anger to be in touch with and to enact in the world. Jaq is a master of this anger. She is powerful. She is ‘Top Girl’. Perhaps it’s useful to note that Jaq herself might have found her way to liberation by noticing that she couldn’t conform to the norms of working class womanhood. Jaq doesn’t fancy men, and her sexuality isn’t defined by needing to conform to what is acceptable and attractive to them. The freedom to step outside of the expectations bestowed upon women might be derived from Jaq’s sexuality, but perhaps more importantly, from the necessity of being different. It is this difference of perspective which allows Jaq to perturb us towards freedom. We are told that we should embrace difference, even though it comforts us less than familiar sameness, and here is the least reason why – it is for our own good that our expectations and assumptions are confronted with ‘no’.

There are many different ways to live as a woman. If we make our choices freely, with awareness, with other viable options available, and with the capacity to change our minds when we wish, then we, like Jaq, are being ourselves and are free. We are our own ‘Top Girl’, of our own definition. Waking us up to this process of active aware choice-making are the examples around us; the lives lived, the characters imagined, the stories told that leave us asking questions: What can Jaq do? How does she see life? How does her life illuminate our own? How wonderful to have works of art which invite us to ask questions and discover more about ourselves through the process of inquiry. We are all unique individuals, as such each of our hearts point a different way. Great works of art have the depth and breadth to hold much of us.

So tell your sisters, your daughters, friends and mothers. It is important to practice awareness, feel that rooted anger which arises when we are treated poorly, and take up our power to define ourselves in our own terms. ‘The master’s house is never dismantled with the master’s own tools’ as they say, and so it is up to each of us to free ourselves. Then perhaps, we might offer examples of freedom to others who are paying attention. Our process of becoming free involves seeing through the received stories of who we are, and the engine of this process is awareness, listening carefully to our own heart as it points the way to the questions that we need to explore in order to grow.

Of course, this isn’t just an issue for women and girls. It’s for all people who find themselves born into the wrong side of a binary within which power is unequally distributed: Black and white, poor and rich, gay and ‘straight’, ‘disabled’ and ‘able’, young and old, ill and well… the list goes on and on, and somewhere along the intersecting lines of difference, all of us get clobbered somehow.

Thankfully, society’s times, they are a changing. Yes, too slowly, falteringly, and with backward steps sometimes, but when you know, you know. Once we have looked freedom in the eye, and recognised ourselves in the reflection, there’s no going back.

Jael 2023