I’ve talked a little about the Rebel Badge Club/Book before – some of the badges I’ve done and especially Summer Camp and apparently the first ever Meet Up but after going to my sixth nearly three weeks ago, I thought it was time to talk a bit more about it. The initial plan was to just write up this one but once I started thinking about it, I realised there’s maybe something wider to say about the meet ups.
For a little context, the Rebel Badge Club started as a book of merit badges for adults, specifically the ones who say things like “I got badges all the time when I was a kid, I got a Brownie badge for making an old person a cup of tea*, now I’m an adult I don’t get badges, why isn’t there a badge for adulting?” Well, now there is! Chief Rebel Charly wrote and published the Rebel Badge Book in 2021 and yes, it includes an Adulting badge (I haven’t done it). Four a half years later, one badge book is now three badge books, plus monthly, quarterly and annual badges, an equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, an annual adventure challenge, city-wide games, local “Rebellions”, summer camp and Meet Ups, ie events where 70-odd members get together to do stuff plus probably at least half a dozen things I haven’t thought to mention.
I especially like the Meet Ups. It kind of scratches my itch for grown-up Brownies in a way that the Trefoil Guild (“Guiding for adults”) just doesn’t. This recent one, for example, started with a group line dancing session and then we broke into four smaller groups for a creative writing session, watercolour painting, string art and circus skills.
Now, I’m not very good at things like line dancing, although as dance sessions go, the kind that sticks to a firm rhythm of “1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4″ is not the worst, and last year I choreographed and then ran a line dancing lesson for my Brownies for a Unit Meeting Activity. But I’m no worse than at least a third of Rebels and one thing Rebel activities invariably have in common are good instructors who are not there to shape you into mistake-proof perfect performers, let alone on a first try. That’s what I really want to talk about today. If you get it wrong, no one even notices. If you want to take a break, you just can. If you want to add extra bits, miss bits or otherwise add your own flair, go for it. If you have zero aptitude for dancing, who cares?! If everything except the turn and clap bewilders you, at least you’ve got a point where you can jump back in and no one’s judging you for that, not least because the other Rebels are all counting in their heads and concentrating too much to notice if anyone else is lost. While I was standing there lost, did I notice anyone else in a similar boat? No, but I know they must have been there.
We often do some kind of dance or exercise class and recently it’s been as a large group as a start to the day instead of one of the sessions you rotate round with your patrol. I’ve done drum & bounce, cheerleading, disco yoga, Bollywood dancing and between Guiding and the northern meet ups, I’ve missed nine so I know there are plenty of dance classes I haven’t tried. Is it something I would ever even dream of doing outside of Rebel events? Absolutely not! Am I perfectly happy to give it a go at Rebel events? Absolutely!
There are a couple of sessions that have really stuck with me. The first was the life drawing with Rod that we did all the way back at the first meet up. I can’t draw. I can make positive noises about my abilities but the fact is that I can’t draw. But with Rod, there was something about the way he taught that made me realise that it doesn’t matter. Sitting there with an A2 piece of sugar paper, a handful of pencils and a piece of charcoal, I found that I really enjoyed the liberating feeling of putting on a timer and just attacking the paper with the charcoal. The result is so far from perfect that it’s laughable but it doesn’t matter. In just an hour, Rod has turned me from someone who can’t draw into someone who can and does happily sketch. That charcoal sketch with chalk highlights isn’t a work of art but it exists and wobbly as it may be, you can generally tell what I was trying to achieve. I quite often travel now with scraps of sugar paper and a few pieces of charcoal. I may not use them but I like to take them with me.
I have the evidence of these meet ups scattered around my office. On the side of the bookshelf beside me is a finished Rosie the Riveter cross stitch, a mini screen printed wall hanging where the paint ran and I embroidered over it in colourful thread to pick out the detail – because, like the sketching and dancing, it doesn’t matter that it went wrong, a bag of makeup where a simple “this is how to apply eyeliner for people who don’t wear eyeliner” session transformed my ideas on wearing makeup (I still don’t do it routinely but sometimes I’ll sit and turn my eyes into a riot of colour), a rainbow mandala stone and downstairs is a clay toadstool and a string art flamingo. And that’s just the sessions that left me with something tangible to bring home. Oh, I suppose somewhere I’ve got a roll of paper from that life drawing class and another from the still life class and I’ve got a page of watercolour mushrooms on my desk that I haven’t put away yet.
But what really inspired this post was the circus skills session with Paddy. As a Guide leader, I’ve done a fair few circus skills sessions over the years. At university, I used to sit in a certain college cafe to use up the hour between my last class and my caving club meeting and the circus club met there. I have no idea why I never joined but I watched and I took a shine to the poi, which is now my circus skill speciality. The email said that the circus skills would involve poi, diabolos and flower sticks and I went “Well, I love poi and I can’t do diobolos and flower sticks”. Then there were no poi and I was disappointed, right up until Paddy handed us all a set of flower sticks and the instruction that we were to spend the hour making mistakes. I don’t know if it was the explicit instruction to make mistake taking off the “I have to do it correctly!!” pressure or whether Paddy’s just that good a teacher but within twenty minutes, the entire Patrol had fallen in love with flower sticks. I now have a set of my own. Then we did diabolos and within ten minutes, I was flicking mine into the air (not very high but definitely off the strings) and catching it. Paddy came round to see how we were all doing and went “Oh, you’ve done this before!” and yes, I have, but all I’ve ever done is drop a diabolo repeatedly from a limp string. No one has ever succeeded in teaching me how to get it spinning, let alone how to flick and catch and it just blew my mind that there’s either something in this teacher or there’s something in the mindset he gave us that made such a huge difference.
I don’t have any pictures or videos of either flower sticks or diabolos but I popped my phone up and filmed myself juggling silks – yet another thing I’ve never succeeded in before, and another thing on my circus toys order in the days after the meet up.
Because that’s what so many Rebel instructors do, either at meet ups or at the virtual Rebel Fests or camp. We’re adults, we’re not studying for exams or upholding the instructor’s reputation, we’re here to learn something new and have fun. It’s more important to have a go and leave feeling like you did indeed have a go than to be perfect or even good. I never ever leave a Rebel event or session feeling like I was rubbish at something or I couldn’t do it. Even on camp where I only got one step up the High All Aboard climbing activity – I hadn’t planned on climbing it at all, so I came away feeling accomplished that I’d got off the ground. Everyone’s there to make you feel good about what you did, no matter how little or how bad it was, because the doing is more important than anything else.
I often look back fondly at my days as a Guide – I had a go at climbing, kayaking, camping, cooking, hundreds of crafts and even things that don’t begin with a “c” or “k” sound. I don’t even remember how well most of them went but I had a go at them. I had those opportunities. As a leader, I now provide those opportunities but as a Rebel, I get to be a Guide again. I get to try new things with no pressure. And as I work through the badge books (in four and a half years, I’ve finished 64 badges), I get to try out more new things. Who would have thought I’d take any more than a cursory interest in the stars? I never thought I’d do the Barista, Mixologist or Sommelier badges (I now have strong opinions on lime and a certain chocolatier in Greenwich). I’ve done not just the Artist badge but the Advanced Artist, both as a direct result of that life drawing class three and a half years ago. I’ve got two books sitting on my shelf that I’ve finished writing because Rebel badges gave me a push.
Do you see what a force for good this whole thing is? Oh, it’s easy to feel a certain amount of pressure – that you have to do a certain number of badges or earn a certain number of Cup points (that’s a competition between 500-ish members to earn points for their team over a year by doing badges or bonus challenges) and I occasionally have to remind myself that this is something that’s supposed to be fun, supposed to be enhancing my life and introducing me to new things and not an unpaid job or set of chores that I have to do. I suppose that’s all I really wanted to say – that the Rebel Badge Club, and especially the meet ups, are a really good confident booster in areas you might not realise needed boosting and I’m very grateful for the whole thing.
If I’ve convinced you to join, all you need to do is buy the first book (the blue one, Volume One – you don’t need the journal, it’s just a custom-designed workbook to help you track your work) and join the Facebook group. Don’t get swept up in all the chaos immediately, just have a look through the book, see what catches your eye and you can work your way up to volumes two and three and in-person events later.
* What they mean by this is that they did their Hostess badge, for which you had to write a letter inviting someone to an event, address the envelope correctly and look after your guests, including preparing and serving refreshments and making a decoration – it’s not much, perhaps, but it’s a badge for 7 to 10-year-olds.
I Am A Polar Bear 