Less Doing, More Honest Conversations: An International Women's Day Reflection.
For a long time, I thought pushing through was the answer.
Keep going. Stay professional. Do not let anyone see you struggle — apart from the friends who received the occasional WhatsApp selfie of me on the couch, completely broken.
And I was pretty good at it. I enjoyed the highs, ignored the lows, and popped the painkillers when my body really started screaming at me. But there is a cost to that kind of relentless forward motion, and we do not talk about it enough.
A crisis of nervous system overload
I have come to believe we are living through a crisis of nervous system overload. Not just individually — collectively. A world obsessed with action, productivity, and pushing through has forgotten how to pause, to reflect, and to actually be with one another.
And the specific pressure on women in the workplace — to perform, to keep up, to never make their struggle anyone else's problem — is adding to it quietly, every single day. The instinct to absorb everything, to manage it privately, to present an unbroken surface, is exhausting in a way that compounds over years.
Where change actually comes from
Here is what I have come to believe about change. It does not come primarily from big campaigns or sweeping policy shifts — necessary as those can be. It comes from small, honest conversations. The ones where someone finally says “I'm not okay,” and the person next to them chooses to listen rather than to fix.
For me, it looked like something very small. Telling colleagues that I had really bad period pain and needed a couple of hours. That was it. And them replying: “Of course, no problem.” No drama. No need to take formal sick leave. Just a recognition that I would still deliver, but that I am human and need to do that in a way that does not break me in the process.
Those conversations mattered more than any awareness campaign I have encountered. Because what they created was permission — for me, and potentially for every other woman on that team who had never felt safe enough to say it out loud.
The question I want to ask this International Women's Day
So this International Women's Day, I do not want to talk about glass ceilings or gender gap statistics. Important as those are, and much as I have written about them elsewhere, I want to ask something more personal.
When was the last time someone asked how you were actually feeling — and you told them the truth?
And when was the last time you created the space for someone else to do the same?
Less doing — even just a little bit, and I know how hard that is in the world we are currently living in. More being. And more honest conversations.
Happy International Women's Day to every woman who is learning to listen to herself, and to every person choosing to listen to the women around them.