She was telling me about prepping for her trip to Paris and how she picked up her company badge in hopes of showing off her prestigious London office to her family.

She was SO giddy that I got second-hand excitement. But in a split second, I was hit with a wave of emotion, and my tears fell to the table.

I remembered being that excited about my job, the work, and the future of my career just last year. But a lot has changed between then and now.

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You’ll find out that I cry, like, a lot. At sad things, at happy things, at sunsets… at anything that hits me in the gut. And this did just that.

While I was trying to smile through the tears welling up, there was no hiding the strange, bittersweet feeling that came with mourning my career.

For almost a decade I’ve written for every medium, learned to navigate startups and big agencies, built relationships, won awards, and been shortlisted in competitions… all building toward the career I thought I wanted.

But the future I’d been working towards didn’t feel like mine anymore. And every day since, that ‘knowing’ has sunk deeper and deeper.

My ambition has gotten me so far in life.

In high school, I was on the honors list; in college, I was on the dean’s list. I played sports and joined clubs. And I continued to perform when I got into the office.

Throughout my life, I’ve been ‘successful,’ and I’ve prided myself on how hard I’ve worked to get there.

You know how it goes: you meet someone, you ask their name, and then immediately what they do because that’s what society cares about.

I was so excited and genuinely proud to get to say ‘I’m a copywriter’.

I found a career where I could use my creativity. And I loved explaining what I did because, sometimes, people didn’t know this kind of job existed.

Or they thought I was somehow a Copyright and Trademark lawyer, which… HA no.

I thought I would be a change-maker in this industry.

I was pumped to be at a big company with BIG clients and the possibility of getting one of my ideas through. Or even better, getting to be on set as a part of production.

And after years of trying, I finally did it.

For the past three years, I tried to get on a shoot, so you can imagine just how excited I was to drop everything and jet off.

Next was three weeks of travel, nice hotels, good meals, and collaborating IRL (which was thrilling since I’m remote). I was crafting the stories and having fun while doing it.

I cracked jokes with the client, made our talent feel like family, and was on cat-duty every time one walked into frame.

But as I lay star-fished on the king-size bed, looking at the eccentric, art-deco room of the swanky LA hotel I was staying in, I realized last year I would’ve looked at me now and thought:

I made it.

And again, the emotions washed over me; my tears hit the pillow, and my body melted into the mattress…

This is who I’ve been trying to become for the past nine years…? Wait. Is that right? NINE YEARS?!

And as soon as I got it, I didn’t want it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I was still so grateful to be there. But this was complicated.

Just one year ago, I probably would’ve said to myself, “Look at what you’re doing! Why are you leaving?” and I’m sure that’s what people are looking at me and thinking now. And that’s okay.

Because both things can be true.

For months, I almost felt guilty because even though I was on the biggest shoot of my career, I was simultaneously building my way out.

I fell in love with advertising because I thought it would be about fighting for good work and making amazing things with amazing people.

But instead, the reality is: the work becomes less about collaborating and creating and more about navigating the yes-men and the mean girls around it.

And that’s not the career I was sold.

Last week, I cried as hard as I will ever cry again over this fucking job – because I finally came to terms with the fact that I have to leave.

This cry wasn’t like the rest. It was visceral. It consumed my whole body. It was coming from my core. And it lasted for hours.

I wasn’t crying like that because I was scared of jumping without a backup plan or a leap fund. It wasn’t because I wasn’t a “good fit.” And it definitely wasn’t because I don’t have what it takes.

Quitting a toxic workplace is one thing, but quitting a career that you have been busting your ass for and genuinely enjoy isn’t something a lot of people talk about.

Because it feels like shit.

It feels like after a decade of proving myself… like I gave up.

And I’m sure that’s what it looks like from the outside.

But on the inside? It feels like I’ve been pushed out of a version of my career that I worked so damn hard to build.

Maybe that’s why I’ve cried about this so much.

Because I’m not just grieving a career. I’m grieving the life around it that I’ve pictured since sophomore year of college.

I’m grieving the team I thought I’d find. The collaboration I thought existed. The culture where the best idea mattered more than the politics around it. And the job where making something great with people you respect was the whole fucking point.

And that’s what hurts the most: I still love the work.

I love finding the golden insight. I love my creative process. I love changing perspectives. I love building something that makes an impact. And I love collaborating with people who care.

But I hate what happens when all of that gets buried underneath politics, ego, competition, and the pressure to create at the ‘speed of culture.’

Because creativity needs room to breathe. It needs time to sit with an idea, to talk to someone who sees it differently, to let it evolve and get better. It needs people who can challenge each other without turning it into a power struggle.

And that’s what I thought I was signing up for. But I was wrong.

I used to think I would be the person behind so many big campaigns. And I still will be.

It just might not be for a big organization or from inside the industry I spent the last nine years building in. And, honestly?

I love that for me.

Because even though it looks like I’m giving up on the career I wanted, I’m not.

You can be grateful and ready to leave. You can love the work and hate the environment. You can be successful and know it’s not right for you. You can be ambitious and walk away.

So I’m finally giving myself permission to build a version of my career that I actually want.

Share the audacity to be ambitious

In high school, I was playing dead or alive with my sister when the football went right between my pinky and ring finger. And as soon as it happened, I shook out my hand and said: “Oof, that didn’t feel good.”

Then after four weeks of wearing an extra-large glove at the pizza place, I bumped my pinky just right, decided to go to the doctor, and came home with three screws in me and a lobster claw of a cast.

By college, you think I would’ve learned… but I didn’t.

This time I did a cartwheel into a pool, but the edge of my foot hit the bottom and rolled. And I am no stranger to the sprained ankle, so I hopped out and got a bag of ice for it.

That weekend I went to Chicago and walked all over on a broken foot, priding myself on the fact that my friend only had to rewrap it once. Then I got put in a bulky-ass boot for 6 weeks.

I used to think having a high pain tolerance was something to brag about. Poor girl.

Truth is: the pain barely registered because I learned to disconnect my brain from my body. And I’m just now trying to tether them back together.

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I wonder how many other women cut ties with themselves in this way.

Women are simply not taught about our bodies. And more importantly, we aren’t taught to feel our bodies — we are taught to fix them.

Cover up the acne. Quiet the cramps. Dye the grey hairs.

So we poke and prod to become someone else’s version of “beautiful.” We plaster shit across our face before we feel confident enough to leave the house. We do everything to stay youthful, but aging should be the most celebrated thing on the planet.

We’ve inherited the expectation to do endless self-work — on top of all our actual work — just to hide the downfalls of this broken-ass system… and it’s making our anxiety, stress, and depression skyrocket.

Which is exactly what it’s supposed to do when generations of women are taught to self-abandon, over-function, and constantly perform as the ‘good girl.’

Her nervous system vs. the system

When you’re in a society that keeps you this disconnected from your body, it gets harder and harder to recognize the signals.

But my mom knew the signals; she just couldn’t do anything about them.

She was married to a man whose rage ran the house, and leaving wasn’t an option when she thought about handing me and my sister over to him. So she stayed.

And she sacrificed herself over and over and over, not because she was ignorant of what it was doing to her, but because the alternative was leaving two kids unprotected in that house.

She was at constant odds with herself because she knew what her body was telling her, but it wasn’t safe enough for her to do it. And when you have no choice but to keep going, that’s exactly what you do… and you pay for it later.

At her core, my mom loves to help people. Before having kids, she was a special ed teacher, and her stories will both warm and break your heart. She’s the kind of person who drops everything when you need her. And to this day, she’s my fiercest protector.

I watched her put everyone before herself, constantly, and she was never a martyr about it. She provided for me and my sister while running on survival mode, but never made us feel like we owed her for it, and I can’t thank her enough for that.

The Body Keeps the Score is a book I’ve heard about for decades. But I never read it because as soon as I heard the title, I knew I witnessed it firsthand growing up.

My mom had fibromyalgia, and not the kind where you’re sore here and there. I’m talking about the kind that made her bedridden for days.

Sometimes she pushed through the pain, but sometimes she couldn’t even get off the couch. Her body physically wouldn’t let her, and no doctor ever gave her an answer that stuck.

She experimented with elimination diets. Routinely went to a chiropractor (who I referred to as ‘the popcorn doctor’). And tried every supplement, topical, and health hack under the sun. But her pain had nowhere else to go.

Fibromyalgia and autoimmune diseases in general are something researchers still argue about — because there’s no one cause, no single symptom, and no bloodwork that flags it. Just chronic pain that doctors typically write off as “in her head,” or worse, label her as a “WW” (whiny woman). Yes, really.

She wasn’t a woman who complained or who ignored her body. She was a woman who felt everything and still couldn’t leave.

Tolerating the intolerable

It doesn’t matter whether the self-sacrificing is coming from a marriage or the workplace, because your body files it the same way.

It doesn’t know the difference between “keep the peace at home” and “keep the peace in the meeting.” Your body registers it as a threat, absorbs it, and waits for you to do something about it.

Take the pain pill. Get the Botox. Get a better therapist. Then send you right back into the same environment that made your body scream in the first place.

And honestly, I love Ibuprofen as much as the next gal, so I’m not saying I’m against any of that. But I am against pretending they’re a substitute for changing the places that are making us sicker and even more disconnected than before.

When you take this band-aid fix because the bills are due or the kids need you, your body starts keeping score until you can’t ignore it.

Whenever I overwork, I pay for it. My back flares up. My neck hurts. And I need to sleep for 10, maybe 12 hours. And I don’t mean to overwork, but I am ambitious.

I have a full-time job, I’m working my way out on the side, and sometimes I don’t know where my drive stops and my survival skills begin.

I’ll push and push and push, not listening to my body that’s been asking me to slow down for days. And that’s the instinct I’m still unlearning: ambition first, body second, deal with the pain later.

My mom couldn’t leave her marriage sooner because it wasn’t safe. And so many women feel like they can’t leave their jobs for the same reasons — stability, money, insurance, whatever it is.

From endless to-do lists and constant ‘urgent’ deadlines to the fear of losing our only source of income, our nervous systems are not meant to stay in this fight-or-flight state.

It starts with the Sunday scaries. And those turn into evening scaries. Then that turns into morning overwhelm. Morning overwhelm turns into daily dread. Daily dread turns into using your PTO just to try to recover. And before you know it, you’re fully burnt out.

I wish I were joking, but these are things I’ve heard women say all within the last month:

‘I had to up my meds again just to keep up’
‘I can’t take a sick day; I would be buried in work’
‘I got let go and finally had time to go to all the appointments I’d been putting off’

And what do we get to make up for it? A meditation app? A wellness stipend? A fucking pizza party from the same man who just tripled your workload?

I mean, how is it that we’ve made working to get an ad out the door more important than working out…?

Our bodies are not machines, and they were not made to sit at a desk and stare at a screen for 40 hours a week, if not more.

The 8-hour-a-day, 5-day workweek was not made for bodies that run on a 28-day cycle, and more specifically, it caters to the bodies that reset every 24-hours.

And by now, you’re probably tired of me saying women are tired… but this is more than just career exhaustion.

It’s the schedules that don’t work with our cycles. The mental load. The physical load. The office housework. The caregiving. The proving ourselves. The sought-after independence that’s actually the pipeline to isolation. And so much more.

We’re trained to call staying “resilient” instead of what it actually is: tolerance with no exit.

“Controlling women’s bodies and labor is foundational to patriarchal societies”
– Kari J. Winter

Sometimes the signals that turn into a crisis aren’t because of a failure to listen. They’re because the environment isn’t safe enough for you to change it.

My mom knew that. She knew she was hurting. She knew the house wasn’t safe. She knew she was exhausted. Her body was telling her the entire time. But knowing and being free enough to act on it are two very different things.

She didn’t get better because she learned how to tolerate her environment, tried a miracle drug, or found a doctor who finally listened. She got better because when my sister and I were finally in college, she left.

Her nervous system was reacting to the dangerous environment she was surviving in for decades, and when she left Michigan to go back to California… I kid you not, she was able to GOLF. Exactly.

For generations of women, leaving a bad marriage or a bad job meant: no safety net, no support, and no plan B that didn’t look like starving or going to a shelter. So women stayed, and their bodies have paid for it ever since.

We keep telling women to listen to their bodies without asking the more important question:

What happens when you’re too disconnected to hear what your body is telling you, or worse, you can hear it, but you can’t do anything about it?

What happens when your body says leave, but your paycheck says stay? When your body says rest, but your inbox says urgent? When your body says this isn’t safe, but your health insurance is tied to the job?

I used to think my pain tolerance made me tough. But it just meant I got really good at not being home when something bad happened to me.

And that’s the trick: the system causes the pain, tells you it’s your fault, and makes sure there’s no real fix available.

So you’re not choosing this…you’re building the last survival skill you need to try to fit in a system that isn’t made for you.

And the system needs women separated from their bodies so we keep capitalism, caregiving, and, let’s be honest, the whole fucking economy running.

A woman who is disconnected doesn’t know how to feel when something’s wrong. She doesn’t know how to trust her instincts enough to leave. And she doesn’t listen to her gut when she wants to speak up.

So the goal is not to be so resilient that we can tolerate anything.

The goal is to become connected enough to know what our bodies are telling us — and free enough to do something about it.

Share the audacity to be ambitious

“I like myself just the way I am. I like myself just the way I am. I like myself just the way I am.”

She said, “Anna, who are you talking to?” And 5-year-old-me said, “To anyone at school who makes fun of me for these!”

I pointed to the moles on my neck — ready to guard myself from the cruelty I already knew at that young age.

I’ve heard this story so many times, and I used to laugh at it. My mom tells it as if I was this confident little girl, ready to take on the world.

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But looking back, I know it’s one of the first moments I can point to and say: that’s where the mask went up.

That’s when I started creating alternative versions of myself so I would be safe enough in whatever room I was thrown into.

But is that when I started prepping to be the outcast?

How many times did I already have that kind of experience? How many times had I already been made fun of… or scolded? How many times had little Anna picked herself up by then?

Clearly enough for me to look at myself, dead in the eyes, and practice how to defend and protect myself before walking into the next day of school.

Survival of the visible

I knew exactly who I was before I was cruelly, guilt-tripped into shape-shifting to everyone else’s needs.

I’ve had a big personality since I could talk. I’m loud. I’m deeply emotional. I call out the ugly truths… and people don’t like that. Especially narcissists.

My emotions have been guiding me my whole life, but I was told I was too sensitive. That they didn’t matter. That I was wrong.

I was a choir kid and loved to sing, but would get screamed at to stop… constantly.

I ran around being my bubbly-self at daddy-daughter dances, just to get reamed out on the ride home because I didn’t spend enough time with him.

I was a goofball at friend and family gatherings, just to get pulled around the corner and scolded two inches from my face with the familiar: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

And when I was genuinely excited to share my wins, I’d get questioned or discredited.

Every time I shined too bright or took up a little too much space, I would get knocked down a peg — or ten.

My sparkle became material for manipulation, my emotions became leverage for later, and my needs became proof that ‘you are needy.’

Master of masks

Women already grow up believing that being seen is risky, but I learned that it’s dangerous.

When you go through narcissistic abuse — and when that abuser is your parent — the fear of visibility gets embedded as a core survival strategy before you even have the words for it.

I was being watched, instead of seen — so I had to become hypervigilant. I saw my passions get praised one day and punished the next — which pushed me into perpetual performance mode. I was gaslit into thinking there was something wrong with me — so I would dissociate and shut down.

Society expected pleasant, organized, and obedient girls… and I was none of those things.

My favorite 5th-grade teacher actually told my mom that she wanted to give me all good grades, but had to mark me down in the communication category because, and with love: “She doesn’t stop talking, and that’s just Anna.”

Little did I know: I was neurodivergent AF.

In school, I interrupted every time I tried not to. I got emotional and did my best to contain it. And I was wildly unorganized but somehow still got things done.

Little by little, all the things I was hearing at home started to take form in my own voice. “What’s wrong with you?” “You’re so dumb.” “Why can’t you just do it?”

I was becoming a master manipulator… of myself. A pro at building versions of myself so no one could ever see the chaos that lived in my head.

And just like that, the harmful patterns of hyper-independence, over-preparation, and self-doubt laid the groundwork for my invisible existence.

My fear of being authentically seen turned into the terror of being exposed as fundamentally broken.

I’m what you get when a woman who was born wired differently gets raised by someone who weaponized that difference, then gets handed a culture that calls it a ‘character flaw.’

And that combination is the triple whammy that can stomp out your sparkle forever.

Visibility means vulnerability

Then I walked into my first big-girl job to find out one of the most important things in climbing the ladder is… visibility.

Ha. Of course it is.

So men grow up being taught to face their fears. To be visible, to be confident, to be ready to get promoted. But women? We are systematically taught to play it safe.

And when we get to the workplace, we see the same thing reinforced: invisible women get overlooked for opportunities, and visible women get overly exposed to harassment, retaliation, and abuse.

So by the time I walked into an office, I was terrified of being truly visible, but I already knew how to build a professional version of myself to survive.

What I didn’t know was: this toxic pattern was the unspoken golden rule of every system I have ever been a part of.

I get the dreaded ping: “Hey, available for a quick chat?”

Before I even joined the call, I knew what was coming; so I prepped. I prepped the version of myself who’d been managing a difficult man’s moods since before I could drive.

He told me I was too far in the weeds. That I cared too much about process, documentation, and details that “didn’t actually matter.” That my attention to detail — the exact thing that had made me good at my job for years — was suddenly a problem I needed to fix.

He flattened my professionalism into an office joke. Devalued my role and my voice. And then acted surprised that I was upset.

I remember getting off that call, and sobbing.

Sobbing because my nervous system couldn’t tell the difference between a difficult coworker and the man who raised me.

Corporate déjà vu

What they don’t tell you when you go into advertising is that narcissistic traits thrive in industries that reward charisma, overconfidence, and self-promotion.

Narcissists take the credit, make bold, high-risk moves, and therefore, are seen as ‘leadership material’ — even though those exact traits predict worse team outcomes and weaker performance over time.

I had no idea that, statistically, I would probably work with men who were wired like my dad.

Wired to sabotage the emotionally intelligent, self-aware, high-performers, like me, so they can amplify our mistakes, gaslight us into working harder, and move the goalposts every time we get close.

And once I saw it in corporate, I couldn’t unsee it.

THIS is why ambitious women are leaving the system altogether. Because we’ve accepted the fact that every company we work for will most likely be run by narcissists, or worse, “corporate psychopaths.”

I mean, did you know a study found that 21% of senior professionals possess clinically significant psychopathic traits? And that’s nearly identical to prison populations.

So this corporate system doesn’t just tolerate narcissistic leadership…

It manufactures it.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve experienced enough narcissistic abuse in my 29 years that I will not let myself be exposed to that kind of environment ever again.

Seen women scare people

My life has been the perfect storm of being gaslit into thinking me and my emotions are the problem, unknowingly becoming a master at masking my neurodivergent traits, AND making myself smaller and smaller to try to be what everyone else needed.

My light will always be seen as a threat to people who need control.

That’s why the fear of visibility is planted in us so early, and why its grip is still there decades later. We write the caption and never hit post. We film the video and delete it before anyone sees it.

Not because we have nothing to say — but because some part of us is still five years old, practicing how to protect herself in the mirror, convinced that being her authentic self will be the thing that gets her hurt again.

I wish I could go back and tell her that there was never anything wrong with her. That the very things everyone tried to shame out of her would become her greatest strengths.

And to keep 👏 fucking 👏 shining 👏

Because it turns out, visibility for women is activism.

So the most dangerous thing we can do to men like that isn’t staying invisible…

It’s shining as bright as we always have.

Share the audacity to be ambitious

You know it. Your manager knows it. Your manager’s manager knows it.

Then an opportunity pops up on the internal job board. Same role. Different office. Perfect fit.

You go to apply and see a checkbox: “Does your manager know you’re applying?”

So you bring it up at your next one-on-one, just to loop him in, and he says, “Actually, let me double-check on that… I wouldn’t want you to burn any bridges.”

…I’m sorry, what the fuck?

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And for the lady, perhaps, a break?

Women aren’t just ‘tired’… we’re fucking exhausted. The years of overworking, the continued lack of support and lack of compensation, on top of this 9-5 schedule that goes against the very nature of our bodies… It’s all finally starting to set in.

And this isn’t just on the individual level. Collectively, women have bent over backwards for decades… and now we are finally breaking.

We have ALWAYS been taught to put others before ourselves. We’ve been told not to step out of line. Don’t make waves. Don’t burn bridges.

But what does that look like when your authentic self inherently makes waves?

I’ve always wanted to bring my whole self to work, and I’ve tried to, but since joining the workforce, I’ve had to contort into a ‘professional version’ of myself. And I hate it.

But this isn’t professionalism — it’s conditioning. And it’s getting us nowhere. Actually worse than getting us nowhere…

Women are burning out at higher rates, with six in 10 senior-level women reporting frequent burnout and nearly 80% of senior-level Black women.

We are expected to be “on” emotionally AND show traditional leadership qualities. But the pressure of navigating how to be warm enough, assertive enough, and never too much of either is another level of exhaustion.

We know that this emotional exhaustion in women is not just because of the work — it’s the performance. It’s managing egos. Softening the email. Rehearsing your tone. And smiling through the credit theft. Because god forbid we aren’t a ‘team player’.

At work, at home, and everywhere in between, the performing is burning us out. Our days are filling up with more and more meaningless work that we can’t even find time to make dinner or exercise, let alone figure out what we actually want in this life.

So I’m done burning out — and I’m ready to burn bridges.

When I joined the corporate world as a junior, I was eager to make a name for myself. Instead, I was trained to do more with less and to work, hustle, and be as productive as humanly possible… (which clearly still wasn’t enough, thanks to AI).

I thought this hustle was my ambition, but I’ve realized it was just my nervous system on overdrive with a really good PR team.

And I performed like that because I thought the system would eventually meet me halfway. But I was naive about how little progress had actually been made inside the corporate world… and just how many women accepted it.

And ya know what? I get it. There was quite literally no other option for us. Every generation of ambitious women has had to learn how to play the game — how to play their game.

But now? Women have options that the generations before us never did, and we know it. So we’re done putting up with the same old shit.

Because fuck proving ourselves to people who will always view us as the underdog. Fuck pretending like your hands-off approach is helping anyone but yourself. And FUCK being manipulated into thinking a dumpster fire of a project is a ‘strong opportunity.’

So I’m no longer trying to make a name for myself in the system that expects to extract everything from me. And I definitely won’t be protecting it on the way out…

Because, maybe, I am starting to make a name for myself… The audacity 😉

Compliance dressed up as career advice

All my life, I’ve given people a million chances. From elementary school to college and well into my adult life, I have let people push and push and push me until my breaking point.

And that’s not something I’m proud of.

I’d get a new friend, have playdates, then never speak to her again because she chucked my doll over the railing on the stairs.

And I’d cut off lifelong friends because they got back with their shitty exes.

From the outside, it looks cold and detached, like “How could she really just walk away?” It seemed like it would take just one thing for me to write someone off.

But what you never saw were the countless times that person already crossed my boundaries… and I never spoke up.

This pattern of over-tolerating was ingrained in me from my childhood trauma, taught to my undiagnosed ADHD-ass throughout school and society, and then monetized by corporate culture.

And now, I’ve given more chances to a workplace than I’d ever give a person… and it’s damaged my career in more ways than I can count.

A chance: every time I raised my hand — and got handed a man’s busy work.
A chance: every promotion cycle I worked towards — but “next year” was always the year.
A chance: every time they nominated me to do more work on top of my actual job — and framed it as “congratulations.”

So when my manager said, ‘I wouldn’t want you to burn any bridges’ — I knew he wasn’t warning me. He was betting on my pattern. Betting I’d stay a good cog, give the benefit of the doubt, and sacrifice myself quietly, like I always had.

But as my mom likes to say, when I’m done, I’m DONE.

I knew these men didn’t give a fuck about me or my career, so I checked the box and applied.

And you know what came of it? Nothing.

And that’s when it clicked: I was still performing for people who were never going to see my value.

So I struck a match to burn the version of myself that performed for everyone else.

The slow burn of unlearning

I’d love to tell you I stopped performing overnight, but it’s not that simple. I still catch myself softening a question before I ask it or rehearsing for a one-on-one.

This wasn’t one before-and-after moment.

It was years of watching these people prove they were never on my side, even as I still looked up to them. Still took their advice. Still hoped they’d finally see my worth.

But after being stepped on over and over and over, that hope fizzled out.

So I’m gonna let you in on a little secret: By the time you hear “don’t burn bridges,” the bridge has already been burning for years.

You just never noticed because you were the one putting out all the fires. What your manager might call burning a bridge is actually just you putting down the extinguisher.

That phrase is meant to keep you scared and thinking about what leaving might cost you… The reference. The reputation. The relationships.

But staying? That costs the average woman half a million dollars over her career. In addition to her health. Her sanity. And the version of herself that still believes she’s meant for more.

So these “bridges” are not supportive relationships. They’re toxic control mechanisms made to burn you out, pay you less, and keep you exactly where you are.

Trust me, I know the “Does your manager know you’re applying?” checkbox was never a courtesy… It was a signal.

A signal for my manager to buy time, alert the other men in leadership, and probably try to stop it because ‘wHo ElSe w0uLd Do aLl ThE WoRk AnNa iS dOinG?’

So here’s how you really figure it out: burn the performance, and watch what holds. If the camaraderie and warmth evaporate, it was never a relationship. It was a toll booth, and you just stopped paying.

So let it burn.

Burn the version of yourself who always asks for permission. Burn the “mentorship” you were running by yourself. And burn your loyalty to the people who never viewed it as a two-way street.

Because the bridges worth keeping won’t burn… But the ones that keep us stuck? Those will go up in flames.

So now it’s time to build around the ones who never saw us coming…

Share the audacity to be ambitious

You hop on the call with a handful of coworkers to get briefed on the work, and this man has the nerve to say, “We were looking for someone to help fast and at a low cost, and you checked all those boxes!”

I don’t even think he noticed… but I sure as shit did.

He didn’t mispeak. He said the quiet part out loud. And I learned exactly what my caring looks like from the outside…

Fast. Cheap. Available.

Got it.

^{[credit: giphy.com]}

The collateral of caring

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told I care too much. And I’ve spent years trying to figure out if that was a compliment or an insult.

From the little girl raised by a narcissistic father to the woman who finally got diagnosed with ADHD at 28, my entire life has been training me to read the room — because that was the only way to survive.

A slight glance. Uncomfortable body language. Off energy. For women, any subtle shift can be the difference between safety and danger — and sadly, I learned this around age four.

Because of this inherent pattern recognition, I’ve always been able to tune into a frequency others can’t.

And I know I’m not the only one. You see the through-line of an idea before any of the higher-ups. You feel the shift in a meeting before anyone says a word. And you put out emotional fires before others even notice something’s wrong.

Women are trained to sense the underlying emotional dynamics of every room we walk into, spot the tension, and fix it (a skill that should be on my resume).

We are socialized not only to do the work, but also to feel responsible for everything. The relationships. The situations. The outcomes.

And whether we like it or not, this kind of caring makes us incredible at our jobs, but it also makes us exceptionally exploitable.

Whoever said “Love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life” was definitely a man.

When I stepped up to lead the creative for the largest account in the office, I quickly clocked that the creative, digital, and strategy teams were working in silos. And I hated it. But when I brought solutions to my manager, I was told, “They don’t work with us, so why would we work with them?” …

Well, that wasn’t good enough for me. So I built the process anyway.

While leading this 15-person team, I spearheaded brainstorming sessions to generate ideas for our client’s organic social content.

And it became the best meeting of the week.

It boosted morale, built a pipeline of real ideas, and gave younger talent a room where they could actually speak up.

I created this on top of my regular duties because I cared about the work and was dedicated to making it the best it could be.

Pulling strategic cultural topics. Setting the agenda. Hosting brainstorms. Consolidating. Rewriting. Presenting. Coordinating. All in addition to my actual job.

Then I was ‘relieved’ from my leadership role. And I still did all of this work… for over a year.

Eventually, I realized that one person can only do so much if no one else gives a shit.

So why did I continue to care? Because this was MY brain-child. Because the culture I’d spent the past two years cultivating was dying. And because I thought if I just kept showing up… maybe it wouldn’t.

I know now that’s not dedication; that’s what it looks like when you’ve become SUCH a good cog in the machine that you can’t tell the difference between caring for your work and sacrificing yourself for it.

I couldn’t ignore the growing tension between the two versions of myself — the one who was deeply invested in the work and the one who had to bite her tongue to survive.

I was exhausted, but couldn’t stop. I would vent to my friends about the same insane scenarios over and over, not because I couldn’t let it go, but because I couldn’t stop trying to fix something I genuinely cared about.

But that’s the thing about caring too much. You don’t just do the work… You absorb it. You take on the weight that never should’ve been fully yours. You over-function in a system that under-delivers. And you burn out faster because you keep trying to solve it all.

Caring isn’t a character flaw. It’s the system’s strategy.

Corporations don’t just benefit from how hard women care — they depend on it. And our nervous systems were never built to sustain that.

Unfortunately, in mission-driven work like nonprofits, social work, and SPAM (social, PR, advertising, & marketing) roles, where women are overrepresented, the expectation to “do more with less” is built into the culture.

Our caring is free, unpaid labor. Our sense of responsibility is a leash. Our emotional investment makes us easier to exploit, and our positions make it significantly harder for us to walk away.

This false sense of security will keep us tethered to our company computers, trying to prove ourselves while drifting farther and farther from our purpose.

I’m someone who has always been deeply devoted to her work, but I realized I can’t continue to care that much about projects or ideas that are not fully in my control. Because they’ll either get watered down or be killed by the client, if not internally first.

So after months of begging for support with the brainstorm, I told my manager if nothing changed by the new year, I would have to roll off that too.

And guess what? They tried to get me to stay by waving hopes of ‘exciting things on the horizon” but since they had said this for the past four years, I knew it was all a lie to keep me there.

I just couldn’t care anymore… so I immediately asked to be removed from leading the brainstorm.

The meeting I created.
The meeting that brought the team together.
The meeting that was making a positive business impact — and that I had bigger visions for.

But I didn’t have the internal teamwork to sustain it, and I wasn’t going to keep burning myself out to keep it alive.

This was the first time I had the audacity to take the reins of my own work.

And for the first time in my career, I stopped working over 45 hours a week.

But I never told anyone how much of a failure I felt like. It felt like I was letting work slip through the cracks. Like I couldn’t let it go… I had to keep reminding myself to loosen my grip.

Because, unlike women, it’s okay for men to treat work as transactional. They take their lunch breaks. They’re confident even when they are confused. And they only overextend themselves for high-visibility projects.

They don’t feel responsible for everything, they don’t second-guess themselves, and they definitely don’t raise their hands for office housework.

They do the bare minimum and get rewarded for it. Period.

When all this clicked, I remember thinking, “So this is how men have always operated?” Because I would have SO much more brain power if I treated work like this…

Women are taught to treat work like it’s personal. Caring about the work is expected of us, but once you start caring about boundaries, your own advancement, or solving a problem they don’t want to fix… You become a liability.

And now, more than ever, we are being fed a lie that “women don’t have what it takes” and “she couldn’t handle the pressure,” when in reality, it’s “her job extracted every ounce of her until there was nothing left.”

But we don’t have to operate like men; we don’t have to ‘care less.’

We just have to start asking, “What the hell do I actually care enough to burn for?” ❤️‍🔥

Share the audacity to be ambitious

This kind of travel wasn’t new to me. My dad was a pilot, so my whole family could travel standby with our companion passes. And for those who don’t know, standby is when there are open seats on a flight, so you can basically just put your butt in one and pay the taxes, not the ticket fee.

This meant learning to navigate the airport at three, waiting hours for open flights, and sleeping at too many gates to count. But it also meant I could fly first-class to Spain for $48 round trip.

Out of my looong travel days, this was easily the longest. But I didn’t mind snuggling up in economy for this 14-hour flight because this time, I got to travel around the world for my work.

The next 10 days were full of collaborating across cultures, trying new foods, and pulling all-nighters to get it over the finish line.

We didn’t win, but that didn’t matter. This was the first time I saw all the places advertising could take me.

Challenge accepted

Last week, I shared the first part of my Builders & Storytellers challenge submission, and as promised, here’s part two:

We were told to start pulling our favorite recent travel photos. Specifically, two images that helped tell our story… a moment, a feeling, a place that meant something to you.

It didn’t have to be perfect… it just had to be REAL.

SHE_BUILDS had us post our submissions on WOCO, a new travel publishing and destination discovery platform, and they asked us to keep the captions short and sweet (which was no issue for me).

They wanted my perspective, my curiosity, and my voice, so I chose travel images that best reflected me. But, of course, I couldn’t just choose two…

We were encouraged to add more to our profiles if we wanted, so that’s exactly what I did.

My two photo submission:

Morrison, Colorado 📍 2018

I came for a trip and moved for the feeling ✨ But funny enough, that feeling wasn’t gasping for air (brace yourself for the altitude, it’s no joke). It was the insanely welcoming people, the high energy, the fresh opportunities on the horizon, and yes, the 300 days of sunshine 🌞

This was the first time I felt like I belonged without having to perform… I could finally breathe 😮‍💨 I went back to Michigan and spent the next four years plotting how to get here ❤️‍🔥

New York, New York 📍 2025

From the 9th floor of the Museum of Art & Design, THIS is the POV of a U.S. Cannes Young Lions finalist 🤭 In 2022, everything was virtual; but this was very real. Standing up, looking out at all of this… I actually felt like I might be making a bigger impact in this world than I thought.

This was my moment. And the night I got industry confirmation, I have what it takes 😈

My profile add-ons:

Denver, Colorado 📍 2022

Specifically, the RiNo Art District! This neighborhood continues to match my energy and make me believe I chose right 🙂‍↕️ Murals, music, creative energy, and the kind of color that makes a rare, grey day feel vibrant. And the infectious conversations that keep confirming I was always supposed to be here 😇

Shanghai, China 📍 2018

BRB: discovering hidden gems 💎 In the middle of a chaotic ten-day advertising competition, I had one free afternoon. I still think about this “art maze” of poster shops, speakeasies, art studios, and street food 😋

This is exactly why you travel… To feel wildly alive in a place you never even knew existed ✨

Leadville, Colorado 📍 2026

When you need to get out of the city and into nature… Behold: the best dispersed camping spot 🏕️ There’s nothing like a bonfire, a blood moon, my favorite person, s’mores, and the serene, mountain escape I moved here for 😌 And after three summers here from MI (✋🏼), I finally know where all the accessible lakes are 🌊 Paddle boarding, anyone?

Unfortunately, there were so many technical difficulties, from instructional emails not going out to submissions not showing up, so it took a little longer for me to hear back.

But when I got the email, it said I didn’t make it.

And there was the familiar feeling of being a finalist, not the winner.

But again, it didn’t matter. This was the first time I saw all the places I could get to on 👏🏻 my 👏🏻 own 👏🏻 And I am so fucking proud of myself.

I’m proud of my ability to change and adapt. I’m proud of choosing myself over and over. And I am damn proud of relentlessly creating spaces for myself and others to simply belong.

Looking back at my story will always fuel the future I am building.

So even though I got another ‘no,’ I will continue to tell myself “I didn’t make it, this time.”

Because someday, I will make it.

Share the audacity to be ambitious

Freshman year, I absolutely hated Writing 101.

I called my mom crying, after every lecture and before every deadline, because I would get so hung up on the long-form structure, grammar, and, of course, the dreaded citations.

I’ve always been the artistic one in my family… meaning I never wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, or businesswoman. So I started a Graphic Design minor and checked off my gen-ed courses while figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.

And it was actually my mom who mentioned advertising. When I looked into it, I naturally fell into the art direction path. But when I took my first hybrid class with copywriters, it was the classic college group project. AKA: I did the art direction and the copywriting myself.

After I presented “our” project to the class, the copywriting professor asked to speak to me out in the hall…

Ngl, I thought I fucked up big time. Especially because our assignment was to “create a bad ad,” and I might’ve taken it a little too far on the tasteless, raunchy side. LOL

But when the door closed behind me, he said, “You wrote that, didn’t you?” I nodded with hesitation as he smiled and probed, “I don’t think you’re an art director… I think you’re a copywriter. Take my class next semester and let me show you.” (tysm Lou <3)

And thank GOD I didn’t let the emotional scarring from past writing classes stop me from saying yes, because with copywriting, I discovered a completely different way to write; one where I didn’t have to be so formal.

I could write something funny and witty without a footnote. I could lean into the heartfelt moments without having to pull back (too hard). And I could finally stop designing pixel by pixel and focus on what I was best at: connecting the story.

I don’t even think I was halfway through the class when I decided to swap my major.

When you work in advertising, attending the Cannes Lions Festival is THE career goal. And for the past four years, I’ve entered the U.S. Cannes Young Lions competition to shoot my shot.

For those who don’t know, I am a huge humanitarian; I’m only interested in the ideas that ACTUALLY solve a world problem, and that’s why this competition is so special to me.

Every year, they partner with a nonprofit for the brief, and this is the only time throughout the entire year when I actually get to have full control of my idea from strategy to concept to execution.

This two-week creative sprint has over 600 teams competing, and if you win, you get a chance to show your stuff on the world stage. And since competing, I’ve become a finalist twice.

But this year, I decided not to participate because my ambitions and goals have shifted drastically. And I’m ngl, it was hard to let go… like, really fkn hard.

There was still a part of me that wanted the challenge and industry recognition, but I knew I needed a break. But when the brief dropped, it broke me. Because it was the nonprofit of my dreams, and I had a good idea instantly.

I am so driven in my creativity that sometimes I don’t know when to quit. But I told myself, “When one door closes, another one opens.”

And a couple of months later, I stumbled across a much more aligned opportunity for an all-access pass to the festival of the year. It was hosted by @shebuildsinitiative (an empowering nonprofit for women) and @WOCO (a new social platform), and the application had just two questions…

Question #1: How would attending benefit you and your work?

I’m a copywriter by trade, a storyteller by design, and an activist by nature — and right now, I’m in the middle of building the biggest, scariest, most important thing of my career.

For years, I played the game. I raised my hand, advocated for myself, and relentlessly made opportunities where none existed.

And I got penalized for the same behaviors that got the men around me promoted. I watched the system quietly push women like me out… and I spent too long trying to fix it from the inside.

So I stopped.

Now I’m straddling two different realities: working towards entrepreneurship while figuring out exactly how to leave my corporate gig. So I’m building for the women who are still in it. Who are burnt out, talked over, and worn down, but not done.

I thrive when I pour my creativity through the cracks of what’s broken or cast aside, illuminating the dark, shadowy places where most people won’t go.

My work turns the painful experience of being a woman into stories that validate, arguments that activate, and a community where ambition gets to be selfish AF.

Cannes Lions is where the people who shape cultural conversations go to find each other. And I am ready to be found. The real change-makers are the ones fed up enough to build something new. And I am part of that.

I’m wired to empower women because I know our struggles first-hand, and honestly, that’s guided my entire career. Now, I’m ready to go from surviving in a system that’s meant to shrink me to thriving in a collective that’s made to support me.

Attending would catapult me through this transition, connect me with like-minded builders, and gain creative exposure that will make my thinking sharper and my work bolder.

Question #2: Tell us what you’re building…

I’m building the space I never had. A place for ambitious women to return to themselves before they build something new. To feel seen after years of having their reality denied. To find belonging without performing for it.

It started in February by launching Office Hours on LinkedIn. This is a 1:1 space where ambitious, creative women can get a direct, honest perspective from someone who can see things shifting from the inside out and who has been exactly where they already are or where they’re heading.

My need to talk about what’s really going on behind corporate doors has grown into a Substack I launched in April called The Audacity to Be Ambitious — and I’m already building a community. My posts are equal parts thought-provoking insights, raw personal stories, and an unflinching look at the glaring systemic inequalities that define what it means to be a woman in the workplace.

These are not think-pieces. They’re arguments. With data, with receipts, and with the kind of specificity that makes women DM me, saying, “It sounds like you wrote down my story.”

But I’m building this into something bigger. I’m creating an ecosystem designed to help women redefine what meaningful work, real success, and selfish ambition actually look like.

As a senior copywriter, I’ve spent years turning complex ideas into clear, compelling narratives and sparking authentic connections through cultural moments for some of the world’s biggest brands.

I’ve shortlisted in the US Cannes Young Lions competition twice — in both PR and Print. I know how to tell stories that move people. So now, I’m turning my skills on the system itself.

I don’t have all the pieces yet. But I know what I’m building toward: a brand, a business, and a body of work that makes ambitious women feel dangerous enough to leave their mark on the world.

I am dedicated to translating emotion into strategy to rewrite the stories, rewire the structures, and reimagine the systems that hold us back.

And I’ve been moving towards that every single day.

But I’m not done with corporate… I’m coming back for it. When I become a full-time entrepreneur, I want to bring workshops directly into organizations to do what most DEI initiatives never actually do: change the culture, not just the optics.

To help companies dismantle the biases and stigmas that push women out, and build workspaces that are genuinely safe, inclusive, and worth staying for.

Because while there is no going back for me, the women inside the corporate system need me to fight that fight too. I just need a little support and one solid shot.

I don’t know how many applicants there were, but I was one of 100 women who shortlisted.

And all this isn’t just to say, “I shortlisted again.” Knowing that my writing, my story, and my vision got me to the next level of this challenge is just another sign that I am doing exactly what I need to do.

I have never felt as confident in my path as I did after writing this — and this is just the start ✨

Stay tuned for my visual storytelling submission for the second phase next week!

Share the audacity to be ambitious

From brainstorming and writing headlines to art direction and concept development, I watched him make about six different agents for every part of the creative process. And he did all of this, instead of collaborating with a single coworker.

He assured us, “This will only take our jobs if we let it,” and “It’s all about adapting to work with AI and showing your value…” while simultaneously showing us the “value” of ideating in a vacuum.

Which is ironic AF, because this is coming from people who don’t actually know how to manage people. So instead, they manage their visibility by performing leadership instead of actually leading.

Then, with a straight face, he said that the future of our creative work is changing from an ‘individual contributor’ to a ‘manager of AI agents.’ And when that came out of his mouth, he didn’t even flinch.

Good thing I was off-camera, because I couldn’t have rolled my eyes harder. But after that call, I realized I wasn’t just angry…

There’s a reason I didn’t become an accountant or a software engineer. I became a copywriter because I love people. I love the messy brainstorms. I love blurting out something insane and watching it spark an idea that no one saw coming.

And I love watching a room full of people from different backgrounds build something new, together.

I chose this career because I’m a creative, and so much of my creativity comes from collaborating. But I was just told to my face that he — and the rest of leadership — don’t care about the craft, the creativity, or the humanity in our jobs.

I didn’t go into advertising because I wanted to manage systems. But now, I’m realizing leadership might see those moments as my weakness, instead of a fundamental disconnect from the very nature of creative work itself.

Move over “marketing girlie”

If you’re in an adjacent industry, I’m sure you’ve seen the viral video saying how AI tech bros are coming for our ‘Women in SPAM’ jobs (AKA social, PR, advertising, and marketing).

And YES, I will forever be using that term.

With disruption in tech industries and across the entire job market, men are looking for the “safe” industries to run to… and our SPAM jobs are top of mind. So I want to be clear, tech bros aren’t “coming” for our jobs, they’re already actively taking them.

But that’s not the scariest part…

When men enter female-dominated fields, they don’t just join the industry...They get fast-tracked into leadership. It’s called the glass escalator, and we’ve seen it enough to know how this ends. So do we honestly think the culture is going to get any better?

Creative work is becoming workflow management.
Collaboration is becoming automation.
Craft is becoming optimization.

And the people who built careers around human connection are being told our skills matter less than ever. So what happens when companies stop valuing the very things that made these careers meaningful in the first place?

Computers will never make meaning

Want to know who’s behind some of the most viral and transformative advertising campaigns in history? Women. Just ask Jewel Ham… Oh, that’s right. You probably don’t know her by name, but you do know her work.

If you’re excited to post your Spotify Wrapped at the end of every year, you have Jewel to thank. Spotify officially launched a ‘Year In Review’ in 2016, but the concept didn’t fully take off until 2019 when Jewel presented her internship project.

She turned their highly customizable analytics into a music meme frenzy. She saw the human connection across the data points. She brought the story to life with the numbers. And when she shared it with the top dogs… they ran with it.

This idea went on to create an infinite return on investment for Spotify, without her name attached. In 2020, app downloads increased by 21% in the first week of December, and they’ve been soaring ever since. But Jewel was the one who transformed this idea into the wildly memeable and insanely anticipated cultural phenomenon that it is today.

For decades, women have built these industries from the ground up. Through our innate skills, personal relationships, human creativity, and emotional intelligence — all things that AI can’t replace.

We champion inclusivity. We make space for complex emotions. We rally the team for birthday celebrations. We take the time to guide younger talent. We care about our coworkers.

And we’ve devoted our entire careers to making brands feel meaningful, while we get taken out of the credits.

Again and again, our ideas go out into the world… but our names don’t.

Creative career turned AI agent manager

I’d like to think women have shaped these industries enough that we couldn’t get replaced… but I see the signs from miles away.

Only 21% of entry-level women are encouraged by their manager to use AI, compared to 33% of men at the same level.

So tech bros don’t need to be better creatives than us. They just need leadership to stop valuing what we’re good at and use AI as a mechanism to weed us out.

And now leadership knows they don’t have to replace us… they just have to redefine our jobs until we can’t recognize them anymore.

I am watching my job rapidly change from creating meaning to managing the robots that will *attempt* to do that for me.

So the new, expected workflow is:
brainstorm ideas with your “world-class Strategist,” filter those ideas through your “award-winning Creative Director,” ask the “visionary Group Creative Director” to elevate the idea into culturally relevant brand activation.

Then these are the ideas you can FINALLY bring to a human team?!?!

Doesn’t anyone else see something wrong with that?

So if tech bros are running to fill creative jobs that aren’t even creative anymore… LET THEM.

Maybe the real reason why so many women are quietly questioning their careers right now is because the work we love is becoming less human.

We’ve been trained to tell the stories that grab attention, change perceptions, and rally people together, but we can’t do that with a system that doesn’t understand how we work.

Creativity has never been about writing the best headline, having the most optimal workflow, or even winning a Cannes Lion.

So the question isn’t “how do we survive inside these systems?” anymore. It’s “how do we build spaces that still value what makes us human?”

I’m calling the rise and fall of women in SPAM right now, because the ones making these workflow decisions are so far removed from the work we actually do, that they have no idea what they’re actively running into the ground.

But we won’t fall because creativity has always been about the humans behind it, and women have always made space for others to belong.

THAT is what your ambition protects.
THAT is what your audacity is for.
THAT is what is still worth building.

And that’s exactly what I’m here to do.

Share the audacity to be ambitious

At my performance review, I was surprised to hear “Let’s build a stronger case for next time!” because I thought I had already been proving myself.

So over the next six months, I did exactly that. I worked harder. I documented everything. And I came back with undeniable proof.

Talk about unpaid labor…

But before you think this is just my story — it’s not.

The Prove-It-Again Bias is as destructive as it sounds. It haunts the women who are passed up for yet another promotion after proving themselves over and over again. Meanwhile, members of the boys’ club get promoted based on potential alone.

After decades of being sidelined, women aren’t even interested in advancing. We are more likely to point to a time (or times!!) when we were passed over for a promotion, and therefore, can’t see a realistic path forward.

And it only gets worse the higher you climb. Senior-level women are more likely than any other group to believe top roles are unattainable — and that the people in them are burned out and unhappy.

Most women in the workplace are doing the jobs of three men simultaneously…but that still isn’t enough?! We also need to perform the job for an audience that’s too busy managing up to notice.

We are seeing what happens at the top and realizing what the promotion really costs.

So it’s not because we stopped being ambitious. And it’s not because we aren’t completely fucking capable. It’s because we see time and time again what happens when we try to advocate for our worth.

Going into the next review cycle, I was armed with my wins and ready to advocate for myself. But before the process even started, I was told: no raises, no promotions, and probably minimal merit increases. Sorry.

I thought, “Can they really do that?” Because I had a kick-ass year, and had been tracking it every step of the way.

So, I talked to a few coworkers and realized… they were setting me up to expect nothing.

And the thing is, I’m a writer, so I focused on highlighting all my wins the way women are supposed to, just to get noticed in this review.

Three things I had to learn the hard way, so you don’t have to:
1. Being a creative makes it harder for leadership to see our business impact
2. Being a woman makes it harder for them to recognize my inherent value
3. If I don’t clearly communicate how my work impacts what they care about, I will keep being overlooked

I spent hours writing my self-reflection and listing out my wins in a way they would understand. I stated 1) what I did, 2) what changed because of it, and 3) why it mattered to the business and larger company priorities.

I felt prepped, genuinely excited, and like I actually had a shot at getting what I deserved.

In my review, my manager applauded my hard work… but I realized about halfway through that he failed to mention any of my leadership impact. None of the stats, results, or outcomes I had thoughtfully added. And not one mention of me LEADING an account at all (the largest account in the office btw).

And the thing about me is: if something doesn’t sit right, I will say something. So I stopped him to ask where everything in my self-reflection was. The numbers, the evidence, the case he insisted I needed for next time…

He stuttered and brushed it off by saying he’d add that in. But this shook me wide awake. This was way bigger than one performance review.

This was the moment I started to see just how many men in corporate pull shit out of their asses. Because not only did he clearly NOT read my self-reflection, but he was also the Creative Director on the account I led…

So was he just not paying attention for the past fucking year?!

He wrapped up the half-assed ‘good job’ section and moved on to the ‘opportunities’ section. And before I say anything else, I need to make it clear: I’m an ambitious creative, and I thrive on constructive criticism because I want to hear all the ways I can make my work better. But every single bit of feedback was about me — not my work or business impact.

It was about how I react to feedback, how I let go of ideas (or can’t), and how I verbalize my frustrations.

And it wasn’t an accident. This was all happening around the same time my leadership role was replaced by a man who was actively making my life hell.

So, no shit, I probably wasn’t the most positive person in the room. But I know this feedback is just “smile more” dressed up in corporate jargon. Because do you think a man would ever get that feedback (or that treatment)? No.

This was just another way for them to try to manage my personality away.

But honestly? What I would’ve taken as a sharp dig in previous cycles, I wore as a badge of honor for this one. Because now, I knew how to translate it:

Receive feedback with openness = stop pushing back when we’re wrong
Creative detachment for momentum = stop caring so much about your own work
Positive-oriented mindset = stop naming what’s broken

So do you think I stopped doing any of those things? HELL NO.

And mainly, because I don’t know how to.

How do you not fight for your work? How do you switch off caring? How do you stop trying to fix what’s broken? Turns out, it’s a lot easier if you’re a man or a neurotypical… and I am neither one of those things (:

And ya know what? I bet I was, and probably still am, making my manager’s life a living hell just by being myself. And I refuse to change.

Women are routinely held to a higher standard across the board, with 76% of top-performing women receiving negative feedback, compared to just 2% of top-performing men.

Let that sink in.

The best part of this whole experience? My manager thought I was actually going to sign that ridiculous review. Little did he know, I was not leaving that cycle empty-handed.

It took not one, but two more meetings — and the audacity to be ambitious — for him to accurately record all of my wins.

And even then, he literally just copied, pasted, and tweaked verbiage from my self-reflection. So no matter how much you think your manager is advocating for you, they’re probably not.

It’s always been on us to get shit done, and even then, our careers can plateau because of just one biased manager.

After all of that, suddenly, a promotion wasn’t just on the table… it was served on a silver platter.

For about five minutes, it felt like a win…

Until I did the math.

When I started as a junior, I was at the top of my salary bracket. But after just two promotions, I’m now at the bottom of my salary bracket.

As I climbed, the ceiling dropped.

Glassdoor’s 2026 Beyond the Gap report found the pay gap doubles over the course of a woman’s career — starting around 12% early on and widening to 25% after 30 years of experience.

It also said a woman’s earnings plateau in their late 30s. But men’s? Oh, theirs keeps growing into their 40s…

The more experience we gain. The harder we fight. The more we prove.
The longer we wait. The wider the gap grows. And the further behind we fall.

When all of this clicked, I finally stopped fighting to belong in a system that’s designed to keep me busy by trying to prove I deserved to be there.

FUCK THAT.

I’ve done that enough to know I’m not doing that anymore.

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Yuuup, I wish I was kidding.

And for a moment, I was genuinely speechless. Which, if you know me, is not typical.

After I started explaining the second shift (which was named in 1989, by the way, and is still very much happening), I couldn’t stop thinking…

Here was the uncomfortable confirmation that men at the top — even the ones who seem to give a shit — don’t even know the basic foundations of what has helped make men like him successful.

^{[credit: giphy.com]}

So the question is: How are all of our contributions THIS invisible to the very men who are positioned to help us?

And that’s when it clicked.

Women have literally never been able to pursue a career the same way men have.

I mean, imagine everything you could actually accomplish if you came home to a clean house, fresh laundry, and dinner on the table every night.

HA sounds like a fkn dream — no wonder they’ve been able to go all-in.

The late nights. The full bandwidth. The singular focus. It was actually never about their ‘exceptional drive’ or ‘unyielding ambition.’

Throughout history, men’s career accomplishments have only been possible because of the unpaid labor of women. And this has not stopped.

Men continue to pursue their careers with the support of the invisible economy. AKA, they still expect women to take care of everything else… even if we have careers of our own.

If you’re a woman in a workplace, you know we don’t actually get to clock out.

We switch from corporate to household to caregiving, then back to corporate — and we are expected to do it all with a smile on our face.

Because of this disproportionate responsibility, caregiving is cited as the reason for workforce inactivity in 45% of women, compared to just 5% of men.

Our workplaces were designed to assume that employees (men) had someone at home to do the cooking, the cleaning, and the caring.

And THAT is what makes men the ideal workers.

While men fought overseas during World War II, women held it down at home while stepping into men’s jobs to keep the economy afloat.

After the war, the expectation was to return to ‘normal’ with women reverting to traditional jobs like teachers or homemakers — but many women wanted to keep working even as society pushed them back into the home. Sound familiar?

So women entered the workforce and were expected to perform like the ‘ideal worker’ while still providing for everyone else.

And when it comes to the thinking behind everything… the mental load is HEAVY.

It’s gotten so bad that we’ve even coined a term for it: “mankeeping.”

The tracking, coordinating appointments, maintaining relationships, remembering birthdays, anniversaries, holidays — and no, it never turns off.

A 2025 survey found that moms report 67% more household management than fathers, with the biggest gaps in scheduling, managing social relationships, and food planning.

It also showed that while the progression of a woman’s career can reduce the physical chore expectation, it has zero effect on the mental load.

And it’s not just moms. Women in heterosexual relationships also feel the weight of doing the emotional labor for their boyfriends…

I mean, come on, since when is it my job to remind you to call your mom on Mother’s Day? And instead of being thanked for it, we are scolded for nagging and mocked if we show any emotion.

“Mankeeping“ is proof that we’ve collectively acknowledged the mental strain of men not pulling their weight… and STILL nothing’s changed?!

And this doesn’t even begin to cover how single women are actively outpacing single men… It’s like no one taught them how to fend for themselves.

Most men grew up with a woman (probably their mom) handling the logistics of everything, got married, and transferred that responsibility to their wives.

So now we have a society full of grown men who don’t know how to schedule their own doctor’s appointment, put together a grocery list, or maintain a relationship without someone doing the emotional labor for them.

And I don’t even think they even realize how far they’ve fallen behind…

Now, don’t forget all the tasks we do within our jobs that our male coworkers never even think about… like ordering lunch for the team, taking meeting notes, or spearheading the culture committee.

This ‘office housework’ keeps the entire machine running, but god forbid women get any of the credit in a performance review. Nope, this is just another case of our invisible labor benefiting everyone else while it simultaneously digs our own hole.

On the flip side, ‘office glamour work,’ the strategic, high-visibility projects, are the real career boosters and, despite the name, typically go to men.

A recent study shows women did almost twice as much office housework as men, while being about one-third less likely to be involved in career-advancing glamour work.

So we are handed more housework than men have ever had to take on, both at home AND in the workplace, then get slapped in the face with reduced visibility, increased stress, and stunted salaries?

The sad part is, we are even more likely to volunteer for these thankless tasks.

And I promise, it’s not because we are ‘better at it’ or because we like doing them.

It’s because we’ve learned what happens when we don’t… suddenly we’re ‘uncollaborative’ and ‘not a team player.’

It turns out, no one actually needs to ask women to do this work. They’ve made the alternative so uncomfortable that we seemingly have no other choice.

And that’s exactly what they want us to believe.

Nothing about this is invisible… It’s ignored. Because a system that benefits from our unpaid labor has no need to offer support or provide fair compensation, especially when they’ve never had to.

Women and minorities cannot be the only ones fighting for equitable workplaces. If the men in leadership — who hold the power, the budgets, and the promotions — aren’t willing to advocate for inclusion, we will never get there.

So next time you see a man in leadership, just know, he didn’t get there on his own. His mother, his wife, and his female colleagues have quietly absorbed the cost of maintaining that success.

And just so we are clear: men are not rushing to champion a cultural shift that asks them to share any of this responsibility.

Women’s unpaid contributions have been documented, studied, and quantified for decades — we’ve just built an entire culture around men who were never asked to put themselves second to anyone or anything.

So that CCO had access to the same research I did…

He didn’t ‘not know.’ He just never had to.

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Nobody said anything. I actually think a few women laughed. Now, can you imagine a woman doing that exact thing in a male-dominated room? She would’ve “made it weird” and been instantly labeled as sensitive and difficult.

But when a man takes up space and names it out loud, it’s just… a Tuesday.

The audacity.

Reports make it clear that entry-level women feel more comfortable taking risks than entry-level men — 88% vs. 82%. But by senior leadership, only 62% of women feel safe taking risks, compared to 71% of men.

That’s not an audacity issue.
That’s the corporate system teaching us to shut tf up.

“Really, Anna?” Yes, really. We experience getting grilled on our competence and blamed for genuine mistakes, sometimes daily. And if it’s not us, we watch it happen to our female coworkers – all in the name of ‘the game.’

Going into the workforce, I was aware of the “women are bossy, not the boss” mentality, but I was naive and thought this outdated perception was getting better. Spoiler: I was wrong. It turns out the progress of the past decade is not guaranteed — and without intentional, collective action from the top down, it will reverse.

The Cost of Advocating for Yourself

Over a year ago, I was a mid-level Copywriter successfully leading a 15-person team on a massive account with no partner and inadequate support from my male manager.

After routinely waving the white flag, I was urged by a female Associate Creative Director to go to my male Group Creative Director and ask for the support I needed.

I was confident. I advocated for myself. Then I got replaced with TWO male ACDs. So he had to bring in two men, two levels above me, to do the job I was doing? Noted.

Yeahhh, definitely not what I was hoping for.

But of course, it didn’t end there. Throughout the transition, one of the new leads relentlessly belittled me.

He asked for quick 5-minute chats to scold me, strategically avoiding putting it in writing. He tried to convince me he was brought in specifically because I was underperforming (a bald-faced lie). And while unsuccessfully trying to fill my shoes, he destroyed the team morale I had spent the past two years building.

It got so bad that I had to set a boundary and refused to have one-on-one conversations with him. This went on for months... and yes, I reported it, repeatedly. But my manager, my GCD, my CCO, and even HR knew this, yet still didn’t take it seriously.

This ACD was eventually fired, but only after another account built enough business evidence to justify it. And after that, my GCD set up a meeting to thank me for my leadership through it all. *screams into the void*

Yeah, that ‘thank you’ told me everything I needed to know.

And if you’re familiar with this feeling: I’m sorry.

For decades, women have been forced to play a part in someone else’s game, and our options have been either to shrink or get labeled as ‘difficult’. But I refuse to believe those are still our only options.

Throughout my damaging experience, I did what a lot of women do: I started to replay every interaction. Was I too direct? Should I have ‘stayed in my lane’? But the more I analyzed the conversations, the more I recognized the pattern. I’ve actually heard it in just about every way you can say it… You’re too much.

But I’ve come a long way, and I’ve learned I am never ‘too much.’ So I’m done shape-shifting because I’ve tried, and I know that acceptance means nothing if you have to contort yourself to conform.

And here’s the thing no one tells you about advocating for yourself in a system that was never built for you: when it doesn’t work out, the lesson isn’t that you are wrong. It’s that your voice is inconvenient, and your opinion is not valued.

I’ve always been able to see the underlying truth, and I’ve never been scared to say it out loud. THIS is what makes me dangerous. The system doesn’t silence women because we’re wrong. It silences us because when we speak, it threatens the entire structure.

And believe me, that’s terrifying… because it might cost you. It cost me my team, months of belittling by an insecure man, and the future I thought I wanted.

But it also gave me the clearest perspective of my career: my voice is a threat to a broken system. And I’d rather be a bold, audacious woman who scares the shit out of the system than shrink into a shell of myself just to make everyone else comfortable.

We see the double standard day in and day out: When a man walks into a room and takes up space, it’s called leadership. When a woman does the same thing, it’s called a lot.

Collectively, we’ve reached a boiling point. And I am done being penalized for the exact behaviors that men get praised for.

Audacity is something women are trained out of. But it’s like a muscle, and like any muscle, it gets stronger when you use it. The men who fail upward? They were never trained to hesitate.

Every time you call out tone-deaf statements instead of letting them slide. Every time you stop performing gratitude for the bare minimum. Every time you choose your truth over their comfort, you are building audacity.

And no, it doesn’t feel powerful at first. It feels like your heart is in your throat, your hands are dripping in sweat, and every cell in your body is screaming STOP. That’s not a weakness. That’s just your brain trying to protect you from something you were explicitly conditioned not to do.

They might not say ‘sit down, shut up, and be grateful’ verbatim. But over time, you notice the context clues.

Like when you start to succeed, and suddenly opportunities get siphoned from you. When you share an idea, and no one replies, or worse, a man repeats it 5 minutes later… and gets the credit. Or when you are just supposed to accept “probably no raises this year,” after busting your ass.

It was because you were rising, because you spoke up, and because they needed you to forget your own power.

But helllllllllll no. Not here. Now’s the time to say what needs to be said, to take up space authentically, and to have the audacity to build careers and lives that align with our purpose.

If you think “too much” means you’re too loud, too direct, too ambitious, or too emotional, just know, it took me wayyy too long to realize it actually means: you’re someone they can’t control.

So this is my reminder to myself and every other fed-up woman out there:

You were never the problem; you’ve always been the warning sign.

Share the audacity to be ambitious

I chose advertising because it promised full-spectrum creativity in a typically black-and-white business world. It was a career where I could use my skills to make a positive impact and change the perspectives of people I’d never meet.

But as I climbed, I lost myself to the promotions, the awards, and the long hours. It didn’t matter how much meaning I tried to infuse into my work, or how much work I was actually doing, because it was always overshadowed by office politics, gender biases, and societal stigma.

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So no, I didn’t lose my ambition. I just stopped investing it where my effort was met with resistance. For years, I raised my hand, asked for opportunities, and relentlessly found ways to make them for myself.

But I’ve learned first-hand how the constant undermining, undervaluing, and disrespect change you — and I know many women, regardless of industry, feel the same.

In recent years, workplaces have become increasingly hostile for women, yet corporations still expect unrealistic dedication and unwavering loyalty.

We are watching women take the brunt of sweeping layoffs, slashed benefits, revoked DEI initiatives, and rigid RTO policies. But here we are, questioning how we are supposed to give our all to a career, when we should be asking: “What am I really working towards?”

2025 was the largest ambition gap on record, with 80% of women wanting to be promoted compared to 86% of men (and the gap widens significantly at both entry and senior levels). As a senior-level woman in the workplace, you know I don’t take this stat at face value.

Women are well aware that the “ambition” gap has nothing to do with our ambition and everything to do with the report’s very next takeaway: When women receive the same career support men do, they are just as interested in advancing.

I’m sorry, but did you read that?!

The ambition gap disappears when women get the same support as men. AKA, this was never about women’s ambition — it’s about men’s lack of ambition to support us.

Ambition is defined as “a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.” But women know hard work. And we are tired of clawing our way to the next level while bearing the weight of being a woman in the workforce.

Corporate culture has trained us to put performance above passion, hustle above health, and metrics above meaning — but I’m calling bullshit.

For generations, women have literally put the economy on our backs. Since women have entered the workforce, we have been expected to maintain a career AND a household — a responsibility our male coworkers and partners were never expected to carry.

When I talk to women in corporate America, I see the familiar challenges of feeling trapped instead of accomplished, wondering if it’s even possible to pivot in this economy, and dreaming of a future of work that doesn’t feel like so much work.

Between January and August 2025, more than 455,000 women exited the U.S. workforce. And while 42% of these exits were due to layoffs, 58% of women decided to leave. That’s no coincidence.

In 2024, women entrepreneurs started 49% of new businesses, a 69% increase from 2019 and the highest rate we’ve seen in the past five years. Women entrepreneurs were 17% more likely than male entrepreneurs to say they started their business because they wanted to be their own boss, and 30% more likely to say they wanted to work on their own schedule. That doesn’t sound like a lack of ambition to me…

Specifically, AAPI, Black, and young women are driving entrepreneurship. Why? Because marginalized groups have been systematically pushed out, leaving no other option but to cultivate encouraging environments where our voices are genuinely heard, and our diverse experiences are not only valued but celebrated.

Women’s ambition is detaching from the patriarchal version of success we were raised with because we are seeing the costs of using our talents and motivation to further someone else’s dream, while our dreams sit idle on the back burner.

I chose the corporate path on purpose, but now I believe women will be more influential outside of these systems. I want my hard work to make a difference, but I also want it to give me autonomy over my life.

And I know I’m not alone. Women are tired of the bullshit, and our ambition is shifting because of it. We know the real “ambition” gap is not between men and women — it’s between women and the capitalist illusion we’ve been involuntarily shackled to.

So now, it’s time to lean out together.

Because our ambition didn’t shrink…
It got bigger than the system could handle.

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