Why connection isn’t a luxury for women — it’s a survival tool
“I can promise you that women working together — linked, informed, and educated — can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” — Isabel Allende
Being a woman is hard. And I firmly believe it is hard because society makes it hard. The expectations. The standards. The lanes. Sexism. Racism. Gender-based violence. Inequity. The world wasn’t built for us. And yet somehow, we are the ones called failures when we can’t carry all of it.
If you have ever felt overwhelmed, exhausted, or like you are failing at a game you never agreed to play — you are not broken. You are burned out. And you are not alone.
Why Women Carry So Much — And Why It’s Making Us Sick
It is too much to carry alone. The anxiety that hums underneath everything. The perfectionism that tells you nothing you do is ever quite enough. The people-pleasing that has you saying yes when every part of you wants to say no. These are not personality flaws. They are responses to a world that has asked too much of us for too long.
Which is why I believe, like Isabel Allende, that we need each other. We need to uplift each other. We need to support each other. We need to find our community and find refuge in them.
What Bridgerton Reminded Me About Women’s Mental Health
I watched Bridgerton Season 4 recently — a show set in Regency England that follows Sophie, a woman constrained by society’s expectations of her role, and Francesca, who navigates grief, bodily autonomy, and the crushing weight of “duty.” We are not in that era anymore — but you know what doesn’t change? The need for community. When the world tells you that you have a role and must stay put in it… community helps you break those boxes.
Whether it is perfectionism. Rewriting the email five times. Apologising before you’ve even done anything wrong. Or people-pleasing because you carry everyone on your back. It is overwhelming and tiring.
Our community reminds us not to make ourselves small — like they all did with Sophie. Our community is there when the worst happens — like it was for Francesca.
In the show, Francesca’s body was examined without her full agency. Off screen, many of us know that feeling — of not being believed, not being heard, of leaving appointments feeling more alone than when we walked in. Studies consistently show that women — especially women of colour — wait longer, are taken less seriously, and receive less adequate care. We are not imagining it. We never were.
How many of you cried at the funeral? Or when Francesca broke down, saying over and over that she had nothing? Grief is hard. But grieving while quietly believing you are the reason things fell apart — that is a different kind of pain entirely. We should not be expected to perform anything: marry, have a child, be a mother, fit a mold. None of it should define your worth.
The Real-World Burnout Nobody Talks About
Bridgerton holds a mirror up to things women live every single day. The packaging is different. The corsets are gone. But the weight? It’s the same.
The mental load and invisible labour. Women still plan, remember, organise, anticipate, and emotionally manage — not just their own lives, but everyone else’s. The appointments, the birthdays, the groceries, the emotional temperature of every room. It is unpaid, unacknowledged, and a direct path to burnout. And when we collapse, we are told we simply need better time management.
Being dismissed by healthcare providers. How many of us have described our anxiety, our pain, our exhaustion to a doctor — and been sent home with nothing? This is not in our heads. And the toll it takes on our mental health is real.
Caretaking and family expectations. The “good daughter” role is heavy and relentless. Caring for ageing parents, managing family logistics, being the emotional anchor — it disproportionately falls on women. Often alone, often invisible, and often at the cost of our own wellbeing.
Workplace inequality. We work harder to be taken half as seriously. We carry the emotional labour of entire teams while watching others get the credit. We are penalised for being too much or not enough. And still, we show up.
These are not personal failures. They are systemic patterns — and they are fuelling an epidemic of anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, and burnout in women.
Naming them, out loud, together, is the first step to refusing them.
I also want to name something else: access to support is not equal. For many women, finding community or affording therapy comes with its own barriers — shaped by race, class, geography, and circumstance. That reality matters and deserves to be named.
How to Actually Build Community When You’re Already Running on Empty
I know “find your community” can feel like hollow advice when you are exhausted and adulthood has made friendship quietly harder. So here is what I actually mean.
Making friends as an adult is hard — do it anyway. Adult friendships don’t happen by accident the way they did in school. They require intentionality. Reach out first. Say yes to the thing you’d normally skip. Be the one who checks in. It feels vulnerable. That vulnerability is the point. One genuine connection is worth more than a hundred surface ones.
Therapy is community too. Working with a therapist who understands why you can’t stop overthinking, why saying no feels impossible, why rest makes you anxious instead of relaxed — that is not a sign that you have failed at coping. It is a sign that you understand you deserve a space that is entirely yours. A place to put down what you have been carrying, without having to manage anyone else’s reaction to it.
Sisterhood is in the small rituals. It is the voice note instead of the text. The “I was thinking of you” out of nowhere. The friend who asks how you are and actually waits for the real answer. Showing up to the hard moments — the hospital waiting rooms, the breakups, the silent Tuesdays when everything feels like too much. Community is not always grand. Most of the time it is just consistent presence.
We are not meant to do this alone. That is not weakness — that is just being human.
If any of this resonates — the exhaustion, the pressure to be everything for everyone, the anxiety that never quite switches off — you don’t have to keep carrying it alone. I work with women navigating exactly this: the anxiety, the burnout, the weight of everyone else’s needs. Reach out when you’re ready.
So find your people. Hold them close. Let them hold you too.
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