Keep calm and 'ro' forward
Confessions of a former boss babe wannabe
My old workplace was an expert on hyped-up corporate speak. Management would encourage us to “hit the ground running”, and after a successful event over the weekend, they’d warn us not to “rest on our laurels” because there was always more work to be done.
These idiomatic expressions meant to encourage us were tossed around in regular handfuls. And for a time, we bought them because they sounded good. Sounded impressive. I’d echo them to younger friends who were just starting out their careers. But back at the office, we pretended they weren’t disguising the truth that the reward for working hard was even harder work.
I took that give-it-all-you’ve-got mindset when I switched to full-time freelancing. It didn’t help that my business was born in the year of hustle culture. I’d binge-read books on success stories and spend hours watching boss babes tell you that they key to success was showing up all the time, putting all your energy and effort into your business. Tired today? Do it anyway! Don’t feel like doing anything? Fine, sit back and watch your competition overtake you!
I downloaded hundreds of e-books and PDF materials, subscribed to newsletters that promised to be inspirational but only ever tried to inspire you to buy their course or subscribe to their membership. In the end, most of them felt like empty cheers from a bottomless void of preppy talks.
(Okay, not all boss babe advocates are like that, but a good number of them are.)
Just like those corporate-speak phrases that sold us the glamour of hard work, this hustle culture mindset sold us an idea of success: sunsets sipping cocktails by a pool, loads of cash flowing in even while you sleep. But you had to do the hard work first, and that meant late nights on your laptop and weekends working. It meant competing, getting yourself out there, forcing yourself to upload content on social media, creating reels (that you hate because you’re not a video person). You had to post about trendy topics or deliver hot takes about stuff you didn’t really care about either—just to stay on the radar. Just to seem relevant.
But success never talks about the burn-out that eventually cloaks you, pushing you into a sea of despair and confusion. The cocktails by the pool don’t show that no matter how hard you try to raise your head, you’ll only keep flailing under the pressure of everything you could have been. And the boss babes won’t tell you that when the pressure becomes too much, you find yourself losing interest in everything you were once excited about. They won’t tell you that you’ll find yourself languishing.
A terrible state of ennui
Languishing is when you can’t seem to get anything done. When nothing interests you even if, once upon a time, it meant the world to you.
You open a document to write, and then an hour later or two or three, you realize you’ve only gotten a few sentences down. You decide to cook one of your favorite recipes, but no matter how you call up on your ancestors or shake that soy sauce, it doesn’t taste good. You have no interest, no spark of joy, nothing that feels like fun.
Sometimes, the starting point of your languishing or the final tipping point has nothing to do with the work you’re doing but something else instead: an incident that turned out differently from how you thought it would go. Confusion over something you thought was clear enough. Add a dash of work burn-out, a sprinkle of someone not respecting boundaries, a tiny trigger of a traumatic past—and you’re stuck in an endless loop of desperately wanting to do something and being unable to do it and hating yourself for not having a strong-enough conviction to be better.
When you’re languishing, the worst thing you can do is to force yourself to work harder. You’ll only end up hating yourself and resenting your work. And you don’t want to resent your work. You want to be friends with it; you want to be proud of it. Work that you resent is often unshareable because you cannot bear the person you were while writing it.
The opposite—and cure—to languishing is flow.
It doesn’t even have to work-related (just as languishing sometimes isn’t work-related). Something to spark your interest. To allow yourself to see life once more as wonderful and magical beyond the ordinary days. To find yourself so mesmerized by something or someone (!) that it draws you in, captures your attention, holds you so tight that you can’t bear to look away. Such as when the sun’s rays gently touch the leaves after a long rainy night. Or when a bird lifts its head from under its wing and starts to sing again. When you stumble upon a recipe and can’t wait to cook it. When you have an idea for an essay and can’t wait to write it.
One of my friends and I message each other when we reach our “languishing state”, as we like to call it. Simply because you need someone to know where you are so they can pull you up again to where you should be. Or perhaps just to swim beside you. Or row alongside you.
A calm state of flow
Norway’s way of cheering on their football team was one of the most interesting and fun gestures during this 2026 FIFA World Cup. They row.
(Okay, not literally over water because they’re sitting on the bleachers.)
When the Norwegian fans row, they put their hands in from of them, as if grasping oars. Someone beats a drum, and they pull their hands back in a rowing motion while shouting the word, “Ro! Ro! Ro!” at a steady pace that gradually becomes faster and faster.
Ro, I discovered, doesn’t just mean to row forward. It also means to be at peace. To be in a state of calm.
The words “productivity” and “calm” don’t seem like they could be in the same sentence. Productivity is often associated with hustling all the time, requiring you to be in a state of constantly pushing forward, putting yourself out there, exerting yourself beyond your limits.
But in rowing, as I discovered while reading David Allan’s Getting Things Done, there’s something called the “swing”:
“Rowers have a word for this frictionless state: swing. . . . Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: an easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. The swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung. The boat swings you. The shell wants to move fast: Speed sings in its lines and nature. Our job is simply to work with the shell, to stop holding it back with our thrashing struggles to go faster. Trying too hard sabotages boat speed. Trying becomes striving and striving undoes itself. Social climbers strive to be aristocrats but their efforts prove them no such thing. Aristocrats do not strive; they have already arrived. Swing is a state of arrival.”
—Craig Lambert, Mind Over Water
A calm, clear mind is one that is sharp, focused, and knows what it’s doing. It is less burdened by worries, less frenetic, less frantic, less likely to break down from overwhelm.
Have you ever been in a place where all the work you were doing felt effortless? Where every action was a step that carried you forward? Where the work was challenging, yes, but at the same time, it was also satisfying and fulfilling because you were in your best possible state of mind and body and doing what you loved?
I think that’s what flow looks like, what swing should feel like. That odd paradox that’s also the perfect intersection between what you need to be doing and thriving in it at the same time. It’s what’s missing from the boss babes and hustle culture movement where productivity and success are measured by the amount of effort you put in, even if it requires finding yourself in places where you may end up burning out.
A rhythm of one’s own
One of the things I find the most fun about having your own freelance business is that it teachers you a lot of things about yourself (okay, that part can be excruciating, too). Running a freelance business is pretty much holding a mirror to your personal life as it runs in parallel to who you want to be as a career person. What you discover about yourself as a freelance business owner leads you to discover more about yourself, too.
I once thought I would be the climb-the-corporate-ladder kind of girlie. As I was preparing to exit my previous job, I had to turn in my laptop and other devices to the IT department. The head of the IT gave me a lecture before signing my clearance slip. Women like you are too strong and aggressive these days. You need to be thinking about settling down instead. Become weak so man can love you. Hopefully, you’ll find the person who will complete you.
(Goodness knows what that had to do with returning a borrowed laptop, but anyway.)
I carried the ire of hearing those words straight into the pandemic. That’s when I started listening to the boss babes. Perhaps I was desperate to prove that a girl could make it up the corporate ladder no matter what people like him said. But you know the story—businesses stopped hiring, our lives were placed on hold for a while. It was in the middle of that when I (re)discovered writing and decided I wanted to do it full time. (Sometimes, the little vengeful twin that lies inside of me wishes I could bump into him and tell him thank you for your advice, I didn’t climb the corporate ladder; I built my own business instead.)
After almost two years of hustling and pushing and showing up at supposedly 100% when, honestly, I could only afford a 10% that day, I crashed. Then came the languishing. The staring at blank pages. The emptiness because all I could do was write for others and not for myself, and everything felt like it was spinning out of my control.
But little by little, I’ve been tweaking my business and my everyday life to do what I want to do. I follow a rhythm that’s not dictated by the boss babes or brought about by this desperation to keep up with hustle culture.
I pace myself. I find what works for me. There’s no unnecessary pressure, no unnecessary drama, no unnecessary stressing over things. There’s none of that mild panic attack that I need to post the same thing as a certain influencer or content creator posted that’s doing well.
I’m learning to talk about my freelance business in a way that feels comfortable and not forced. I’ve never been a reels or YouTube kind of girlie. I breathe longform and lengthy paragraphs and personal essays. Instead of spending forever trying to get a video transition to work, I try to go deep down on what I do have, learning to play it to my advantage.
I acknowledge that not all days are alike. There will be days when I feel rest and inspired to write a lot and tick off all those little boxes in my to-do list. And there will be days of just thinking and outlining and daydreaming and mere outlines and writing the worst of first drafts.
And then there are days of spaciousness. Of a little bit of spontaneity and seeing where life takes you. Sometimes, my siblings and I will talk about exploring a certain coffee shop, and before we know it, we’ve spent half a day talking or brainstorming or just sitting there and people watching. Old boss-babe-wannabe me would have berated myself for half a day wasted. But new me says that it’s okay because sitting there is enough to let inspiration come knocking at your door (as evidenced by the little scribbles I have after sessions like that).
Mostly, I think of what I want to feel at the end of my workday, on Mondays, on down days. Certainly not stressed out and furious with myself. Of course, sometimes it fails, and the next day, I realize that I was a little too hard with myself the day before. But mostly, mostly, mostly, I just want to have a good life. Quiet, uneventful. Enjoying what I do, what I see, who I’m with.
That—is how I want to ‘ro’ with the flow.