I’ve heard a lot of things about women in the workplace.
Too emotional.
Too competitive.
Too complicated.
Too much.
But somehow, in the corner of our little sales cubicle—where the budget updates meet the cold AC and es kopi made in pantry with any sort of milk—something soft is happening.
They don’t tell you this, but sometimes your real support system isn’t your family.
Sometimes it’s your coworkers—the ones you meet in a white-lit room (and Google Meet) at 8AM, pretending to care about KPIs while silently clutching cracked hearts.
I lead a small, all-women sales team.
On paper? We’re efficient. Numbers delivered. Clients handled. Admin tight — mostly thanks to our one-woman operations angel who makes sure we file things properly and also maybe drink water, who basically babysits our deadlines (and us).
But under the Google Calendar is grief.
And under the makeup, inherited sadness.
We’re around the same age, living parallel lives of quiet chaos:
Career pressure, rocky relationships, loneliness, fertility journeys, dead parents, difficult parents, body image spirals, and childhood wounds that refuse to stay buried just because the Q2 target is due on Friday.
And yet, we show up. And we work.
And somehow, we’ve become… unpaid therapists for each other.
They say office politics are a nightmare—cold wars, fake smiles, PowerPoint backstabs.
Not here.
I know a lot of workplaces run on rivalry and backchannel gossip.
But somehow, this one runs on empathy and FYP links.
We don’t tiptoe around tension. We talk. Directly. Kindly.
Sometimes awkwardly, but always with the intent to understand—not to win.
I don’t think it’s just luck. I think we made it this way.
And maybe I know how rare this is because I’ve worked somewhere that ran on the opposite.
Where the boss was the drama.
Micromanaged everything, stayed in the office 12 hours a day because he didn’t have a home life to return to, just complicated affairs and control issues. He asked too many personal questions, ignored boundaries, and ran the team on fear disguised as leadership. I got sick, twice a year, with actual tipes. My body figured out the truth and waive the white flag long before I admitted it out loud.
So yes—I know what it feels like to wake up dreading work.
And that’s why I don’t take this for granted.
Because here?
We talk. We check in. We update each other on weekends, on weird dreams, on what our cats did. Yes, we all have cats. And yes, we’ve turned them into WhatsApp stickers. Because nothing says “I love you and your craziness” like sending someone their cat’s unimpressed face when they’re overthinking at 10AM.
If someone’s having a rough week, we notice.
If a partner is acting up, we don’t soften the truth.
We say, clearly: Run. Leave. You don’t owe him an explanation.
It’s not trauma bonding. It’s what it looks like when people who’ve been through some things choose not to repeat the harm.
We send memes. We track PMS patterns like detectives. We don't mark the calendar but we know! When any of us become quite out of character, a little to quiet or a little too moody or irritated.
We remind each other to log off.
I tell my team—often, maybe too often—please, have a life outside this. Work is just a means to an end, although we do spend one-third of our life here, in a necessary evil place called the office.
Fall in love. Go to therapy. Bake banana bread. Do exercise. Take that yoga class. Sleep in if your body says no. Hug a tree if that's what helps. Don’t let work be the only place where you feel seen and worthy.
Our weekly briefings bleed into healing circles.
There’s no HR policy for this. No SOP.
Just instinct. Just care. Just the quiet decision to be decent to each other while we get things done.
And while I don’t say it every day, I really do mean it — more than they know:
I am grateful, very much blessed.
For the honesty.
For the loyalty.
For the genuine care.
For the cats.
For the way work feels lighter because we’re doing it together — not just beside each other, but with each other.
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