Overloaded, toughened-up, and exhausted — this is what survival mode looks like for millions of women. And it's not who they wanted to be.
Learning to play the game
My natural personality is quiet, warm, and helpful — deeply feminine, if you want to put a label on it. At work, that got me nowhere. People walked over me. I was passed over for promotions because I wasn't the loudest voice in the room. Once, I helped a colleague with a project and watched him present it as entirely his own work.
That was the moment I decided to change. I started playing by the rules of the male-dominated environment around me. I got louder. More assertive. Harder to ignore. A colleague noticed the shift and remarked — with a mix of disgust and grudging respect — that I'd "grown a pair." He wasn't entirely wrong.
Since then, I've been respected. I've moved up. But deep down, I hate that version of myself. If I could put her away forever, I would.
Doing it all, because someone has to
My partner doesn't care that the contractor drilled the shelves crooked or laid the tiles unevenly. So I'm the one who has to step in and tell the workman to redo it properly. When we travel, I'm the one who books everything, and I'm the one who argues at the hotel reception when we paid for a sea-view room and they try to give us something else.
Not long ago, I got under the bathroom sink and dismantled the drain myself — because my partner couldn't be bothered to deal with the fact that the water had been draining at a trickle for weeks. I don't want to be the one who wears the trousers in this relationship. But when the alternative is watching everything fall apart, I don't have much of a choice.
When you're a single woman, the world tests you differently
Living alone comes with its own set of battles. When there's no man in the picture, certain men simply don't take you seriously — especially tradespeople. Call a plumber or an electrician on your own and some of them will try to charge you double, assuming you don't know any better.
I learned quickly. Now, when a workman arrives, I don't smile and offer coffee. I look them in the eye and tell them — calmly but firmly — that my father was an electrician, a plumber, a gas fitter, whatever the job requires. Don't try to take me for a ride. Do the job well and do it quickly. They get the coffee — and the smile — when they've earned it.
Same approach at the mechanic. Without it, your car sits untouched for a week. I would never choose to act this way. But the world has made it necessary.
Being both mum and dad
My ex-husband and I separated three years ago. He sees the kids roughly once a month. He takes them out for food, buys the little one toys, and hands the older ones some cash to spend as they like.
I don't have that luxury. My income, combined with his laughably small child support payments, is just enough to get us to the end of the month — barely. I can't take them to a restaurant, but I pay for their school lunches. I can't buy them expensive toys, but they have shoes on their feet and the heating works in winter.
He's not there when I have to sit down with the youngest and address a bad grade. He's not there to enforce a curfew when the teenagers roll in at two in the morning. He gets to be the fun parent. I'm the strict one — the bad cop. But the bad cop is the one keeping everything from falling apart. I have no choice but to be both mother and father to my children, because if I don't, no one will.
The Mr. Hyde I never wanted to become
I work as an interior designer, which means I spend my days directing builders and tradesmen. Needless to say, the gentle, accommodating version of me gets ignored completely. The only version that gets results is the one I had to build from scratch — harder, louder, less forgiving.
Sometimes I raise my voice. Sometimes I swear. I don't enjoy it. But it's the only language that gets through. So I use it.
Survival mode isn't a personality — it's a response
I ran into a former male colleague recently and we caught up over coffee. At the end of it, he told me he'd forgotten how funny I was, how easy I was to laugh with, how feminine I seemed. He looked genuinely surprised when I told him: in a corporate environment, a woman has to act like a man if she wants to be taken seriously. That's not a personality trait. That's a survival strategy.
The woman he saw at that café — relaxed, warm, laughing — she's the real me. The one he knew at work was the armour I had to wear every single day.
"My mum worked three jobs"
She wasn't a workaholic. She had no choice. There were three of us kids, and our dad was never much of a provider. He wasn't a bad man — he loved us — but he couldn't handle responsibility. He liked good food, a drink, a good time.
He once got fired because he didn't show up to work. Instead, he took us to the beach because the weather was nice. As children, we thought it was the best day ever. We couldn't understand why Mum was furious with him that evening.
It was only as adults that we all understood why our mother was so strict, so tough, so permanently exhausted — while Dad was the charming, carefree one. She had no choice but to become that way. If she hadn't, we would have lost everything. She wasn't masculine. She was surviving.
And honestly? So are most of the women you know who seem "too hard," "too cold," or "too much like a man." Look a little closer. Behind the armour, there's almost always a woman who simply never got the option to be anything else.
