I sat down to work the other day and could.not.do.it.
Not because my calendar was empty or my ideas had dried up. I just couldn’t psych myself up to even crack open my laptop. The weight of what is happening in the world — the suffering, the injustice, the nonstop nature of it all — had settled in my body and refused to be ignored.
Maybe this has happened to you.
You’re supposed to be building. Showing up. Answering endless emails. Growing this thing you’ve poured your whole self into. But instead you’re staring at a blank screen, doomscrolling, or if you’re like me, literally anything other than working— because even that feels more honest than pretending everything is fine.
Here’s what I want to say to you: that feeling is not a problem to fix. It’s information.
Your intuition doesn’t stop when you sit down to work. Your brain doesn’t have a work/life balance. It’s always reading the room — the room of your life, the room of the world — and when something is deeply wrong, it will make sure you know.
The question isn’t: How do I make this feeling go away so I can get back to work?
The question is: What is this feeling asking me to pay attention to?
Especially as women building businesses, we’ve been taught to compartmentalize and shove that stuff wayyyy down in there during the day. We’re told to be professional, which means leaving our “personal stuff” at home with our Crocs. To separate our values from our strategy, our grief from our goals, our outrage from our offers.
But that separation is a lie. And where did that lie come from? You guessed it: patriarchy. Whose idea of “professional” are we trying to fit? It’s not mine; it doesn’t value anything connective, authentic, emotional, or human. It values one kind of dress and one kind of speech.
The most powerful thing about you is that you can’t be split in two. Your business is built from the same place your heartbreak lives. Your vision comes from the same source as your fury. That’s not a weakness. That’s your greatest asset.
So when the world feels too heavy to work, let it be heavy. Don’t rush past it. Don’t productivity-hack your way through it.
Sit with it. Ask it what it knows. Notice what it’s showing you about what you actually stand for, what you’re actually building, and why.
That’s not woo. That’s the work.
The entrepreneurs I admire most — the ones building things that actually matter — aren’t the ones who figured out how to turn their feelings off. They’re the ones who learned to listen to them and let the discomfort point toward clarity. The ones who stopped waiting to feel “ready” and started trusting that what they felt was real and worth acting on.
You are not too sensitive to be in business. You are not too much. You are not broken because the world is breaking your heart.
You are paying attention. And that attention — that fierce, inconvenient, wide-open attention — is exactly what the world needs more of.
Trust it.