Nobody Told You There Were Other Doors

Were you taught to hustle before you were taught to rest?

Taught to turn every soft thing into a side hustle. Every hobby into a personal brand. Every quiet Sunday into "building something." They called it Girlboss. They called it having it all. But strip off the crown, and it was just productivity, dressed up as power. The same old rule that your worth is tied to your output, just with a ring light now.

And you believed it. I believed it. Not because we're gullible. Because everyone around us believed it too. An entire generation of women taught that rest is a reward you earn after the hustle, that a hobby doesn't count unless it can pay you back, that "what do you do" is the only interesting question anyone can ask you.

But a hobby can be just that. Fun without a content calendar. Socials without an eye on the brand deal. A website without an SEO plan built into every word of it. A walk that's just a walk, not content. You're allowed to stop asking everything good in your life to also be strategic.

Because here's what nobody says out loud: there are always other doors.

More than just the “hustle harder” door and the “burn out and rebuild” door. Whole other rooms — the ones where you get to be curious without monetizing it, rested without earning it, good at something without turning it into a product.

Nobody will hand you the map to those rooms. You have to find them for yourself, usually the hard way, usually after the girlboss thing stopped delivering whatever it promised.

Here's what I don't say enough: I was raised on the same script, and I'm not fully out of it. I still, often, catch myself when I have a good thing — be it a walk, a book, an hour with my hands doing something pointless and pleasant — could this be something? As if joy needs a business plan to be allowed to stay. I write "you don't have to monetize the soft parts of your life" and then I go try to find a way to monetize mine. That's the hustle script talking. It's quiet now, but it's not gone.

So let's be honest about what untaming actually asks of you. Not that you've already found the other doors and walked through all of them. Just that you know they're there now…that hustle was never the only room in the house, and rest was never something you had to earn your way into.

You don't owe anyone a business plan for your joy. Not the version of you a decade of girlboss culture built, and not the version of you writing this either.

You were never meant to be small, or productive, or both at once. Just you.