Sexual assault. Sexual harassment. Psychological manipulation. Gender discrimination. That's the short list of what my nervous system has absorbed in the workplaces I've walked through in my life. This piece isn't about calling out any one company or manager. It's about what was left in me after all of it, in my body, and what I've come to believe that says about what women carry that never gets properly tended. I trace the line from an assault the summer after I graduated college through years of vigilance most women learn to carry without ever naming it, to a lunch table with old colleagues where we realized we weren't telling similar stories. We were telling the same one. What I land on is this: women don't need better policy. We need care, real repair, and the chance to finally stand down from a watch we've been keeping since we were teenagers.

I've held three people's nervous systems steady in one afternoon and called it Tuesday. For years I thought that was just what capable women did, until I learned it has a name, a mechanism, and a bill that comes due later in the body. This piece traces the line from the vagus nerve to the immune system to the fact that eighty percent of autoimmune disease is carried by women, and asks what it actually costs to keep everyone else regulated while quietly running your own emergency. It's not an argument for absorbing more, better, longer. It's the beginning of a renegotiation, one where you get to locate what's true in your body, root back into it, and lead from there instead of translating yourself into something smaller and safer.

Something is wrong. Most of us can feel it, in the tightness a day off never resolves, in the guilt that shows up the second we sit still. We've been taught to call that a personal problem. It's not. It's 500 years old. This is the story of how feminine leadership was buried, on purpose... and why getting it back starts with the body.

This essay explores the unraveling of outdated systems and the emergence of a new way of leading. It reframes “the future is feminine” as an invitation into embodied, relational leadership rooted in connection and long-term wellbeing. At its core, it’s about reconnecting body, voice, and communication to shape a more human future.