Seven years in a newsroom will teach you things that no textbook, no seminar, and certainly no inspirational speech about “empowered women” will ever dare to say out loud.
Seven years is long enough to understand that history does not unfold politely. It crashes through the door uninvited, loud and relentless, and if you happen to be sitting behind a desk with a blinking cursor and a deadline, it becomes your job to make sense of the chaos before the next edition goes to print.
I have watched the world unravel from this chair more times than I care to count. I sat here during a pandemic that stripped humanity down to its most fragile bones, when the illusion of normal life collapsed overnight and we all discovered just how thin the thread of certainty really was.
I watched as cities went quiet, hospitals filled, and fear traveled faster than any virus could. I watched people look to the news for answers that, more often than not, we did not yet have.
And now the headlines carry another kind of tension. Wars threaten to ignite, alliances fracture, and entire regions of the world teeter on the edge of violence while ordinary people wait, helpless, for decisions made by powerful men in distant rooms.
When you spend enough time reporting on the world, you begin to understand a simple and uncomfortable truth: the systems that govern our lives were rarely built with women in mind.
The world runs on structures designed by men, for men, according to the logic of men who never had to fight simply to be taken seriously when they spoke.
And yet here we are, women showing up every day anyway.
Let us stop pretending that being a woman in media is glamorous. Let us retire the tired image of the fearless female journalist striding down a hallway in a power suit while triumphant music swells in the background. That fantasy might sell magazine covers, but it does not resemble reality. Reality is quieter and far more difficult.
Reality is the exhaustion that settles into your bones after years of proving that your voice deserves space in a room where people still instinctively look past you when the conversation begins.
Reality is the subtle calculations you make every day about how much passion is acceptable before you are labeled emotional, how much confidence you can display before someone calls you aggressive, how carefully you must choose your words because a woman’s mistake is never just her own but becomes evidence against every other woman who comes after her.
Reality is the anxiety that hums beneath the surface like an electrical current, constant and low, reminding you that the margin for error has always been smaller for you.
And sometimes reality is depression, the quiet, suffocating kind that does not look dramatic enough to attract sympathy. The kind that sits with you in the morning while you stare at your shoes and wonder how something as simple as getting dressed could feel like climbing a mountain.
No one sees that part when they read the byline.
No one sees the friendships that faded slowly into silence because the work demanded too much time, too much energy, too much of the fragile parts of your life that were never meant to be sacrificed to the news cycle.
Women in journalism and other male-dominated fields are expected to endure these things quietly. Strength, after all, has become another performance we are required to deliver. But the truth is that strength rarely looks the way people imagine.
There were days when I did not want to show up. Days when the world felt too heavy and my own mind felt like a battlefield. There were weeks when the light in my eyes flickered so faintly that I wondered if anyone could see it at all.
But I showed up anyway. Not because I am fearless. Fearlessness is a myth created by people who have never had to walk into a room knowing they will be underestimated before they even open their mouths.
What women possess instead is something far more powerful and far more difficul… PERSISTENCE. Women show up while afraid. We show up while exhausted.
We show up carrying grief, doubt, heartbreak, and the memory of every moment someone tried to convince us that we did not belong where we stood.
Every step forward requires negotiation, endurance, and a stubborn refusal to disappear.
To the young women watching the world from this island province, wondering if there is a place for you in journalism or politics or any of the other arenas where voices shape reality, I will not lie to you.
The path ahead will not be easy. You will be told that you are too emotional when you care deeply about injustice. You will be told that you are too ambitious when you reach for opportunities others believe belong to someone else. You will be told to soften your voice, shrink your presence, and make yourself easier for the room to accept.
Ignore them. The world does not need quieter women. It needs women who understand exactly how fragile our societies are and who are brave enough to say so out loud. It needs women who refuse to sanitize the truth simply because honesty makes powerful people uncomfortable. It needs women who can look directly at the cracks in our institutions and describe them without apology.
You do not need to be fearless. You only need to be relentless. Show up with your doubts. Show up with your anxiety. Show up with the memory of every door that closed in your face.
Then open your notebook, take your seat, and speak anyway. Because resilience is not about being unbreakable. Resilience is the quiet, stubborn act of continuing after the world has tried to break you more than once. It is learning how to bleed and keep walking at the same time.
The newsroom and any other room do not need the myth of the perfect woman. It needs real women, women who understand the cost of silence because they have felt it pressing against their own throats. Women who know that their lived experiences are not weaknesses but instruments that sharpen their ability to see what others overlook.
The truth is that every time a woman writes, reports, questions, or challenges power, she is doing more than just telling a story. She is altering the shape of the room itself. She is reminding the world that the structures built without women will eventually have to answer to women who refused to disappear.
So, on this International Women’s Day, keep the slogans if you must. Keep the speeches and the polite applause. But when the day is over and the newsroom lights flicker back on, remember that the world is and will always be complicated. Power is still unevenly distributed. And the work of telling the truth is still unfinished.
