The Female Collective: Unfiltered

You've already had an argument, dealt with someone else's drama, mentally rewritten your entire to-do list & possibly had a little cry in the car. Bloody hell, it's not even 9am yet.

Then you walk into work, someone asks how you are & out comes that familiar little lie. “I'm fine, thanks.”

The person asking? Lets out a sigh of relief. Because let's be honest, most people don't actually want to know how you are. They want you to smile, say you're fine & let them get on with their day. God forbid you tell them the truth & they have to figure out what to do with it.

It's a strange little ritual we've all agreed to participate in. We ask questions we don't necessarily want answered, give answers we don't necessarily mean & carry on as though we've had a perfectly normal conversation.

Welcome to Episode One of The Female Collective: Unfiltered, where Suki & Shelley get into the performance we put on between leaving home & getting into the office. One minute you're dealing with the chaos of your personal life, the next you're expected to pull on your professional hat & act as though none of it happened. As if the woman who's already lived half a day can magically disappear just because the working day has begun.

Here's where it gets interesting. We talk about not being able to leave ourselves at the door, but what if work is the one place you actually want to be? What if those eight hours of being brilliant at your job are a welcome escape from everything happening at home?

We get into the different versions of ourselves we create, whether getting older finally gives us permission to stop performing & how much of our personal lives we're really comfortable bringing into the workplace.

And when it comes to being your true self at work, we don't always see eye to eye. Where does authenticity end & professionalism begin? And who gets to draw that line?

We explore how every well-meaning “How are you?” after you lose a loved one makes you want to scream. Not because you expect anyone to fix your grief, but because you know most people wouldn't know what to do if you told them how you were actually doing.

There are tears behind the wheel, moments when it's better for others to give you a wide berth, conversations about understanding your fight language, what happens when a bad day follows you home & rather colourful ways to handle difficult clients.

If you've ever walked into work, smiled & said “I'm fine” when you've already had enough of the day, then this one's for you.

🎙️ Pull up a chair, listen to the conversation & tell us what really happens in your world before 9am. We suspect you've got a few stories of your own, & we bloody well want to hear them.

The Female Collective: Unfiltered. Real women. Real stories. No filters. No holding back.

Selfish. Seven little letters that can make a grown woman feel guilty before she's even opened her mouth.

But here's a question. If you've spent your life putting everybody else first, who gets to call you selfish when you finally choose yourself? Especially when they've become so accustomed to getting what they want that anything less feels like an insult.

Welcome to our very first episode of The Female Collective: Unfiltered, where five grown ass women get together to argue over who gets to decide what's selfish, only to discover that the answer gets rather uncomfortable when we start looking at our own behaviour.

Four of us are eldest siblings, born with an invisible job description for a role none of us remembers applying for. We're expected to be responsible, look after everyone, put ourselves last &, whatever we do, not complain about it.

One of us spent years being the fixer & wondered when somebody would finally ask what she needed. Another left her partner & daughter at home to pursue a career she loved, while one of us walked away from a marriage, decided to move cities & asked her children to come with her. Selfish? Depends who you ask.

& just when we think we've got a handle on this selfishness business, somebody brings parents into the conversation. Oh, now we're in dangerous territory. They've spent their lives saying yes to us, but does that mean we owe them the same? & what happens when the life we want isn't the one they imagined for us?

It's easy to complain about the people who've taken us for granted, but rather less comfortable to admit that we might have done exactly the same to someone else.

Then we add resentment to the mix. That ugly little feeling nobody likes admitting to. You spend years being the responsible one, the dependable one everybody turns to, but when does being needed stop feeling like love & start feeling like obligation? Can you really resent someone for a responsibility they never asked you to take on?

We get into family expectations, cultural differences, sibling rivalries, relationships & the rather inconvenient realisation that we've all been on both sides of selfishness, whether we recognised it at the time or not.

There's laughter, a story with no clean knickers, a few uncomfortable admissions & a deeply personal birthday moment that changes the mood around the table.

Selfishness can look very different depending on which side of it you're standing. We certainly don't agree on everything. Nor are we about to wrap it all up with a pretty little bow & tell you that putting yourself first is always the right thing to do.

Who's really the selfish one? The woman who finally says no, or the people who've spent years expecting her to say yes? & what happens when the roles are reversed?

Pull up a chair, pour yourself a tipple & come be selfish with us.

The Female Collective: Unfiltered. Five real women. Real stories. No filters. No holding back.