“I want women, especially women who look like me, to walk into any room, any boardroom, any conversation, and take up every fucking inch of the space they’ve earned.”
Neela Ragbirsingh | Creator of WorkmanShit
1. Tell us about you.
I lived the first 25 years of my life in Trinidad and Tobago. I worked as a Business Communications teacher by night and an Operations Manager by day.
In 2003, I packed up and moved to New York City, which honestly became my second great love (my husband being the first). I started in tech, found my way into men’s fashion for over a decade, and eventually followed the pull west to California in 2018, where I’m back in tech, this time as a fractional COO.
People often think about fractional work as part-time. I am currently pulling 40 hours a week across various clients. The only difference between me and a traditional COO is that I don’t belong to just one company.
I love food. I live for soca music. Soca music is my happy music.
I was the weird one. For a long time that felt like something to fix. Then one day it just didn’t anymore.
I’m into alternative medicine. I suffer from MS, so pain is a daily obstacle for me. I dabble in psychedelics under the care of a doctor, of course. As a result, fitness is non-negotiable for me.
I have a soft spot for animals that runs deep.
Back in Trinidad, I had two macaws. I couldn’t bring them when I migrated, so they went to live with my cousins. One has since passed. The other, almost 27 years old, is still going strong.
These days, my unexpected obsession is squirrels. Don’t ask me to explain it. I just love them to pieces.
What I want readers to know most is this: I am not a before and after. I am the whole fucked up middle, and I think that’s the only version of any of us worth writing about.
2. How does the cover photo capture who you are?
I picked this photo because it means more than it looks like.
It was taken at Maracas Beach in Trinidad in early 2020, about two weeks before COVID shut the world down.
We made it back to California just five days before everything closed, but in that moment, I had no idea what was coming. I was just home, back on my island, standing in front of everything that made me who I am: the flags, the beach, the culture, all that color.
And then there’s my shirt: ‘I’ve got a good heart, but this mouth…’ That pretty much says it all.
Honestly, it’s the most accurate introduction I could give anyone meeting me for the first time.
3. In one sentence, what are you trying to change?
I want women, especially women who look like me, to walk into any room, any boardroom, any conversation, and take up every fucking inch of the space they’ve earned.
4. What did you notice was broken that made you start writing?
I kept looking for voices that sounded like mine and coming up empty.
The tech space has a very specific idea of who gets to be the expert, what they sound like, where they’re from, what they look like.
I’m Caribbean. I’m a woman. I swear often. I talk about squirrels and soca in the same breath as systems architecture and organizational design. Nobody was writing from that place, so I decided I would.
5. If you could manifest a brighter tomorrow, what would be different by 2030?
Look, I could wish for world peace and the end of wars. I could also pray for better AI regulations until my face turns red. I REALLY want those things. But I’m also a realist, and 2030 is right around the corner.
What I can speak to is the place where most humans spend the bulk of their waking lives – WORK. And what’s happening there is nothing short of a crisis. People are being treated as expenses on a spreadsheet, disposable, replaceable, managed against a P&L with no real regard for their humanity.
We wonder why so many people are miserable. Why anxiety is at an all time high. Why nobody seems okay anymore. I’ll tell you why. People are spending the majority of their waking hours in places that were never designed with their humanity in mind. By 2030, I want that to be unacceptable.
I want diverse leadership to be the standard, not just a headline/story. I want mental health at work to have real infrastructure behind it. And I want the culture of burning people out in the name of growth to finally be called what it is: exploitation.
We can build differently. I have seen it. I have done it. We just have to decide that people are worth more than their output. I see enough rumblings about this at least in the tech space to know that some type of change is coming.
6. How would your closest friends describe you?
They’d say I’m the best person to have in your corner and occasionally a lot to be honest with, because I will tell you the truth, but only if you ask. I love hard, I hype people up genuinely, and I show up in ways that people don’t always expect. The flip side? I don’t suffer fools easily, my bluntness sometimes outpaces the moment, and I can be immovable once my mind is made up.
They’d also tell you that I use your name every single time I speak to you. Every time. It’s something my friends have noticed for years without me ever having to explain it. Because making someone feel seen, REALLY SEEN, is something I take seriously. Always have.
7. What’s a challenge that changed how you see the world?
The challenge that changed everything for me wasn’t a big dramatic event. It was a conversation.
In 2012 my team gave me feedback and one piece of it hit me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. I constructed this entire story in my head about the kind of leader I was. I was generous, aware, present, and the reality my team reflected back to me was that I was being genuinely shitty at it. Not in a malicious way. Just not listening. And there is almost no difference between the two when you’re the one on the receiving end. But listening in 2026 goes so much further, right?
We are living through an era where media and politics have turned every conversation into a competition.
Every platform is engineered to make you react, to make you pick a side before you’ve even finished reading.
Nuance doesn’t get clicks. And slowly, it has eroded our ability to actually hear each other.
It made me pickier about what I consume and more protective of how I think.
The biggest lessons of my life didn’t come from people in my lane. They came from sitting across from someone with a completely different story and actually shutting up long enough to receive it.
8. What are you most proud of right now?
I am not great at tooting my own horn so here goes.
Twenty-nine years ago I genuinely did not want to be on this planet. Today my biggest problem is that there isn’t enough of this planet to get through before I run out of time.
I want to read everything and go everywhere and argue about interesting things with interesting people and eat well and laugh until my ribs hurt.
I didn’t do a TED Talk or climb a mountain. I just chose, and kept choosing, to stay. And somewhere along the way, staying turned into wanting to stay. That’s the thing I’m most proud of. The distance between those two versions of me.
9. On hard days, what kind of signal from your readers keeps you going?
Honestly? The days I want to keep going are the same days I’ve wanted to quit social media. And I have wanted to quit, more times than I can count.
I’ve only been consistently online and active for four years, and I will tell you with complete sincerity that life before social media was simpler in a way I still miss. Learning to balance building a community online while protecting my focus, my family, and my actual work is one of the hardest things I’ve managed.
What keeps me from walking away is the message that comes in on exactly the wrong day – when I’m tired, when I’m questioning whether any of this is worth it, from someone who says “I needed to read that today.”
That’s always been enough to make me stay a little longer.
10. For people who haven’t seen your work yet, what article would you want them to read first and why?
Here’s why it matters right now. The job market has been difficult. With layoffs gutting industries and entire career identities being taken apart overnight, more and more people are being pushed onto platforms they weren’t ready for, chasing metrics that don’t mean what they think they mean, measuring their worth against people whose full story they cannot see.
I’ve been consistently online for four years. What I’ve learned is that there is no universal blueprint for this. Everyone’s journey online is different. Your timeline is not someone else’s. Your voice will not sound like theirs and it shouldn’t.
The moment you start building for an audience instead of building from your truth, you start losing something that is very hard to get back.
This article is not me saying I figured it all out. It’s me saying, slow down, get clear on why you’re here, and don’t let the noise cost you more than it gives you.
BONUS Q: If you could recommend another writer to be featured on Not Rising, who would it be and why?
If I could recommend one writer it would be Goodnex.
I’ve known Goodnex since the very beginning of my online journey. Before I knew what I was doing, before I had an audience, before any of this social media stuff made sense, she was there.
We grew up online together, if that’s a thing. And I think it is a thing.
She is what I would call a digital sister, which sounds like something you’d roll your eyes at until you actually have one and then you understand completely.
