It’s mid-February and around 25 degrees the day I meet with Ashley Corbo over Zoom. “I live in Connecticut, so I can’t really go for a hot girl walk,” she tells me in an exclusive interview for Her Campus. “I’ve been loving going to Zumba because I feel like online, all these workouts are so trendy, like pilates and cycling,” she says. “I love Zumba. I just like chill activities. I’m very [much a] homebody now that I’m turning 28, so I just like to relax, keeping my peace, doing my thing.”
Corbo speaks with an ease and assuredness, but it definitely wasn’t instilled in her overnight. Over the past few years, the content creator has built a community through her social media presence and her podcast, Trying Not To Care, where she showcases her trials and tribulations with self-improvement, letting listeners in on her vulnerable, relatable, and honestly entertaining journey. “Although this is my job now, I started it for me, and I’m still having fun with it,” Corbo says. “I’m helping other people, but I’m also doing this for myself and I want to make myself proud and happy.”
Her podcast episodes, released every Monday, share her inner world and relatable topics, including stories about her early 20s, post grad life, friendship breakups, following her dreams, and setting boundaries. “When I started my podcast, it wasn’t really directed as educational. I was just kind of using it as a diary for me to express my thoughts and share how I was feeling, share my experiences with friendships and breakups and mental health,” she says. “I like giving my takes and sharing my experiences and hoping that it resonates with other people,” she says.
For many people, post-grad life encompasses a ton of uncertainty, and requires self-transformation and growth. After graduating college in 2019 with a degree in psychology, Corbo decided to go against the traditional route of post-grad life. “For a lot of people, they go into college not really with a plan … and if you don’t know what you’re doing your junior or senior year of college, you kind of seem like you’re doomed,” she says. “When I graduated, I was limited on what I could do. You have to keep going for school, and I didn’t want to do that.”
Corbo always wanted to pursue social media, but it wasn’t an easy start for her. “I would try it and I would back out of it because I was scared of what people were thinking about me. I would post a video and it would flop,” she says. But then COVID happened. “I was working from home, and that’s when I started posting on TikTok. I got really invested in it and I loved doing it. A year later, that’s when I decided, ‘OK, this job isn’t for me, I’m going to try to do social media full time.’ I didn’t really have a plan, but I did it. It was what I wanted to do, but it was definitely very difficult,” she says.
Even though social media became her full-time job, podcasting is Corbo’s personal safe space. “I don’t have any sisters, so [getting big sister advice] was really difficult for me throughout my entire life because I didn’t have a strong figure telling me what I should be doing. Even with my mom, she just didn’t really give me that type of advice,” she says. Then, in 2021, Corbo was struggling with friendship breakups post-grad. “I found this podcast called Mindset Magic & Manifestation by Mikayla Jai. She talks a lot about manifestation and self-improvement. That’s what got me into podcasting and really helped me.”
This shift in mindset helped Corbo with those friendship breakups, which are unfortunately common in the months and years post-graduation. “When I had friendship breakups in my early twenties, I took them really hard. But now as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just realized there’s only so much that you can control. You can’t control how someone treats you or how they think of you or how the friendship fell out. You can only control what you do moving forward,” she says. “It’s OK to be upset about the friendship breakup. You should feel your emotions. But when it’s eating you alive and all you’re doing is ruminating over it, just redirect it and focus more on things that make you feel better.”
Corbo says that in her own post-grad life, “I was very stuck on what everyone thought about me and wanting to please everyone. At the end of the day, as much as you want to think that people are thinking about you, they’re not,” she says. “Everyone’s focused on themselves, not so much you. And even if they are focused on you, they’re a fan. Whether they hate you or love you, if they’re taking their time to think about you, that’s on them, not you.”
And Corbo is one to take her own advice and focus on herself this year. When Her Campus spoke to Corbo in an exclusive interview in 2023, she told us her hobbies included making her own coffee, meditating, journaling, and thrifting. This year? “Thrifting and coffee are just at my core. I love to do that, and that’s always going to be a thing,” she says. “I also just want to take better care of myself and treat myself almost like how you would look after a friend. So definitely working out, more Zumba, more self-care nights, less doomscrolling. And I’ve also been trying to redirect the doomscroll into more productive things. I downloaded some brain games on my phone, like Duolingo. I’ve been doing MasterClass, so just more self-improvement, but in a way that works for me.
Corbo also hopes to add more guests to her podcast this year — “I would love to have [Mikayla] on in the future, and more self-improvement creators and people navigating their twenties” — and pursue YouTube. “I grew up watching that, and so I feel like 2025 is just the year of YouTube for everyone,” she says.
And for those of her listeners that are newly post-grad trying to figure out what to focus on this year, “Stay on path with what you feel is best for you. And there’s only so much that you could do that’s in your control. So as long as you are applying yourself and trying your best, that’s all you can do,” Corbo says. “Don’t be too discouraged. Just keep trying because trying is better than nothing.”