Rest is not a reward for surviving your life. It’s part of how you stay in it.

There was a time when I treated rest like dessert. For the first decade of my adult life, it was something sweet, indulgent, slightly undeserved, and wholly guilt inducing. I rested only after I’d “earned it,” usually in one of two scenarios: only after everything on my to-do list had been crossed off and I’d proven my usefulness to the world for the day, or after I’d crashed trying. I’ve done them both lots of times. Either way, rest was conditional. The price of admission? Productivity, on a good day. On a bad day, my sense of self.

In my younger years, I didn’t question the logic. It felt natural to push through tiredness, to override discomfort, to ignore the subtle signs my body sent when it needed a pause. I wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. To me, being busy meant being important, and feeling depleted meant I was trying hard enough.

Eventually, I paid that price.

Burnout didn’t show up as one dramatic collapse, sliding me down a wall one day in a torrent of tears. It showed itself in smaller ways, like a creeping sense of dread around work once enjoyed. Brain fog when I used to feel clear. A low-level irritability that made simple tasks feel taxing and challenging tasks feel insurmountable. My body had been whispering for some time, and when I refused to listen, it raised its voice.

What I’d misunderstood was simple: rest is not a reward. It is a requirement. It is not something to be earned after output, but part of what makes meaningful, sustainable output possible in the first place. Walk with me.

Unlearning the “Power Through” Reflex

Many women, especially throughout the African diaspora, are socialized to power through. As children—babies, even—we learn how to make ourselves smaller, quieter, more accommodating. We learn how to keep going even when we feel uncomfortable, upset, uninspired, or unseen—sometimes all at once. We learn that our internal weather is an inconvenience, something to be managed privately, efficiently, so as not to disrupt the flow of what needs to get done.

Over time, this becomes reflexive. When we’re tired, we reach for caffeine. When we’re uninspired, we force creativity. When we’re emotionally tender, we compartmentalize and keep moving. The body becomes a machine we drive, rather than a living system we partner with.

And the body takes note.

I’ve come to understand that powering through doesn’t signify strength. Often, it signifies disconnection. And disconnection, sustained long enough, becomes depletion.

A Practice of Mindful Trial and Error

For me, learning how to rest has not been a single decision or action, but an ongoing practice. What’s helped me most is developing a system of mindful trial and error. Instead of treating my energy, focus, and emotions as obstacles to overcome, I’ve started treating them as data to listen to.

This looks like deepening my respect for my reactions and feelings, which is about as challenging as learning to ride a bike. Noticing when my body feels contracted and disconnected versus when it feels open and curious. When my mind feels clear and receptive versus rigid and strained. And rather than immediately overriding those signals, I pause long enough to validate them.

The mistake that lots of people make—my younger self included—is that validation doesn’t mean indulgence. It doesn’t mean shirking responsibility or collapsing into apathy. It means acknowledging what’s present without shaming myself. It means giving experiences room to produce emotions, and giving my emotions room to be felt without letting them creativity, productivity, or self-esteem.

I’ve felt truly powerful saying to my Self, “This is what I’m feeling today. How can I work with that instead of against it?”

Working With Cycles, Not Against Them

One of the clearest examples of this practice showed up for me recently while creating Gloss and Ritual content! Leading up to my period, I noticed a familiar pattern: I felt critical, irritable, and my desire to generate new ideas dropped significantly. The part of me that usually feels excited about building, brainstorming, and expanding went quiet. I began feeling frustrated, and recognized that I was, essentially, punishing myself for simply being alive. In the past, I might have labeled these feelings as laziness or a lack of discipline and pushed myself to “be consistent” anyway. I might have even shamed myself for feeling shame. Ahh, shame inception.

This time, I tried something different.

I didn’t force new content. I shifted my focus to editing and refining what I’d already created. I handled lower-effort tasks. I tended to the parts of the site that required care and insight rather than invention. And when my inspiration naturally returned a few days later, I met it with energy instead of resentment.

And can you imagine? Nothing fell apart. My productivity didn’t suffer. If anything, my work felt more considered, more intentional. I felt strong. The container held.

This experience reminded me that we are not static beings. We move in cycles. Our capacity ebbs and flows. Creativity, energy, focus, and emotional bandwidth are not constants. When we design our lives as though they are, we end up at odds with our Selves.

Honoring our natural cycles doesn’t mean we do less forever, but that we do different things at different times. It means we design systems that flex with us instead breaking when we bend.

Building Containers That Support You

This is where systems and containers matter. It’s not enough to intellectually understand and agree that rest is valuable. We need practical ways to support that value. Containers are the structures that make it easier to honor your needs without recalibrating your entire life every time you feel your energy shift.

For some people, this might look like batching creative work during high-energy windows and reserving low-energy days for maintenance tasks. For others, it might mean designing a weekly rhythm that includes intentional gaps in output—white space, if you will. It might look like planning gentler days around your menstrual cycle, your travel schedule, or your emotional load.

The point is not to optimize yourself into another performance framework. The point is to create conditions that make it possible to trust yourself. When you make room for yourself to be the human being that you are, you outgrow betraying yourself in order to be and feel effective.

Rest as a Feminine Inheritance

There is something radical about a Black woman resting. In a culture that demands our depletion without much reward, rest is framed as selfish, lazy, and indulgent. We are often valued and praised for how much we carry, how much we hold, how much we help, how much we endure. We know what that costs us.

Choosing to rest is not opting out of ambition, but redefining what ambition looks like. It is negotiating a form of success that doesn’t require disappearing from your own life. It is choosing to remain in relationship with your body rather than treating it as collateral.

Rest is not a reward for surviving your life. It is part of how you stay in it.

I think that’s the real invitation: to build lives, rhythms, and rituals that make it possible to show up—fully, without burning myself to the ground in the process.

Rest is not what you do when everything else is done. Rest is what makes it possible to begin again, with clarity, with tenderness, with the style that only you can bring.

If you’re learning to listen to your body instead of pushing past it, you’ll find kindred energy here. Subscribe to Gloss and Ritual for slow, grounding reflections and simple rituals that support a more sustainable pace.