For years I treated rest as something I had to earn. If I stopped for too long, I felt like I was cheating. Even when I did sit down, I would distract myself with scrolling or mindless games, which only left me feeling worse because I told myself I was wasting time. I thought I was giving myself a break, but really, I was just piling on another layer of guilt.
It took some of the most stressful times I have ever lived through to shake that pattern. When everything landed at once, when I was brittle with tiredness and stretched so thin I could barely think straight, I realised that I could not keep pushing. I had no choice but to stop. And when I stopped, I discovered that the world did not collapse.
Work carried on without me. My other half stepped up with family responsibilities that I would normally have taken on by default. If I did not feel like socialising, I said so, and it turned out that nobody’s friendship depended on me showing up to every invitation. The pressure I had been putting on myself to be endlessly available, endlessly useful, endlessly agreeable, simply melted away when I decided to put it down.
What surprised me was how empowering it felt to say no. No to extra tasks when I was already at my limit. No to staying late at my desk when rest mattered more. No to stretching myself thin for the sake of appearances. As women we are taught in a hundred subtle ways to be people pleasers, to smooth things over, to pick up the slack, to put others first. Learning to focus on what I needed, and to hold that line without apology, felt like taking back a piece of myself I did not even realise I had lost.
Rest stopped being a guilty indulgence and became something non-negotiable. Sometimes it looked like reading beside a loved one who was unconscious, choosing to talk to them instead of working through emails. Sometimes it was as ordinary as making a cup of tea and sitting down to drink it properly rather than gulping it on the go. Sometimes it was turning down plans I would normally have accepted and using the time to do nothing at all.
What I came to understand is that doing nothing is not really nothing. It is a deliberate choice to let your body and mind catch up. It is a refusal to hand over every bit of yourself to everyone else. It is the act of stepping back and allowing others to fill the space instead of constantly rushing to fill it for them.
I no longer feel guilty for those pauses. I guard them, because they keep me standing when life gets heavy. They are not wasted minutes, they are the very minutes that allow everything else to happen. And if that means saying no a little more often, I have learned to be fine with that too.
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