I'm not busy—I'm tired

Or busy being tired

This summer has been wild, as I feel my body catching up with years worth of exhaustion. I am learning how to hold gaps in my schedule for my fatigue. It is hard. And the desire to say yes in order not to lose people and opportunities is overwhelming.

I came into June feeling like I got the wind knocked out of me. And it's to be expected, because I've been told it's to be expected.

But still, my mind and imagination were prepared to do so much – and my body has proven to me that there are deeper levels of exhaustion still to be known.

Productivity

It's August, and now I'm getting back into recording podcast episodes. I'm preparing myself for another year of school (more on that later). I am scheduling things again… But I am still mindful of this body that needs rest.

I've always been into productivity videos. I can go down the rabbit hole of YouTube researching things like bullet journals. I like learning about mindset hacks, and ways to maximize your time and efficiency with different tools.

What so many of these productivity videos in tips miss is that some of us live in bodies where it doesn't matter how many productivity tools we have, the fear for us is that we are the tools. We are being used and discarded. And it seems like a sad loop to find yourself on the Internet researching ways to become objectively better at being used.

There was once a time when I would see myself as lazy for taking breaks. I would think ill of myself if I am not working at the rate of someone whose body is not holding racial trauma and institutional harm. But knowing what I know now, I am receiving the slowness that I am moving with as a sign of grace.

I love myself enough to realize I do not need to be busy…if I am busy being tired.

Armor Up

Wearing the mask has been a theme for me as I am learning about disability justice and unlearning ableism. And in this learning, I find the freedom to embrace these truths about the body-mind that I live in:

• Pretending I am not anxious is just as exhausting as actually being anxious.

• Masking ADHD is exhausting, and I can say that for most of my life I've done a pretty good job of it, and I am learning to release that in order to get the help I need.

• Anemia is exhausting— both and seasons where I am taking my iron consistently and when I'm not. If you ever had to take iron pills you know that ish is disgusting.

• Being Black in Boston is exhausting. The part of the city that I live in, I get to see the economic discrepancies as I travel from the place where I live to the place where I go to school. It is impossible for the city to mask its racism.

Still, it is not always safe to unmask. It is not always safe to bear vulnerability that the world around you will swoop in and take it vantage of. Sometimes the armor we wear is part of how we survive.

The Enneagram for Black Liberation

In her book, The Enneagram for Black Liberation,¹ Chichi Agorom writes in a way that honors this complexity about our armor. For those that are familiar with the Enneagram you might know that the common narrative is “the Enneagram leads us to a place where we can take off our armor and be are most vulnerable selves of the world.” And instead Chichi asks, what about those of us who need our armor to survive? Can we instead look at the Enneagram as the ways in which we have shaped our personalities to help us survive, and grow beyond that as knowing when to put armor on and went to take it off?

Rather than focusing on a hierarchy for becoming your best self, I appreciate this approach for allowing us to fluctuate between seasons (and spaces) where we are conscious enough to take off our armor and live into that freedom or need to put armor on in order to protect our selves.

I was blessed to have been able to talk to Chichi in a conversation for DSBW season two. And I had the opportunity to interview her with one of my best friends. I am so excited to share that episode.

I am additionally excited to promote Chichi’s upcoming at ease cohort—a space for Black people to practice softness in cultivated space.

In this season as I negotiate time to do things with time to just admit that I am too exhausted to do things, I find that curated spaces for my softness are the best. So I am thankful for my friends… I am thankful for those who understand the weight and are willing to wait as long as it takes for me to find, not only time but energy.

I hope that you can make time for your exhaustion if you are exhausted. And I hope you do not see that time as unproductive. Rather, I hope you understand that rest is generative (thank you, to my friend Coburn for offering this helpful understanding!). I think of the land, which is a prophet of rest. I think of how soil reminds us rest is generative. Rest between crop cycles allows the soil to replenish its nutrients. Some of the greatest violence committed against nature and the name of capitalism has led to the depletion of this process. If this lack of rest is bad for the land, consider what it means for you and your body to be deprived of the space to replenish.

1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link. Any purchases made through this link give me a 10% commission. You can check out other books I’ve read and loved at the Dear Soft Black Woman bookshop.