The Power of Pausing

Backstroke & Breakthroughs – Post #21

They don’t tell you this when you grow up in survival mode:
Rest is your birthright.
Rest is resistance.
Rest is power.

I didn’t always believe that. For most of my life, rest felt like weakness like slacking, like failure, like disrespect to the hustle. When you’re a middle child in a big house, raised by working-class hands, and carrying both the burden of brilliance and the weight of trauma, you learn to stay moving. You work to be seen. You keep showing up, even when no one claps.

But over time, and especially through hardship, I learned something else:
You can’t build anything sustainable on a burned-out foundation.

Rest saved me.
Not the spa-day kind.
The soul-level stillness that comes when you finally stop performing strength.

I found it after my near-death experience, when my body forced me to be still. I found it when I realized the workplace that depended on my creativity wouldn’t protect me with the same energy I gave them. I found it when I started turning my phone off on purpose. Not out of avoidance but out of honor.

In a society that profits off our exhaustion, especially Black and brown exhaustion choosing to rest is a revolutionary act.

I now see my pauses as part of the process.
The quiet moments are where I heal, reflect, and reclaim my timeline.
Rest is how I realign with God, with my ancestors, and with the version of myself that isn’t driven by scarcity.

It’s also part of why I started this blog.
To create space. For others. For myself. For truth.
Writing is a form of rest when done without apology.

This week’s takeaway:
You don’t have to “earn” rest.
You don’t need a crisis to justify your stillness.
You don’t need permission to slow down.
You just need the courage to stop—and trust that the world will still spin.

I’m still learning how to rest out loud. To say “not today” without guilt.
To nap without a productivity excuse.
To let emails wait.
To breathe deeply and know it’s enough.

Because my worth was never tied to my output.
And neither is yours.

Rested and rising,
– J.R.