A Black Girl Wrote This

No one talks about how much rest you’ll need when you finally feel safe.

When I thought about this for the first time, it hit me like a wave. Because it’s true—no one prepares you for the exhaustion that comes when your body and mind are no longer operating in survival mode.

For years, I thought my constant tiredness was laziness or lack of motivation. But the truth is, I was never resting; I was only collapsing. And there’s a difference. Collapsing is what happens when your body has no choice. Rest is what happens when you finally do.

When you’re raised on survival, your nervous system is wired for hypervigilance. You’re always scanning for threats, even when there are none. Your body holds tension in places you didn’t know existed. And when you finally feel safe—truly, deeply safe—your body says, “Oh, we can stop now?” And you do. You stop. You rest. You sleep. You lay down not because you’re lazy but because your body has been carrying weight it was never meant to hold for that long. You see how we throw lazy around for everything? Whole time our bodies really be going through something.

And yet, even in that rest, there’s an unease. Because when all you’ve ever known is survival, peace feels foreign. You’re used to running on adrenaline, to always having something to do, to needing the next crisis to prove your worth. So what happens when the crisis is gone? What happens when no one is chasing you, when there’s no fire to put out? You think you’ll celebrate, but instead, you freeze. Because for the first time, there’s space—space you don’t know how to fill.

I remember when I first felt like I didn’t have to hustle to make ends meet. I had worked so hard to get to a place where I wasn’t drowning, but when I finally got there, I felt lost. I sat in the stillness and felt like I was doing something wrong. Shouldn’t I be grinding? Shouldn’t I be making myself useful? I had spent so much time proving my worth through productivity that the idea of simply existing without struggle felt unnatural. I had to remind myself that peace is not an assignment. It’s not something to achieve. It’s something to experience.

Safety feels like permission to exhale. But it also feels like permission to unravel. To release. To fall apart a little because you’re no longer holding it all together with sheer willpower. It’s crying for no reason other than the fact that you finally can. It’s sleeping for 12 hours and still feeling tired because rest isn’t just about sleep—it’s about recovery. It’s about teaching your body and mind that they don’t have to stay in fight-or-flight mode anymore.

I’m learning that rest isn’t a reward for hard work. It’s not something you earn after you’ve been productive enough. Rest is a right. It’s necessary. It’s sacred. And it hits differently when it’s not stolen in the cracks of chaos but given freely in the softness of safety.

So if you’re tired, really tired, after finding peace… that’s not failure. That’s healing.

And healing takes time.
Go take a nap fren. You deserve it.