Stilled Water...

Don't run your river dry.

current — archives from 2018.

I find myself exhausted. My experience in life has largely been one of doing in order to feel worthy and valued. To my particular experience as a Black woman, it often feels like the bane of my existence. For so long, I’ve equated strength to my unwavering ability to do and be everything. But really, if I’m doing and being everything for everyone, what of me do I have left for myself?

As of late, I’ve been learning what it looks like for me to slow down. To lean into stillness. To dance around with the slow-drawn scenic routes of life. To rest. Admittedly, that felt foreign to me for so long. It still does sometimes. It’s easy for me to feel undeserving of rest unless I’m in a constant state of doing.

I’ve asked myself time and time again where this belief came from. In response, all I can think about are the women who modeled this quest for strength that I now mirror to this day. In the wake of unlearning, I find myself learning now that our strength, our worth, our value, our success does not have to be measured by how much we do.

as the birds just be — 2023.

I don’t want to merely be remembered for all that I did. I don’t want to be known for the strain that my physical and emotional labor caused, for how I never created space for rest, for stillness. I don’t want to be known for the exhale I never allowed myself to take. I want to be remembered for who I was, for how I loved.

In conversation with a dear friend of mine, she poured out to me about how doing so much had gotten overwhelming. There was a lack of balance and a lack of ease present in her life. And because she felt she could not balance all the things that she’d taken on, she felt like she wasn’t deserving or worthy of praise. What I shared with her was not only a truth that I wanted her to hear, but a truth that I needed to hear for myself as well:

The tendency to try to do and be all the things, at least in my experience, is a trauma response. You don’t have to do anything but just be BE and you are still so loved and valued. You have to learn that.

Learning that we don’t have to do or be all the things in order to be loved or valued is a hard hill to climb. There may be some things at the brow of that hill that we’re afraid of facing, such as who were are outside of all our doing.

Do you believe that if you stop doing, you’ll stop being? Are you afraid of what you’ll discover in seasons of stillness? Does rest not feel like a God-given right to you?

These are some valid questions to sit and ponder on. In doing so myself, I wrote this small piece as a reminder that even without my works, even without what I can do for others or for the world, I am a treasure that will never lose its value.

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I don’t have to be a slave to doing. Stilled water is still water; true and true, for it knows how not to run its river dry. I yearn to be a witness of my own being. Which means not being all-consumed in my doing that I miss out on experiencing the most important parts of my full self along the way. Don’t run your river dry, child. Don’t you ever run your sweet river dry.