You Don't Have to Earn Rest

Cinco de Mayo is this week.

Not the version most people in this country celebrate, which is honestly more about chips and margaritas than anything else. The real version. The one that happened on May 5th, 1862, when a poorly equipped, exhausted, vastly outnumbered Mexican army faced one of the most powerful military forces in the world and refused to surrender.

They were tired. They kept going anyway.

I think about that kind of tired. The bone-deep kind. The kind that doesn't show up on your face because you've been managing your face for so long, you don't even know you're doing it anymore.

I think about the women inside that story. The ones history doesn't name. The ones who were holding everything together while the world demanded more than anyone should have to give.

Sound familiar?

Somewhere along the way, most of us got a very specific message.

Rest is for after. Rest is the reward. Rest is what you get when everything is done, when everyone is taken care of, when you have sufficiently justified your existence for the day.

The problem, as you may have noticed, is that everything is never done.

So we keep going. We find the next thing. We fill the space that rest was supposed to occupy with something that looks productive and feels like virtue and is honestly just fear wearing a very convincing disguise.

Fear of stopping. Fear of what surfaces when we do. Fear of who we are when we are not being useful to someone.

I know this woman. I have been this woman. She is capable and competent and quietly exhausted in a way she has normalized so completely that she no longer recognizes it as exhaustion. It just feels like Wednesday.

Here is what I want to say to her.

The women who came before us, in every culture, in every generation, fought hard so that we could have lives with more choice in them than they ever had. More agency. More room.

The most honest way to honor that is to actually use it.

Rest is a fundamental necessity, not a luxury or a prize. It is as essential and non-negotiable as breathing or hunger. Its worth is inherent; you cannot and need not justify it. Its permission is not tied to your output, your usefulness, or the final checkmark on an endless list.

The battle those soldiers fought was about refusing to be diminished by something that told them they were not enough.

You are fighting a quieter version of that same battle every time you tell yourself you haven't done enough to deserve stopping.

You have.

So here is your permission slip, not that you need one, but in case some part of you is still waiting for it:

Stop. Rest. Not later. Not after.

Now.

You have earned nothing, and you need no justification, and you are allowed.

Feliz Cinco de Mayo.

Love is ALL there is.

Diana