Rest as Resistance: This Is For You, Too

Contentment. Rest. Joy. Travel. They aren’t just for other people. Let's talk about unlearning the belief that goodness is for someone else.

Nov 13, 2025

I was sitting on a massive boulder in an Arizona river a few summers back, feet in the water, face to the sun, when I heard it:

This is for you, too.

It wasn’t a voice, exactly. More like a knowing that rose up from somewhere inside yet was somehow spoken aloud, with enough volume and force to catch me off guard. I knew instantly what it meant.

(I’ve heard this voice once before, telling me to STOP. I knew what it meant then, too.)

This time, it meant all of it.

The cold water swirling over my toes. The dappled light filtering through sycamore and cypress trees. The dust on my nearby shoes, the wide open sky above me.

The new friends I’d hiked alongside down the steep slope. The deep, restful sleep I’d had the night before. The nourishing breakfast, the quiet, the space.

This is for you, too.

That feeling that says, This is enough. You are safe. You are full. You are allowed to be here. That was the “this.” All of it.

And the second I let it in, the doubts came crashing in after.

Because experiences like this have never felt like they were for people like me.

I didn’t grow up taking river vacations or eating nourishing breakfasts or waking up well-rested in safe, beautiful places. I grew up in survival mode, a child of addiction, poverty, and chaos.

I was pretty much on my own by fourteen, and although kind, helpful people have come along and changed my life many times since then, I had learned early not to count on anyone.

I worked through high school, and even more after I was expelled. Paid my own rent. Picked up the broken pieces that were mine, and many that weren’t. My sense of worth has long come from being useful, needed, productive. A workhorse.

Rest wasn’t just rare, it was dangerous. Unstructured time meant vulnerability. If I stopped, I’d fall behind. If I let my guard down, I might not recover from what was let in.

So yeah, sitting on that rock in the sunshine, feeling safe and nourished and whole felt wrong. Or more precisely, it felt like I was trespassing.

Because joy, exploration, contentment, peace… those belong to someone else, right?

Someone who’s done more. Been better. Achieved great things (according to… who?).

We’re taught in a thousand insidious ways that the good stuff — stability, freedom, happiness, even love — are things you earn only after suffering enough, achieving enough, proving yourself worthy.

But who gets to decide how much suffering qualifies?

I’ve internalized this “otherness” my entire life. Not because I wanted to, but because systems and stories told me to. It wasn’t one moment or one person; it was a slow, persistent layering of messages that started early and stuck deep.

That kind of deep-rooted conditioning doesn’t unravel all at once. But now and then, in moments of stillness, I catch a glimpse of something truer. Like sitting in that river, letting the sun warm my face, feeling something I never used to have words for: enoughness.

And so I’m still slowly, painfully unlearning the lie — that these moments of enoughness are only for others, not for people “like me.”

If this comes across as self-indulgent, consider that this shift toward reclaiming rest and joy for ourselves isn’t only about ourselves, either. It’s about sustaining the long road ahead.

The world is on fire, and that makes our joy and refusal to give in to despair even more urgent. Not as denial, but as defiance and strategy. As survival.

adrienne maree brown said it best in her “Tapping Into Pleasure” talk:

“Who wants to join a movement where everyone is burnt out and miserable?”

She’s right. No one is inspired by a life that looks like nothing but struggle. We don’t draw others into change through martyrdom. We don’t build better systems from a place of exhaustion. We don’t fight back injustice when we’re running on fumes.

We do it by showing what a more whole, more loving, more joyful existence can look like, even if only in fleeting moments. We need joy that renews us, rest that restores us, and connection that reminds us what we’re fighting for in the first place.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to give you permission, let me offer it now, gently, fiercely, from one survivor to another:

This is for you, too.