I want to be honest with you about something.
This week I hit a wall. Not a dramatic, fall-apart kind of wall. Just the quiet, heavy kind where you sit down to create something and nothing comes. Where you try to meditate and can't settle. Where you pick up a book and put it down three pages in. Where sleep feels like it's happening to someone else.
I know this feeling. I've had it before. But this time it came with a specific thought underneath it, one I couldn't shake: what's the point of even trying?
And I want to talk about that, because I don't think I'm the only one sitting with it.
There was a shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The war in southwest Asia continues. Wildfires in Georgia. Al Qaeda seizing cities in Mali. And in the middle of all of it, my feed filled up with photographs of politicians and celebrities and athletes in thousand dollar suits and gowns, smiling for cameras at galas and dinners and events, looking for all the world like none of it is touching them.
And something in me just... snapped. Not loudly. Just the quiet snap of a rubber band that has been stretched too many times.
I am a woman-owned small business trying to survive. I’m not trying to get rich. Not trying to build an empire. I am just trying to cover my bills, do work I believe in, and have enough left over to help the people around me who are also struggling. I want to be able to wake up, tend my garden, enjoy my coffee, and rest without feeling guilty that I’m not doing something to actively generate income. That is the entirety of the ask. And some weeks it feels like the system was specifically designed to make even that feel impossible.
I know I'm not alone in this. I see it in my friends. I see it in my clients. I see it in the messages that come into my inbox from people who are brilliant and hardworking and genuinely trying, who are still living paycheck to paycheck the same way their parents did, the same way their grandparents did, wondering when exactly the part comes where the effort pays off the way “The American Dream” promised that it was supposed to.
The divide between the wealthy and everyone else isn't new. But it is getting harder to look away from. And the exhaustion of watching it widen while being told that the solution is just to hustle harder, to optimize more, to be more productive, to want it more…that exhaustion is real and it is valid and it is not a personal failure.
However, even in the wall: the "what's the point" feeling is not the truth. It is a symptom. It is what happens when a nervous system that has been holding too much for too long finally puts something down and refuses to pick it back up until it's been properly rested. It is not defeat. It is a demand.
Your body is not broken when it can't perform on command in the middle of a world that is genuinely on fire. Your creativity is not gone because it went quiet for a week. Your drive is not dead because it needed to stop and breathe.
The point is still there. It didn't go anywhere. It's just underneath the weight right now, waiting for you to put some of the weight down first.
So put some of it down. Not forever. Just for today. Not because the problems aren't real, they are. Not because the anger isn't justified, it is. But because you cannot pour from a place that has been running on empty, and the world you are trying to build, the smaller, more human, more honest one, needs you in it for the long haul.
Rest is not surrender. It is strategy.
With love, Cerissa