Let’s talk about exhaustion. Not the “I stayed up too late watching Paradise” kind. The kind that lives in your bones.
I stood in the bathroom with a fresh silk press and the water running, and I was too tired to move. And considering I was risking it all even though I had a silk press, you KNOW I was tired.
Sidebar: A silk press means my hair was temporarily straightened with heat and could easily revert to coils with too much exposure to moisture.
The problem was I was getting full nights of sleep (6–8 hours) and still chugging more than one cup of coffee. My mind wouldn’t stop racing and I constantly felt behind. I was struggling to hold it together in every room. And that’s when it hit me: this wasn’t a sleep problem. It was a capacity problem.
We don’t talk about exhaustion in professional spaces because we’ve convinced ourselves it’s a personal failure. Like if we could just manage our time better, meal prep on Sundays, or meditate for 10 minutes a day, we wouldn’t feel this way. But some exhaustion isn’t a productivity problem. It’s a signal. It's your body and your spirit saying something has to change.
As a new mom, a professional, and someone who deeply cares about the things I’m building, I’ve had to learn to read that signal instead of overriding it. Because overriding it just delays the crash, and the crash is never convenient.
But something else became clear when I started paying attention. Part of my exhaustion wasn’t just about how much I was carrying. It was also about how much I had normalized carrying alone. When we overextend ourselves, we sometimes unintentionally teach the people around us that they don’t need to lean in.
So here I am being ruthless and honest about what I can and cannot carry in this season.
I started saying no. Not with a paragraph-long explanation. Not with guilt. Just no. And once I said it, I would walk away from Slack and grab some water so I didn’t immediately follow up with a justification.
And you know what happened? The world kept spinning.
More importantly, I started to see something shift. When I stopped overextending myself in certain situations, it created room for others to step forward in ways they hadn’t before. I realized that exhaustion is not proof that I’m not strong enough. It’s proof that I’ve been acting strong for too long without a break.
Sometimes the work isn’t pushing harder. Sometimes the work is putting something down, or handing it off. Because when we refuse to rest, we don’t just hurt ourselves. Sometimes we unintentionally stunt the growth of the people around us. So maybe it’s time to normalize this conversation.
How are you really doing? I’m asking because I actually want to know.