The Rest Trilogy

This series started the way the best things do: with an honest question asked out loud in public.

I posted a Substack note one morning, asking where complicity ends and accomplice begins. Dr. Lissa Rankin entered the thread and said she’s wrestling with it herself. That exchange cracked something open and what came out was not one article, but three, each one pulling a thread I have been holding for years without quite knowing how to name it.

The thread is rest.

Not rest as a wellness trend or a productivity strategy or a thing you earn at the end of a hard week. Rest as a political act. Rest as a personal reckoning. Rest as the thing that gets weaponized against us when we need it and colonized into something unrecognizable when we claim it.

We have complicated relationships with stillness, most of us. We perform busyness because stopping feels like falling behind. We push through fear because slowing down long enough to feel it seems dangerous. We use the language of rest to avoid the work of change and then wonder why we can’t seem to move. And underneath all of it is a question that most of us have never been given safe space to ask out loud: who am I when I stop performing for everyone else?

That is what this series is about.

Three pieces. One conversation. The kind we should have been having all along.

Part One: Rest Is Not the Same for All of Us looks at rest through the lens of race and power. Who gets to rest. Who rest was stolen from. What it actually takes to build a space where women from different lineages of rest can share the room with honesty and trust.

Part Two: When Rest Becomes Inertia turns the lens inward. It is about motives. About the difference between resting to regroup and resting to retreat. About spiritual bypassing dressed in wellness clothes and Newton’s first law applied to women in midlife who are finally tired enough to stop pretending.

Part Three: Call a Thing a Thing goes deepest. It is about the language that has been used to keep women small — in religion, in marriage, in our own heads — and about reclaiming surrender as sovereignty rather than defeat. It carries my own testimony from the messy middle: the dysthymia, the compliance, the broken-open moment, God’s waiting room. The pattern I finally interrupted.

I wrote these three pieces in a single day. Not because they came easily, but because they had been waiting. Because the question Lissa validated is one I have been living inside for thirty years and I finally had enough distance from the hardest parts of it to say what I actually know.

Read them in order if you want the full arc. Start anywhere if one title calls to you first. Come back to the ones that land hardest. That’s usually where the work is.

There is a story behind every face. A lesson in every lived experience. This is mine. I offer it in case any part of it helps you find yours.

— Kim

The COVE (Circle of Voices Evolving) is a screened community for women navigating transformation at the intersection of personal healing and collective liberation. Join us at stan.store/OneVoiceEvolving.

That is the written arc. But some things need to be spoken to be fully heard.

Because there is a difference between reading someone's reckoning and sitting inside a conversation while it is still unresolved. Between following a thread someone has already tied off and watching two people feel for the edges of something neither one of them has fully named yet.

That is what this episode is: drops at noon Eastern time on Sunday, April 26. Find it HERE.

What you just read is the map. What follows is the territory.