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I canceled a commitment last month and spent the next hour writing an apology nobody asked for. Not a correction, not new information, just an explanation nobody needed: I’m not well, I have too much on, I promise I’ll make it up. I deleted the message twice before I sent it. The thing I canceled was optional. The guilt was not.
This piece weaves my own story with Simone Biles’s publicly told one. I shared my experience and the ideas, and I used AI to help shape the writing.
This piece sits with Hexagram 40, Deliverance: the season when a knot finally loosens, and the work is letting yourself feel the relief instead of explaining it away. It is also my answer, slowly, to a question I asked myself for years: why do I feel guilty resting?
For most of my life, I have been the one who shows up. The one who says yes before she has even checked the calendar, who treats being needed as proof that she matters, who has quietly confused exhaustion with commitment. I didn’t choose this on purpose. It built up the way most patterns do, one reasonable yes at a time, until “I can handle it” stopped being a fact and started being an identity I felt I had to keep defending.
Rest Without Guilt
Somewhere along the way I decided rest had to be earned first. Not rested because I was tired, rested because I had hit some invisible quota of effort that finally entitled me to stop. If I hadn’t hit it yet, stopping felt like cheating, even when my body was telling me something my calendar was not. I am learning, slowly, that recovery does not need a receipt. I do not have to prove I was depleted enough to deserve putting something down. Sometimes the only evidence required is that I am the one asking.
Put Down the Load
The harder habit to break has been carrying things that were never mine to carry in the first place. Other people’s deadlines that somehow became my emergencies. Old loyalty to relationships that had quietly stopped being mutual years earlier. A version of myself that needed to be endlessly available to feel useful. None of it was assigned to me. I just kept picking it back up every time I set it down, the way you absentmindedly pick up a bag you meant to leave at the door.
I think about Simone Biles a lot when I think about this. At the Tokyo Olympics, in the middle of the team final, with a gold medal on the line and millions of people watching, she stepped back. Not because she had stopped caring, and not because she couldn’t push through, but because she could feel, with more clarity than the moment wanted from her, that continuing was not safe. She handed the routine to a teammate and walked off the mat. She came back days later for the balance beam, and came back again three years after that, in Paris, on her own terms. The load she put down in Tokyo wasn’t abandoned. It was simply no longer hers to carry at that moment, and she was the only one qualified to make that call.
Clean Cut, Clear Heart
What I’m slowly building, in the quiet ten minutes a day I spend with this practice, is the ability to end things honestly instead of letting them fade out of guilt. A commitment, a draft, a version of myself that overextends to feel worthy. I’m learning the difference between loyalty and obligation, and I’m learning to trust the people and the work that actually deserve my full energy instead of handing it out automatically to whoever asks first. The exhaustion I used to treat as a badge of honor has slowly become something closer to a signal, and the more I listen to it, the more I notice other people doing the same work quietly beside me. That is most of what I hope these ten minutes do: not fix anyone, just make it a little easier to put something down with a clear heart instead of a guilty one.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.
Anne Lamott
What are you still carrying that you have full permission to put down today?
If you want a gentler way to find out, my free guide, 5 Ways to Trust Your Inner Knowing Again, is a good place to start, ten minutes at a time, no chart required.