You Don’t Have to Carry It All at Once

There will always be another email.

Another idea.

Another deadline.

Another person who needs you.

For people who spend their lives caring for, teaching, coaching, leading, and supporting others, rest can easily become the thing we promise ourselves we will get to later. After the project. After the busy season. After everyone else is taken care of.

But what if we stopped waiting for life to become less demanding before we gave ourselves permission to rest?

For Vonleshia Davidson, rest has become less about finding the perfect uninterrupted day and more about learning to recognize what she needs in the season she is actually in.

Vonleisha is an entrepreneurship and e-commerce professor, business strategist, speaker, author, coach, wife, mom, and entrepreneur. Through Thryve Consulting, she helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into income through e-commerce, AI, and practical business strategy. She has more than a decade of experience in business and entrepreneurship, holds an MBA in Organizational Leadership, and has built her own six-figure e-commerce business.

She also knows what it feels like to carry a lot.

And, perhaps more importantly, she has learned that being capable of carrying a lot does not mean you are meant to carry everything all the time.

“Just because I can carry a lot doesn't mean I'm supposed to carry everything at the same time.”

That lesson became especially clear when Vonleisha returned to school to earn her MBA while working full time, running a business, being a wife and mom, and continuing to show up for everyone around her.

“I was checking all the boxes, but I wasn't checking in with myself,” she says.

She was tired, overwhelmed, and operating in what she describes as “just get it done” mode.

That season forced her to reconsider what taking care of herself actually meant.

She had to give herself grace. Ask for help. Say no. And, perhaps hardest of all, stop treating her own needs as something that could always wait until the end of the list.

Today, Vonleisha's approach to rest is much more intentional, but it isn't rigid.

In fact, flexibility is part of the practice.

Rest can be a whole day.

Sometimes rest really does mean doing absolutely nothing.

Vonleshia says she has learned that she needs intentional alone time, and sometimes that means taking an entire day off.

No catching up.

No squeezing in one more task.

No pretending that checking email counts as rest.

“Rest for me means giving myself permission to stop,” she says. “Not slow down while still checking emails or thinking about the next thing I need to do, but actually stop.”

On those days, she might sleep in, put her phone on Do Not Disturb, or simply spend the day without being responsible for everybody and everything.

And sometimes, her version of rest is a little more luxurious: a bubble bath, candles, and her favorite Jill Scott songs playing in the background.

The point isn't the activity.

The point is the permission.

This idea reminds me of Tricia Hersey's work in Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, which has profoundly shaped the way I think and write about rest. Hersey challenges the idea that our worth should be tied to what we produce and argues that rest can be a way of reclaiming our humanity from grind culture. She writes, “We are enough now.”

For caregivers and other people who are accustomed to being needed, that can be a radical thing to believe.

You are enough before the inbox is empty.

You are enough before the house is clean.

You are enough before the next goal is accomplished.

Rest can also be 20 minutes.

But rest doesn't always require an entire day.

Vonleshia stopped waiting for the mythical perfect day when nobody needed anything from her and nothing was on her calendar.

As she puts it, “that day is probably not coming anytime soon.”

Instead, she looks for small pockets of rest throughout her actual life.

It might be sitting in her car for a few extra minutes before going inside. Taking a long shower without rushing. Enjoying a quiet cup of coffee. Putting her phone on Do Not Disturb.

Or simply giving herself 20 minutes when she isn't working, answering questions, or solving someone else's problem.

These moments may seem small, but they create something important: space to return to herself.

Rest doesn't have to be elaborate to be restorative.

This is also where I think back to the Seven Types of Rest framework developed by physician and researcher Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith. In a previous article, I explored how rest is about more than sleep. Dalton-Smith identifies seven forms of rest we may need: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual.

Vonleshia's quiet coffee, phone-free 20 minutes, and time alone may look simple, but they remind us that restoration can happen in many forms and in many sizes.

You can revisit my earlier piece on the Seven Types of Rest for a deeper look at the different kinds of restoration we may be missing.

Rest can mean asking someone else to hold space for you.

As a coach, Vonleshia spends much of her time holding space for other people.

But she doesn't try to do everything alone.

Her husband, sister, close girlfriends, and therapist are part of the support system that allows her to be vulnerable, laugh, cry, vent, and simply be herself.

“I spend so much time pouring into other people, so it's important for me to have people and spaces where I don't have to show up as the coach, the professor, the leader, or the problem solver,” she says.

“I can just show up as me.”

There is something powerful about that distinction.

Care-centered professionals are often celebrated for how much they can hold. But being the person who holds space for everyone else does not mean you should never need someone to hold space for you.

Sometimes rest looks like being cared for.

Sometimes it looks like telling the truth about how tired you are.

Sometimes it looks like letting yourself be the person without the answers.

And sometimes, rest is communal.

Hersey's work pushes this idea even further. Her approach to rest is not simply about taking a break so we can return to productivity refreshed. It asks us to question the systems and beliefs that taught us to equate our value with how much we can produce. As she puts it, “Our bodies are a site of liberation.”

For people who spend their days holding space for others, that matters.

We deserve spaces where we don't have to perform strength, expertise, productivity, or usefulness.

Rest can mean changing the plan.

For Vonleshia, flexibility has become one of the ways she protects her rest.

She tries not to pack every day from morning to night. When possible, she leaves space in her schedule. And when life changes, she allows herself to change with it.

If she's exhausted, she might move something that can wait.

She might order dinner instead of cooking.

She might say no.

She might decide that what she has already accomplished for the day is enough.

“I have had to learn that everything does not have to happen exactly when I originally planned for it to still get done,” she says.

That may sound simple, but for ambitious people, it can be a radical practice.

We often treat flexibility like a reward we can give ourselves once everything is handled.

Vonleshia's experience suggests the opposite.

Sometimes flexibility is what allows us to keep going without running ourselves into the ground.

Rest can mean letting something remain unfinished.

One of Vonleshia's biggest obstacles to rest isn't a lack of ambition.

It's that she has a lot of it.

Her mind is always moving. There is always another idea, another goal, another project.

Add motherhood, marriage, teaching, coaching, and entrepreneurship to the mix, and it becomes very easy to believe that rest should wait.

But Vonleshia is learning that productivity isn't the only measure of a valuable day.

“I'm still learning that I do not have to be productive every minute of the day for the day to have value.”

That lesson matters because there will always be something unfinished.

There will always be something you could have done.

There will always be one more email, one more load of laundry, one more idea to write down.

This author is still wrestling with this one, too.

Rest asks us to believe that unfinished does not mean unsuccessful.

Sometimes “enough for today” is actually enough.

And that belief is closely connected to Hersey's challenge to grind culture: what happens when we stop treating our bodies as machines and start treating rest as something inherent to our humanity?

Rest can mean not being the strong one for a moment.

For many Black women, rest can come with another layer of complexity.

Vonleshia speaks openly about having to unlearn the idea that being strong means always being able to handle everything.

There can be pride in being the dependable one. The person everyone can call. The person who figures it out.

But that identity can become exhausting when there is no room to be anything else.

“I don't have to prove how strong I am by constantly running myself into the ground,” she says.

Strength, she has learned, can also look like setting boundaries.

Saying no.

Asking for help.

Going to therapy.

Admitting that you need a minute.

You can be ambitious and still rest.

You can be dependable and still have limits.

You can care deeply for other people and still make room for yourself.

That is part of why rest has become such an important part of my own work with care-centered professionals. In my writing on rest, I keep coming back to the idea that caring for others should not require abandoning ourselves.

And the more I read and learn from writers like Tricia Hersey, the more I understand that this is not simply a conversation about better time management.

It is a conversation about what we believe our lives are for.

Rest can change depending on the season you're in.

Maybe that is the biggest lesson in Vonleshia's story.

Rest doesn't have to look the same every day.

Or every week.

Or every year.

There are seasons when rest might be an entire Saturday with nowhere to be. There are seasons when it might be 20 quiet minutes in the car.

There are days when you may need a nap.

Other days, you may need a conversation with someone who lets you take off the role of “the strong one.”

Sometimes you may need to change your plans.

Sometimes you may need to do less.

Sometimes you may need to do absolutely nothing.

And sometimes, you may need a completely different kind of rest than you did last month.

That is one reason I return so often to Dalton-Smith's Seven Types of Rest framework. It gives us language for recognizing that exhaustion isn't always physical, and that restoration can take different forms depending on what has been depleted.

The goal isn't to create the perfect rest routine.

The goal is to become willing to ask yourself:

What kind of rest do I need right now?

Vonleshia recently found herself answering that question on a Saturday.

She had taken on a new project, and the week had felt busy and fast. There were emails she could have answered, work she could have gotten ahead on, and things around the house she could have handled.

Instead, she chose herself.

She gave herself the day with no guilt and no pressure to be productive.

And afterward?

She felt clearer. Lighter. More prepared to enter the next week instead of dragging herself into it exhausted.

That is the thing about rest.

It isn't necessarily what takes us away from our lives.

Sometimes, it is what helps us return to them.

A reminder for the rest of us

If you are a coach, entrepreneur, parent, leader, teacher, caregiver, or simply someone who has gotten very good at being there for everyone else, Vonleshia has a simple message:

Stop waiting for life to slow down.

It may not.

Instead, start making room for yourself inside the life you already have.

Take the 20 minutes.

Put your phone on Do Not Disturb.

Sit in silence.

Take the nap.

Cancel something that doesn't need your presence.

Ask for help.

Order the dinner.

Leave something unfinished.

Take the whole day if you need the whole day.

And please, let go of the idea that you have to earn your rest by becoming completely exhausted first.

Rest can be a whole day.

Rest can also be 20 minutes.

Rest can mean asking someone else to hold space for you.

Rest can mean changing the plan.

Rest can mean letting something remain unfinished.

Rest can mean not being the strong one for a moment.

And rest can change depending on the season you're in.

Maybe rest isn't something we find after everything else is done.

Maybe rest is something we learn to make room for along the way.

And maybe, as Hersey reminds us, rest can be more than recovery.

It can be a way of remembering that we are human beings, and we deserve space to simply "be".

Written by Chanier McDonald