We live in a world that romanticizes rest.
Or maybe not rest itself, but the image of it—the curated, palatable version. The kind you can filter in soft gold tones and post with hashtags like #SelfCareSunday or #HealingVibes. It's always candlelit. Always clean. Always quiet.
Rest, they say, is sacred. But only if it looks a certain way.
Wrap yourself in a weighted blanket. Breathe deeply. Journal gently. Sip tea slowly. Don’t talk. Don’t touch. Don’t move.
This is the rest we’re taught to strive for. It’s the kind of rest that looks good in a square. The kind that behaves.
And don’t get me wrong, I’ve chased it.
I’ve tried to make myself small and still. I’ve laid under thick blankets and tried to believe I was doing something healing by doing absolutely nothing at all. I’ve listened to hours of ambient rain, tried to meditate without climbing out of my own skin, held mugs of steaming drinks like they might warm the hollow space inside me.
But sometimes, none of that works.
Sometimes, that kind of stillness doesn’t feel like peace—it feels like paralysis.
Stillness, for me, is rarely restful.
Stillness is a trap door. It opens into a place where my thoughts multiply and echo. A place where guilt sinks its claws in and whispers that I should be doing more, feeling better, recovering faster. It doesn’t restore me—it leaves me frayed.
So I had to learn a different kind of rest. One no one really talks about.
The kind that doesn’t sit pretty.
The kind that looks like movement. Like sound. Like doing.
Sometimes, rest looks like pulling everything out of the kitchen cabinets and re-shelving it with obsessive precision—not because it needs to be done, but because the act of doing it settles something wild in my chest.
Sometimes it’s scrubbing grout until my arms ache. Sometimes it’s refolding my closet by color, or alphabetizing my books, or cleaning the windows even though no one but me will ever care.
I need to feel like I can complete something.
That matters more than sitting still.
There are days when I recharge by driving at night with the windows down just enough to let the cool air slap me awake. When I pull into an empty lot and just sit with music loud enough to feel like armor, like static pushing the world back an inch so I can breathe.
There are moments when I put on over-ear headphones—not for sound, but for silence. For the kind of silence that mutes the keyboard clicks and keeps the light from cracking my skull wide open. That soft, padded world where I can type without wanting to claw my way out of my own skin.
This is what rest looks like for me.
Not always.
But often enough that I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
Because I spent too long shaming myself for not recharging the “right” way.
For getting anxious during naps. For resenting yoga. For finding more peace in reorganizing a spice rack than I ever did in a meditation app.
And what I’ve learned is this: recharging doesn’t mean turning off. It means tuning in.
Tuning in to what you actually need. Not what the internet tells you should be enough.
Not what your friends find calming. Not what your therapist recommends based on a pamphlet.
You.
You, in all your glorious contradiction.
The version of you that finds comfort in control.
The version of you that feels more at peace after a good cry and a closet purge than after a ten-minute guided visualization.
The version of you that needs a different kind of quiet—the kind that comes not from stillness, but from completion.
So if your recharge doesn’t look like rest—
If it looks like movement, like sound, like a flurry of small, focused tasks—
Don’t question it.
Honor it.
Because healing doesn’t always wear soft clothes.
Sometimes it wears rubber gloves and scrubs baseboards.
Sometimes it wears mismatched socks and blasts music from the early 2000s while rage-folding laundry at 11 p.m.
Sometimes it’s chaos, channeled into something just structured enough to hold you for a while.
It doesn’t have to be beautiful to be effective.
It doesn’t have to be quiet to be restorative.
And it doesn’t have to be right for anyone else to be exactly what you need.
So let the still ones rest their way.
You can move through your own.
Let your rhythm be sacred.
Let your rituals be yours.
And let the act of reclaiming your peace—no matter how messy—be enough.
Because it is.
