The Phoenix Diaries: The Chapter Where I Try Being a Human Instead of a Machine

Learning that rest is not laziness, it’s part of becoming human again.

Phoenix Diaries
Personal stories of transformation, heartbreak, and rebuilding from ground zero.

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I’ve been trying to teach myself how to rest lately.

Properly rest.

The other afternoon, I lay across my bed listening to music while rain tapped against the windows. No laptop. No tabs multiplying in the background. Nothing on fire. Just me, horizontal, doing absolutely nothing productive.

Photo by Abishek Subba on Unsplash

And within minutes, the guilt arrived.

It’s fascinating, really. How quickly the brain panics when a woman becomes still.

I spent years in corporate life where the unspoken rule was simple: if you weren’t visibly producing something, you were falling behind. There was always another email, another task, another goalpost quietly wheeled further down the field while everyone pretended this was just how ambitious people lived and not, in fact, a shared psychosis.

Somewhere inside all of that, resting started to feel lazy. Suspicious, even. As though sitting quietly on a Tuesday afternoon was evidence of some moral failure I needed to account for.

Meanwhile, my body was practically sending smoke signals.

Women are expected to move through life like machines while our hormones perform interpretive dance routines behind the scenes every single month. We bleed regularly from an actual body part and still feel guilty for needing a nap. The audacity of our own biology, honestly.

I once answered work emails from a bubble bath and genuinely thought: look at me, thriving.

An absolute clown.

Something has been shifting in me since I started writing seriously.

Because writing, I’ve learned, is not only fingers on a keyboard. Writing is lying on your bed listening to a song that cracks something open. Writing is sitting in a café, watching a man stir his coffee as if he’s processing a genuine personal crisis. Writing is the conversation on the train, the bookshop you wandered into without a plan. The half-formed thought that arrives in the shower three days after the thing that caused it.

Writing is living. Absorbing and staying open.

You cannot stay open when you’re running on fumes and guilt, performing productivity for an audience that largely exists inside your own head.

That realization has cracked something open in me, and I’m still working out what to do with it.

The guilt is the interesting part. Because it’s not rational and it doesn’t respond to logic. I can know, intellectually, that rest is necessary. I can read every piece of research about recovery, creativity, and the nervous system.

The moment I stop moving, some deeply conditioned part of me starts listing everything I should be doing instead — writing, pitching, building the thing — as though stillness is a crime I need to talk my way out of.

Behind what, exactly? Behind whom?

The goalpost is nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

Rest, I’m learning, is a doing in itself.

Rest is the tiny hotel shampoo bottle of human experience; the thing you save for genuine emergencies, ration carefully, and feel vaguely guilty about using. I’m trying to stop treating it that way.

An actual practice. A necessary part of how a creative life functions.

The ideas that arrive when I’m staring at the ceiling. The scene that clicks into place on a walk I almost didn’t take. The sentence that comes not from forcing it but from leaving enough space for it to show up on its own.

Hustle culture convinced a lot of us that only visible productivity counts. That rest is the gap between work, something to be rationed, justified and earned.

For women especially, that message gets reinforced by a world that has historically rewarded us for endurance; for pushing through, showing up, keeping the whole thing moving regardless of what’s happening in our bodies.

My nervous system is still filing the paperwork on that decision.

So this is the chapter where I try something different. A slow, deliberate unlearning of the idea that my worth lives somewhere inside my output.

I lay on the bed. I let the music play. I watch the rain and don’t immediately turn it into content.

The guilt still shows up. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t. But I’m getting faster at recognizing it for what it is, an old story running in the background, not an instruction I need to follow.

Some afternoons, I lie there long enough for the rain to stop and the light to change and realize I haven’t thought about my to-do list in twenty minutes.

Twenty whole minutes.

For me, right now, that counts.

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Tell me…

What’s your relationship with rest these days?
Has slowing down become easier for you, or does the guilt still sneak in too?

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