You're never too old for a nap!

    This recovery period is my 1st "downtime" since starting Marie Management a couple years ago. Even when I went on vacation last year, I worked the last day. Imagine being in Jamaica on a hammock and whipping out your iPad to work. I hated that for me! Here we are again and I barely took a week off for this surgery and I work for myself! I literally took more time off when I worked for someone else. (Check on your entrepreneur friends, we are not okay!)

    The idea of resting and relaxing has never been an easy thing for me. Seeing my mom work tirelessly throughout the years, I think I had in my mind that this is what womanhood and motherhood looked like. Alisha Aquaye from Allure Magazine wrote, “Black women don't get enough rest, and we don't get all the types of rest that we need.” Granting ourselves permission to rest is the challenge. Even with my body forcing me to rest, I am fighting against it. I am thinking about the commitments I have coming up, the new clients I am trying to land, making it to mason’s playgroup, and a million other things. Making the fact that I still move at a snails pace…..stressful. When in actuality the only thing I should be focusing on during this period is resting, relaxing, and healing.

    As a Black women, praise is usually given based on what we are doing for others. Which is why when we are in a position where we can't do for others we feel useless. Rest does nothing but benefit us, which is why it is also the last thing on our todo list. Because of this, things like, The Nap Ministry, are born. This is an an organization that examines the power of naps. The founder, Tricia Hersey, wrote, 'My rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body. I took to rest and naps and slowing down as a way to save my life and resist the systems telling me to do more.'

    This isn't a new concept, but something I am realizing is growing more and more important as we get older. An issue that we often belittle, but that ends this year. This is the year of unapologetic breaks, rest, and dirty looks at whoever tells you otherwise. We deserve rest and I think this is the year we claim it!

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