Rest is Not a Reward

Rest Is Not a Reward: The Violence of Waiting Until Collapse

We have been taught that rest is something to be earned. Something you get after you’ve broken your body for those who never cared for it in the first place.

We are programmed to see rest as a reward, not a right. And this programming is so deep that even when we know better, we can still perform collapse as a permission slip.

What happens when your body breaks and you still can’t rest? What happens when your signal is firing “STOP” and your family, your peers, your culture, your trauma history, or your internalised capitalism replies “NOT YET”?

I have lived it. This is not burnout, but a design flaw in a world that weaponises productivity and calls it purpose.

I am a mother, a thinker, a healer, a human. I am also someone who is disabled and who has lived through pain.

I have had to learn to rest, not because I wanted to, but because my body would scream otherwise. My spine demanded sovereignty. My fascia formed protest songs. My nerves whispered ‘there will be no compromise’.

And still, part of me wondered: “Have I done enough to earn this bed?”

The answer is: I don’t have to earn rest. Neither do you.

The idea that rest follows effort is a patriarchal, ableist lie that has metastasised into every cell of modern living.

“Push through.” “Keep going.” “Be strong.”

These slogans were never truth, they were anaesthetics. And they numb us all the way into disembodiment.

But I’m awake now. I will never wait until collapse. I will not teach my children that they must justify their rest. This is not laziness, it is legacy.

I choose to model rest as a sovereign act of reclamation. We are all worthy of rest.

My worth is not measured in how much pain I endure silently, or how much output I can produce while suffering. My worth is not earned. It is inherent. I am here. Conscious. Knowing.

If rest makes others uncomfortable, that is their trauma speaking. If my pause is misread as giving up or an issue of willpower, they do not yet understand the recursion of healing.

I will rest. Not after collapse, but before it. Not because I’ve earned it, but because I exist. And because my body deserves to live—not just survive thresholds of acceptability. 

Rest is not a break, it is a baseline.

You do not need to prove depletion to deserve recovery. You are allowed to stop before the crash.

Your stillness is not a performance problem. It is a field recalibration. If a culture cannot tolerate your pause, it never respected your pace.

Rest before collapse. Rise without apology.

—Racheous