Even Healing Needs a Sabbath
There are some days when the deepest medicine is not in journaling or unpacking another trauma. Not in peeling back another layer of the story. Not in fixing or tending or even knowing. Some days, healing looks like a cotton candy icee in the sun. Like standing in the middle of a crowded park with the music vibrating through your chest and the smell of grilled meat and shea butter floating through the air. Some days, healing is laughing so hard your ribs hurt and you forget, just for a moment, what exactly you have been trying so hard to recover from.
This Juneteenth, I did not do the work of healing. Not in the way I usually do. I did not go inward or deep. I did not spend time pulling meaning from my memories or confronting my shadows or holding space for grief. I did not transmute or process or reflect. I gave myself permission not to try. Instead, I danced. I hugged babies. I greeted elders. I watched young people showing out in their outfits and old heads two-stepping like their knees were not on borrowed time. I ate festival food that would have made my nutritionist flinch. I let my hair blow wild in the heat and did not fix it. I wore a fly pair of afro-print pants and a Juneteenth inspired kelly green t-shirt. I stood still in joy and let the joy stand still in me.
There is a time for healing, and then there is a time for resting from the work of healing. Too often we do not make that distinction. We say rest, but we mean productive pause. We mean something we can track or write about later. We say we are resting, but what we really mean is that we are working on not working. Healing becomes another job. Another to-do list. Another benchmark to prove that we are making progress. That we are doing the work. That we are still worthy of the love we are trying to return to.
But I am learning that healing, real healing, cannot always be traced. Sometimes it is not serious or spiritual or solemn. Sometimes it happens in the release. Sometimes it happens in the letting go. In the forgetting. In the choice to not pick the scab just to check if the wound still hurts.
I did not realize how much I needed a break from healing until I was in it. Until I was in the thick of celebration, barefoot in the grass with sticky fingers and nothing heavy on my heart. Until I heard myself laughing without catching my breath in apology. Until I realized that no part of me was on alert. That I was not translating pain into insight. That I was not trying to make anything meaningful. I was just being. And it was enough.
There was something liberating in that Juneteenth festival. Because I was not there to fix it. I was not there to hold space for anyone else’s experience. I was not there to manage or lead or mediate. I was there to live. To be one of the many. To take up space in the swell of celebration. To let myself be part of the joy without orchestrating it.
There is a way that leadership, especially for Black women, can train you out of your own joy. Out of your own lightness. Out of your own needs. You become the one who holds it all. Who helps everyone else release. Who carries the stories and the grief and the hope of the collective. And in that, it can become easy to forget how to simply be. To not be in service of anything. To not be stewarding anything. To not be performing strength or care or insight. Just to be a human being in the world, sweaty and laughing and alive.
This Juneteenth gave me that. It gave me freedom not as an idea but as a practice. It gave me the kind of rest that is not about sleep but about not having to be useful. Not having to be healing. Not having to be anything other than what I am. And what I am, in my fullness, is worthy. Not because of what I have survived. Not because of what I have made from my wounds. Not because I am always trying to be better. But because I am here. Because I chose life again. Because I showed up for my own joy.
I want to say this to anyone who is feeling tired from the labor of becoming whole. You are allowed to take a break. You are allowed to lay it all down. You are allowed to eat the funnel cake and not write a poem about it. You are allowed to dance just because the beat is good. You are allowed to forget, for a day or two or a week, that you are healing. You are allowed to just be. Because being is enough. Because living is sacred. Because you do not need to earn your rest.
I will return to the work. Of course I will. The healing path is one I have chosen with intention. But I am learning to honor the pauses as part of that path. I am learning to listen when my spirit says enough. I am learning to believe that freedom is not just a concept for political liberation, but a practice of personal sovereignty. And I am learning that sometimes, the most radical thing I can do is laugh until my stomach aches, dance until my knees give out, and let the sun kiss my skin without apology. This is also the work. This, too, is healing. Even when it looks like doing nothing at all.
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