Exhausted for the Cause
I was already exhausted when I landed in the city that never sleeps.
I told myself it was just travel fatigue. I could push through—as usual. Afterall, I had a national summit to attend. I should have felt hopeful. Grateful even. I was headed to an invitation-only gathering of leaders. The kind of room we fight to be in. The kind of room Black women rarely get to enter with authority.
As I crossed the plaza toward the building, I paused to bend down to tie my shoes. As I stood up midway, my back gave out. No warning. No slow build. Just pain. Excruciating, immobilizing pain. I stayed hunched for a beat, stunned, trying to mask the panic spreading through my chest. Tried to breathe. Tried to smile. Tried to will my lower into cooperation because I understood even through the pain, I was entering the kind of room where my absence would be noticed—or worse, misunderstood. So that I continued the journey that was only steps from the building, but it might as well have been miles—each step as painful as the next.
I limped the rest of the way, one cautious foot at a time. At the security desk, I managed small talk through gritted teeth to present my credentials. One of my colleagues happened to be entering the building as well and offered to help me get to the conference room. We rode the elevator in silence. Each jolt a fresh surge of pain. When we reached the floor where the summit was being held, I took the first seat I could find—near the back, near the door. I didn’t care about optics. I was trying not to scream. Sitting hurt. Standing hurt. Raising my hand to wave hurt. But I was there.
And that’s what mattered, right?
I nodded. I laughed when I was supposed to. I performed proximity to well-enough, even as my body was no longer making polite requests. It was begging for rest. What used to be subtle whispers turned into a loud scream. My body was collapsing under the cause. I was exhausted from over-functioning in a system that extracts and expects gratitude in exchange for proximity to power.
I had given everything to "the cause."
By midway through the summit, the pain had progressed in my lower back. I sat on the edge of my seat in the back, trying to listen, trying to smile, trying to represent, trying to participate while my lower back pulsed with pain every time I shifted my weight. I gritted my teeth through networking conversations. I sat through lunch. Standing hurt and sitting hurt even more. Still, I never considered leaving early. I told myself it wasn’t that bad, even as I quietly panicked about how I’d make it through the night’s social dinner, let alone the next day. I am the leader. I am the face. I was supposed to be fine.
But the truth is, I wasn’t fine—and hadn’t been for a long time. And if I’m honest, I didn’t feel like I was allowed to not be fine. Not in this role. Not in this sector. Not in this body. Leadership is supposed to be about impact. But somewhere along the way, it became about performance—perfection, really. For those of us who come from the very communities we serve, there’s a quiet rule we’re expected to follow: sacrifice yourself and smile while doing it. We’re made to feel that we are lucky to be here, that we represent something bigger, that the mission is too urgent to slow down, too important for boundaries, too sacred for self-preservation. And we internalize it. We metabolize exploitation into virtue. We dress up burnout as excellence. But that day—my back giving out on a city corner—I realized something: the system, whether intentional or unintentional, is designed to break us.
The complex thrives on the unpaid labor of passion, the underpaid labor of purpose, and the overextended labor of identity. It cloaks harm in the language of justice. It rewards silence. It punishes truth-telling. And it gaslights the very people it claims to uplift. I didn’t know it yet, but the unraveling had already begun. That moment on the sidewalk wasn’t just a final medical warning. It was a rupture. A threshold. A message from my body that could no longer carry what my spirit had long felt but had been too afraid to name. This system is not what it claims to be. And I could no longer contort myself to make it work.
And now my body was me asking a question I had not ever expected to answer. What is "the cause" costing you?
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