The woman who sits

This morning I sat on my back deck with a matcha. No phone. No scrolling. No stacking the next task in my head. Just the creek in the distance and the birds doing what birds do.

As everything settled, I remembered how uncomfortable this used to feel.

When I first sold my businesses and we moved into our new place, it was during COVID. Everything slowed at once. The world shut down, my calendar emptied, and I went from being a dual business owner in constant motion to being home with my kids and more space than I knew what to do with.

One of the first things I noticed was how deeply uneasy I felt when I was not doing something. Not planning. Not building. Not producing. Not moving something forward. Stillness felt wrong, almost dangerous, like I was missing something essential.

At first I understood it through a cultural lens. We live inside a system that equates worth with output. “What do you do?” is usually the first question we ask someone, as if their profession is the quickest way to measure their value. Do more. Be more. Earn your place.

But what I did not yet understand was that my nervous system did not register stillness as safe.

When you grow up in volatile or chaotic environments, your survival instincts make decisions long before you have language for them. With an underdeveloped brain and very limited power, you scan constantly for how to stay protected. Somewhere along the line, mine decided that action equaled safety. If no one else was going to create it for me, I would anticipate, achieve, and stay in motion so I never felt powerless again.

From the outside, this looked like drive. It looked like discipline. It looked like success. I got cultural high fives for overachieving and applause for endurance, which only reinforced the pattern. No one calls it trauma when it produces results.

But underneath it all, my body was braced.

There was one afternoon that made it undeniable. My husband’s truck pulled into the driveway, and I happened to be sitting down. The moment I heard it, I felt a pang of guilt and immediately stood up to start wiping a counter, folding laundry, reorganizing something that did not need reorganizing, as if I needed to prove I had not been idle.

He has never, not once, expected that from me.

When I told him later, he laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

I was not.

That reflex had nothing to do with him. It was an old survival imprint equating rest with danger and productivity with protection. Layer cultural conditioning on top of childhood unsafety, and you get a woman who does not know how to sit down without earning it.

And I know I am not alone.

I remember the subtle sting of being “just” a stay at home mom and how easily that phrase diminishes invisible labor. As if nurturing human life is lesser because it is not salaried. As if unpaid work equals lesser worth. Everything around us reinforces the same message. Your value is your output.

So this morning, sitting on my porch with a matcha and no agenda, was not radical. It was intentional.

It was nourishment.

It was a woman who understands her nervous system well enough to know that stillness is not a threat but a resource. I did not sit down hoping to teach my body something new. I sat down because my body already knows that safety is not created through constant motion. I put myself on that porch without my phone because I understand that pauses like this are part of how we stay well in a culture that rewards depletion.

Presence in the pause is not wasted time. It is maintenance. It is integration. It is how we metabolize life instead of bracing against it.

This is what I want women to taste for themselves. Not as a concept. Not as a performance of self care. But as a lived experience of internal safety.

A safety that does not require exhaustion.
A safety that does not hinge on achievement.
A safety that is rooted in self trust rather than external validation.

To sit down without guilt.
To pause without apology.
To meet your own needs without explanation.

Stillness is not laziness.

For many of us, it is the doorway back to ourselves.