Personal Belonging Part 2 - Moving to the Back Is Not a Betrayal: Reclaiming the Right to Live for Myself Too

So much of what we are told about self-care is to go for a walk, take a bath, talk to your friend, eat healthier food, take a vacation, etc.  It’s always that you have to do something for yourself to feel better.  You can belong to yourself again through activities.

According to Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, author of Real Self-Care (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included), "real self-care is not a thing to do, it’s a way to be...it’s about changing your internal reality - or your consciousness.”

Organizations often apply this “to do” model to employee wellness programs too.  A wellness policy might give staff permission to dip into a fund for therapy, gym memberships, and financial planning.  These are really important resources that organizations can provide to help their people.  

However, access to tools to help you recover from routine overwork  and insidious patterns of emotional labor do not actually result in wellness.  They address symptoms without tending to the organizational causes that makes people need to use up those funds in the first place. 

Just as I became a nonprofit executive director (nearly a decade ago), I heard stories from Black women movement leaders that scared me.  While they fought and loved towards a more just world, some of them had sacrificed relationships with their children, physical health, and even the comfort of sleeping in their own bed at home. 

I vowed to myself that I would not sacrifice my well-being for work and that I would not choose work over my children. 

At the time, the only boundary I knew how to put up was with time.  I told the board of directors that whatever needed to be done was gonna have to happen within a 35 hour work week.  I would not be making a habit of doing more.  For over four years, I moved the organization through a financial crisis to revenue stability keeping that time commitment to myself. 

I had no idea though, that there were other ways that the work could take from you that had nothing to do with your time. 

I had time to meditate, journal, take long walks, eat breakfast and not start my work day until 10 am. Yet, no matter how hard I tried to take care of myself, there was a part of the work that just kept hurting me. I couldn’t figure out how to get away from whatever was causing me pain. 

As a Black woman executive director of a small grassroots economic and racial justice organization, I couldn’t escape larger organizations trying to take credit for what we created and passing it off as their own.

I couldn’t stop “partner” white-led organizations from moving into our local space with hundreds of thousands of dollars to offer programs we were already doing and then needing to respond to their emails asking for help (without compensation). 

I couldn’t stop being ignored because clearly the white guy on the team had to be the executive director, not me.  I couldn’t stop funders from demanding that we perform our values by erasing the people we served whose lives they didn’t like (LGBTQIA and reproductive rights champions). 

The camaraderie amongst staff, nearly a decade of commitment to building the organization in governance and then executive leadership roles, loving and often enjoying the communities I worked alongside started to not be enough for me.

After four years, I really could not take it anymore.  Gospel legend Shirley Caesar sang, "This joy that I have, the world didn't give it, so the world can't take it away." Ungrounded and disconnected from myself, I gave away my joy to survive going to work.

The organization was much healthier financially, we were able to hire staff again, and I was simply worn down.  Small asks from my team became so hard to respond to.  Everyday I was on defense. Like a boxer in the ring putting her arm up to protect her face from an incoming hit. “Guard your grill, knuckle up” everyday all day even when no one was actually coming for me.  So, I quit. 

I turned to being an independent consultant, and only accepted engagements that would not be too hard.  No to helping with conflict.  No to extended contracts that required performing emotional labor for other burned out leaders.

I could serve without being in their pain points every day.  I distanced my heart and offered my mind only.  I offered what I knew I could do and refused challenges. 

I just began to shrink. To only show up to one or two conferences. To not travel so much. To say no to joining the groups and ignoring the group chats I was already in.  More people were coming into and emerging as leaders in the field.  I don’t have to be present for all of it.  Other people are doing the work too. I was grateful to not know everyone anymore. 

I was quiet quitting being a social justice warrior. I minimized exposure to other people in movement spaces mostly so that I wouldn’t get hurt. After five years, I am still healing. 

As I’d been accepting this stance within myself, I had a medical scare.  In 2022 I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease - a hereditary condition in my family.  Gratefully, I have not experienced any symptoms from it.  But in late 2025, results from a routine blood test required that I make some big decisions about my lifestyle to make sure that I do whatever I can to keep the disease from progressing. 

I cannot have high blood pressure.  I cannot have diabetes.  I cannot have the stressful conditions or dietary and sedentary lifestyle habits that lead to those outcomes, which can deteriorate my kidneys. I really can’t get sick from the work, y’all.  

The movement can’t have my kidneys. 

But honestly, it is difficult to intentionally minimize how much of a certain kind of work I give. What’s enough? To some degree, it feels like a betrayal to the movement to not work until I'm tired and heart-hurt. To not allow myself to  stay in a sprint of difficulties, hardships, late nights, and so much travel.  And yes, there is so much joy, laughter, love, and support too. 

Choosing to thrive though, is a strategy of its own.  It is a confrontation and adaptation that mitigates the harms of both the internal and external world. Our organizations cannot win against oppressive systems by extracting from the people getting us free. If we continue to do so, we are depleting the field and doing the opposition’s work for them.  

Gratefully, when I left being a full-time executive director, I had some time to stop doing and focus on being.  I reconnected with a long held passion that I wanted to stretch and grow for in different ways in support of movement warriors. 

Rekindling my passion for curating and sustaining home as a sanctuary led me to create the Black Women at Home Project (BW@H). 

In 2023, I began interviewing Black women to learn about and share with other Black women gems of our lived experiences being at and making home. Gender-oppressed racialized bodies need the sanctuary, authenticity, restoration, and care that home has the potential to provide. The goal of Black Women At Home is to visibilize the ways in which Black women embody, make meaning of, and celebrate home. 

Home (whether the structure you live in or your body) is not a site to be eaten by the others and extracted from.  Home is a place of sacredness, authenticity, restoration, and care as our right. A full life requires action as well as spaciousness to just be still and to move really slow. Rest is for pleasure, not just to recharge for more labor.

The BW@H Project is an oral history and somatic humanities project centered on Black women’s interiority and self-belonging. In this space, home isn't primarily about interior decorating or aesthetic performance. It is about the sacred practice of coming home to yourself through joy, beauty, ritual, and rest. 

Rather than self-care being about doing, these narratives are evidence supporting Dr. Lakshmin's assertion that self-care is about the work of shifting one’s internal reality to be who you are meant to be. 

The Project is expanding as I find connections between our personal sanctuaries and our organizational lives.  In the meantime, strategy, resource mobilization, and governance are still the core of my work. 

My goal is to shift my approach as an organizational development practitioner.   I want to offer a place for leaders to return to themselves for deeper self-knowing and healing to contend with organizational missions, struggles, and opportunities. 

Saying no to asks and leaving projects behind that are still being stewarded in good hands has allowed me to say yes to my heart and to start giving it again. 

Honestly, it is very difficult to refrain from the behaviors that could contribute to not being well. I want to live and labor to build the world I want my grandchildren and generations beyond them to inherit. 

I want to live to witness beautiful sunsets, to smell the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle when I walk around my neighborhood with my family.  I want to live to enjoy stillness and learning more about myself. I want to return the gifts and blessings that I've received. The talents and strengths that are within me belong to you too.

What I am beginning to accept is that moving to the back is not a betrayal, but an act of self-determined self-preservation. It is here that I weave my personal, relational, and functional belonging most earnestly. 

Self-care is a principled way of being alive.