Rest Is the New Hustle

In my early twenties, I thought I was untouchable. I was the girl with the dream car, the high-net-worth clients, the champagne nights that bled into sunrise. Personal trainers back then were luxury — a flex. If you had one, people assumed you were rich. If you were one, people assumed you trained celebrities. That was me. Money wasn’t a problem. Friends weren’t a problem. On the surface, I looked untouchable.

But my body was already throwing up red flags. Fainting spells. Crushing fatigue. Doctors brushing me off, telling me it was nothing more than a “hormonal issue.” Like it was no big deal. Their solution? Put me on two different types of birth control, as if muting the symptoms would erase the problem. I became the glitchy girl who had to be silenced. And still, I kept running — training, hustling, partying — telling myself I was fine.

The Collapse

Until the morning with a client, my body finally betrayed me. He wasn’t just any client — he was the head doctor of the OB-GYN department at a Toronto hospital. He kept asking if I was okay, and I thought he was just stalling, covering for his lateness. I rolled my eyes in my head, told him I was fine. But when it was finally time to get the workout started, the room tilted. My chest caved. He told me to sit. He asked me questions, personal ones, carefully. Then he looked me dead in the eye and said, Go to your doctor. Now. Ask for these tests.

I didn’t wait. I canceled my day and booked an appointment immediately.

When I repeated his words to my own doctor, the man laughed. Said I was overreacting. Said it was “just hormones.” I pushed anyway. Advocated for myself anyway. And less than 48 hours later, the phone rang. Fibroids. Not just fibroids, but ones rooted so deep they had entangled themselves in places no one wanted to touch. My body wasn’t just struggling — it was being overtaken. A body drowning in its own cycle.

The Forced Rest

What followed was a year and a half of being tossed between specialists like an unwanted package: one doctor told me hysterectomy — at twenty-three. He asked if I wanted kids, and I told him I didn’t know — I was too young to be making that kind of decision, and the kind of fast life I was living didn’t leave room for kids. They weren’t on my mind. But suddenly, I was forced to place them at the top of it.

I refused the hysterectomy, and because I said no to the procedure, he refused to operate. He sent me to another doctor, who suggested a different procedure. But that doctor warned me it carried a high risk of pushing me into early menopause. Then I was referred again — this time to a man too close to retirement, who said he no longer handled high-risk cases. I was young, vibrant, supposedly at the peak of my life — yet every door I opened seemed to push me closer to endings.

Meanwhile, my body was disintegrating. Periods so heavy I could barely lift my head. A cycle that didn’t just come and go — it stayed, dragging on for nearly an entire year without stopping, bleeding me of energy, of strength, of life. Bedridden. Too weak to brush my teeth. In and out of hospitals. Transfusions week after week. My career gone. My social life gone. My “dream” life stripped to the bone. I lost everything except the one thing I had spent years ignoring: the demand to rest.

The Slingshot

Rest felt like weakness, like failure. I carried guilt for slowing down while everyone else was still running. But grace lives in the pause. Rest isn’t weakness — it’s a form of resistance, a refusal to worship at the altar of exhaustion.

Spirit had been warning me. My body had been begging. But I wouldn’t stop. So life stopped me. Slammed me into the bed, into silence, into a forced sabbath I didn’t choose.

And that was the lesson I never saw coming: if you don’t honor rest, it won’t ask politely — it will demand to be felt.

At first, it felt like losing — like the world was sprinting past me while I lay flat on my back, pinned by my own body. I sank into a deep depression, darker than anything I’d known. There were mornings I prayed my eyes wouldn’t open again, nights where I didn’t trust myself to make it through. The silence grew sharp, dangerous. And then one day, I crossed a line I could never take back — a moment that showed me just how far gone I was, and how much I needed saving from myself.

But what looked like stillness was actually the pull. Every day I surrendered, every time I let myself sink deeper into the bed instead of fighting to rise, it was as if life’s hands gripped me tighter, drawing me back like a slingshot.

The further back the pull, the more unbearable it felt. Muscles wasting. Days bleeding into nights. Silence so heavy it pressed against my chest harder than any dumbbell I’d ever lifted. I thought I was unraveling. But in the unraveling, a strange truth began to form: maybe rest wasn’t weakness. Maybe this pause was a kind of charge.

Needs and Wants

When my body forced me into rest, survival became the only thing on my mind. Just getting through the day, just keeping myself alive, just trying to make it to the next appointment. And then I met the final doctor — the one who didn’t rush me, who didn’t treat me like a case file, who promised we would take it slow. Her voice was steady, her eyes didn’t dart past me like I was a problem she wanted to hand off. She sat with me, listened, and her presence was the calm that quieted the chaos in me. For the first time in a long time, I felt more than a body in crisis. I felt human again.

That was when I realized how much I had been living only for needs. The need to stop bleeding. The need to preserve my womb. The need to survive another day. Needs swallowed me whole. And for a while, I believed that was all life was supposed to be: staying alive, clinging to what was just enough to get by.

But rest has a way of stripping the noise until only truth is left. And in the quiet, I began to see how small I’d been living. How many times I had labeled my wants as unnecessary, even shameful. How many times I told myself you don’t need that when the truth was — I wanted it, and the wanting itself was real.

Before all of this, my wants were superficial — the fast life, the “friends,” the endless nights out. But when my body turned on me, when it felt like I was at war with myself, that’s when I began to deny myself the luxury of wanting anything at all. Desire felt dangerous, indulgent, something I couldn’t afford. And in that season, I learned that wanting more will ask for blood before it gives you breath.

Survival was safe. Wanting was risky. Yet the more I sat with it, the more I realized they weren’t enemies at all. Needs and wants aren’t separate roads — they circle into each other, feeding and shaping one another like a loop without end. Needs ground you. Wants expand you. Together, they form the rhythm of a full life.

What if the thing you crave — not the flashy, surface wants, but the deep ones — the art, the travel, the love, the freedom, the softness — is actually the marrow of who you are, pressing itself against your ribs, demanding to be heard?

Every time I silenced my desires, I starved myself of expansion. And when you starve expansion, you starve life. Needs will keep you alive. Wants will teach you how to live. And the longer I stayed in stillness, the clearer it became: wanting isn’t a distraction. Wanting is instruction.

The Million-Dollar Sacrifice

I used to think sacrifice was sweat and hustle — hours stacked on hours, the grind that left you wrung out and empty. But I learned the harder sacrifice wasn’t in moving, it was in stopping. It was surrendering to stillness when every part of me screamed to keep going.

It’s easy to give up the small things — the dollar sacrifice, the scraps you won’t miss. But the million-dollar sacrifice? That asks for your pride, your pace, your illusion of control. It asks for you to unclench your fists and trust that pause is preparation. That the pull-back is building pressure, lining you up for the release.

And what if rest was the wealth all along? Not the car, not the clout, not the endless chasing of more — but the energy to breathe deeply, the peace to choose differently, the strength to hold what you prayed for without breaking under its weight.

Wealth is not only money. Wealth is waking up without dread. Wealth is peace in your chest instead of panic. Wealth is knowing your wants are not shameful — they are sacred signals, guiding you to a life that is bigger than survival.

I had to lose the fast life to learn the deeper one. I had to be stripped down to remember what was basic: breath, body, being. And once I touched that rhythm, I knew: doing less “extra” is how you hold more of what actually matters.

The pull taught me that expansion is inevitable if you surrender to it. The waiting, the stillness, the aching pause — all of it was the backward draw of the slingshot, holding me in tension until it was time to fly.

And that’s the paradox no one tells you: stillness can be the most radical movement.

In a world obsessed with endless motion, the most radical thing you can do is rest.

One love, ESS xo