I Stopped Calling It Laziness

Dear Delyara, What I was feeling was not laziness. It was depletion. But because I have lived too long in a culture and a body that mistrust women’s need for rest, I still often translate my own fatigue into moral language before I let it become care. This week, I interrupted that. I felt the heaviness. I stopped. I did not insult myself first. I did not force myself into one more task to “earn” the right to rest. I just rested. That sounds simple. It was not simple in me. It felt like healing because it challenged something old and cruel: the belief that a woman’s body must justify its own limits dramatically before those limits count as real.