I Used to Call It Hustle, My Body Called It Harm: 30 Sacred Yeses That Taught Me the Difference
There’s a particular kind of fatigue that doesn’t show up on lab work or your Oura ring.
You can sleep eight hours, drink the green juice, hit inbox zero and still feel like you’re melting at the edges of your own life.
For my twenties and most of my thirties, that was me.
On paper, I was thriving: educator, matchmaker, coach, author, strategist, “strong friend,” the one who always had language (and time) for everyone else’s breakdowns and breakthroughs.
But privately, I was fluent in something I didn’t yet have words for:
Self-abandonment.
Not the glamorous kind that comes with a dramatic exit and a new haircut. The quiet kind. The “I’ll just…” kind.
I’ll just take on one more project.
I’ll just swallow that comment.
I’ll just ignore what my body’s been whispering for months.
It shows up in emails you answer at 11:47 PM, in dates you say yes to when your spirit is screaming no, in jobs you stay in because you’re afraid of what happens when you stop performing.
I built a life around being useful to everyone but myself.
It took years, a recession, a pandemic, a nervous system revolting, a few relationships ending, a couple of career pivots, and four alter-egos (The 4 Personas) that surfaced during a year-long mental health sabbatical to finally admit:
I had mastered the art of curating a life that looked intentional while quietly erasing the woman at the center of it.
2025 was the year I decided to stop calling that “normal” and start calling it what it was: a pattern, one I could study, interrupt, and re-design.
I have finally landed on a name this inner work: Abandoning Self-Abandonment™ and this piece, this list of 30 Sacred Yeses, is my first public record of what it actually looks like in practice.
It’s part memoir, part field guide, and maybe the most honest thing I’ve written about what it means to create, to connect, and to build a life without burning yourself down to keep the lights on.
What I Mean by Self-Abandonment
Self-abandonment is not just “bad boundaries.”
It’s the slow, habitual leaving of yourself.
It’s when your calendar reflects everyone else’s priorities but yours.
When you apologize for your needs before you even say them out loud.
When your work is dazzling but your body feels like a hostile workplace.
It’s the teacher who never stops teaching, even when no one is listening.
The “nice” partner who never asks for reciprocity.
The leader who leads everyone but themselves.
For me, it looked like:
Over-performing at work while under-feeling in my own life.
Saying yes to roles that exploited my care…and no to creative risks that could have freed me.
Treating my body like a vehicle for productivity instead of a home.
On the outside, it reads as achievement.
On the inside, it feels like vanishing.
The Shift from Autopilot to Agency
I didn’t fix this with a vision board and a bubble bath.
I started with one brutal, liberating truth:
I am not just overworked. I am under-honored…by me.
This past year, there was no dramatic makeover montage. No overnight rebrand. Just a woman in her 40s standing in front of a bathroom mirror, asking herself a question that refused to let her go:
“What would my life look like if I stopped walking away from myself?”
Not metaphorically. Not in a hashtag.
Literally stopped leaving my body, my needs, my voice, my desires behind to be palatable, productive, or praise-worthy.
I didn’t start with a framework. I started with a feeling: I’m tired of being applauded for the parts of me that are slowly killing me.
What I’m Still Learning and Growing Through
To abandon self-abandonment is not to become selfish or detached. It’s to recognize that you cannot build a regenerative ecosystem including a family, a brand, a classroom, a community, or a company on the unpaid labor of your own erasure.
It means:
You don’t teach your nervous system that love equals disappearing.
You don’t teach your clients that your boundaries are optional.
You don’t teach your audience that your worth hinges on how “on” you are.
You don’t teach your collaborators that urgency and chaos are your default.
You become, instead, a living case study in another way of being.
Your yes becomes sacred when it costs you self-respect to say no.
Your no becomes sacred when it costs you approval to say yes.
So I began tracing:
Where did I first learn to ignore my own signals?
How did religion, respectability, and “strong woman” culture teach me that my exhaustion was proof of my goodness?
How many of my “yeses” were actually fear wearing a cute outfit?
That inquiry eventually birthed a whole ecosystem I’m beginning to nurture. It was as if I curated my life like an exhibit titled:
Here Lies a Woman Who Refused to Leave Herself Behind.
The artifacts became:
Abandoning Self-Abandonment™ the framework and language.
Free Spirit a meditation album about returning home to self.
Ease as a Regenerative Practice experiments in living without self-erasure.
Where I Left Myself a long-form video series on the micro-betrayals and micro-repairs that shape a life.
Receipts & Red Flags field notes on modern love and self-respect.
Regenerative Case Files story-driven breakdowns of brands and systems trying (or failing) to move beyond extraction.
All of it, every series, every project, every offering is, at its core, another Sacred Yes. All of them orbit one question:
What happens when a woman stops outsourcing her worth to institutions, relationships, or productivity and starts treating self-honoring as a daily practice, not a prize?
My answer began, not with a grand gesture, but with 30 small, sacred yeses.
30 Sacred Yeses: A Different Kind of List
Sacred Yeses are not resolutions.
They are reorientations.
They don’t ask, “How can I become better at abandoning myself more beautifully?” They ask, “What would change if I stayed?”
Stayed honest.
Stayed inside my body.
Stayed with my intuition long enough to hear what it’s been trying to say.
These are not resolutions.
They’re receipts.
They’re tiny, disruptive choices I made this year to stop leaving myself behind. I’ve grouped them loosely by arena: body, work, love, voice, money, and possibility.
Use them as mirrors, not mandates.
Yes to My Body
1. Yes to listening before it screams.
I stopped waiting for breakdowns and burnout and started paying attention to the early whispers from my body: eye aches, brain fog, exhaustion, irritability. Instead of muscling through, I asked, “What are you trying to protect me from?”
2. Yes to gut health as gospel, not trend.
I stopped treating my stomach like a trash can for convenience food and started relating to it as a second brain. Tests, tweaks, and tenderness, not punishment, became my approach.
3. Yes to movement that feels like power, not penance.
Boxing, walks in my childhood neighborhood, listening to LoFi or binaural frequency playlists while stretching to open my heart and hips in my living room on Sunday mornings when everyone else was at church. Less “burn 500 calories,” more “can I feel myself breathing again?”
4. Yes to perimenopause honesty.
Instead of whispering about hormone changes like a scandal, I started saying it plainly: my body is shifting, and I deserve support. Sweats, bloating, and mood swings don’t make me weak, they make me human.
5. Yes to sleep as strategy.
I stopped glamorizing 2AM productivity and started romanticizing being in bed at a decent time, unless I genuinely had the inspiration and energy. My creativity sharpened the moment I stopped treating rest like a side hustle.
Yes to Work that Doesn’t Require Disappearing
6. Yes to leaving titles that no longer fit.
“Educator,” “coach,” “consultant” were accurate but incomplete. I said yes to holding the more honest titles: wellness journalist, creator-in-residence, regenerative ecosystem designer.
7. Yes to turning my frameworks into art.
Abandoning Self-Abandonment™ stopped living in my notes app and has become inspiration for talks, meditations, and series. I stopped hoarding brilliance in Google Docs, my second brain.
8. Yes to working with, not for, brands.
Instead of chasing gigs that drained me, I began designing creator-in-residence models where I show up as a peer, not a prop. No more partnerships that require me to dim my values or point of view as a 40+ woman.
9. Yes to fewer, deeper commitments.
I walked away from “a little bit of everything” and chose a smaller set of aligned projects: Free Spirit, Ease as a Regenerative Practice, and my thought leadership on future-of-education.
10. Yes to ease as a KPI.
If an opportunity promised money but cost me my sanity, I let it go. Ease became a measure of success, not a reward I get at the end.
Yes to Love That Doesn’t Feed on Self-Doubt
11. Yes to walking away when my nervous system said no.
There were men who looked good on paper but felt bad in my body. I stopped explaining away my discomfort and started honoring it.
12. Yes to calling it a red flag, not a “quirk.”
Passive aggression, emotional unavailability, unresolved trauma that bred lack of self-awareness or trust in others, control disguised as protection. I stopped romanticizing what my spirit knew was misalignment.
13. Yes to being desired and respected.
I stopped negotiating between chemistry and care. The bar is now “emotionally intelligent, spiritually grounded, financially responsible, prioritizes health, and deeply kind” or we’re not a match.
14. Yes to Receipts & Red Flags.
I turned my dating adventures and matchmaking history into a public lab. Not to drag anyone, but to normalize women choosing self-respect over romantic scarcity.
15. Yes to being loved where I actually live.
I stopped presenting a polished persona and started letting people meet the parts of me that are tender, complicated, and still in process.
Yes to My Own Voice
16. Yes to recording before I feel “ready.”
From ‘Refined Garden’ to ‘Where I Left Myself.’ I stopped waiting for the perfect outline and started recording the truth of where I was.
17. Yes to experimenting in public.
Some episodes are polished, while others feel like voice notes to my future self. I post anyway. The point is not perfection; it’s presence.
18. Yes to sound as medicine.
Free Spirit meditation album, sonic essays like Please, BARE With Me are examples of how my voice became more than a tool for teaching. It’s now a home I was rebuilding for myself.
19. Yes to saying the quiet parts out loud.
The ways religion shaped my shame. The cost of always being “the strong one.” The grief of losing an old identity. If it was haunting my body, it belonged in my work.
20. Yes to narrating from the middle, not the mountaintop.
I’m in the place between no longer and not yet, so I’m not sharing to say “I have arrived,” but “I am arriving.” That framing alone dissolves so much pressure.
Yes to Money that Matches My Mission
21. Yes to minimums that honor my labor.
I set a baseline $10K/month and started making decisions like a woman who expects her work to be resourced, not “thanked.”
22. Yes to naming my value clearly.
Instead of vague “services,” I now speak about creator-in-residence programs, frameworks, and IP that host brands can plug into and co-develop.
23. Yes to walking away from misaligned money.
If a partnership meant confused deliverables, diluting my message, tokenizing my story, or glamorizing burnout, the answer became no even when the number was tempting.
24. Yes to building my own distribution channels.
Website and newsletter under construction, YouTube for raw sonic work, contributing to social platforms and conversations that are intentionally meaningful. My goal is not virality, it’s sovereignty.
25. Yes to money as a reflection of alignment, not martyrdom.
I stopped chasing income that required me to sacrifice my health. Revenue and regeneration have to sit at the same table now.
Yes to a Future that Includes Me
26. Yes to being a student of my own life.
Instead of just designing curriculum and frameworks for others, I became my own case study. Ease, pleasure, discipline, grief. I let it all teach me.
27. Yes to leaving old scripts on read.
The “strong Black woman,” the “good girl,” the “successful professional,” I stopped auditioning for roles I didn’t write.
28. Yes to building regenerative ecosystems, not just personal brands.
Every project or initiative now is a node in a larger vision where people, institutions, and communities stop running on depletion.
29. Yes to giving myself the love I’ve tried to earn from work.
I am slowly learning to see myself as more than my output. To treat my body, my ideas, my heart like they’re already enough.
30. Yes to being here. Fully.
This might be the most sacred yes of all: I am staying with myself. In confusion, in clarity, in desire, in doubt. I am no longer leaving me.
Why I’m Writing This Now
I could have waited until everything was polished, perfectly packaged, ready for a big reveal. But that would have been another quiet act of self-abandonment, another moment where I made being “finished” more important than being honest.
So I’m sharing this now, while it’s still tender.
While I’m still revising.
While my life still looks like a draft in places.
Because maybe you’re here, too:
Half in a role that no longer fits, but afraid of what leaving might cost.
Half in relationships that require you to mute parts of yourself or your truth.
Half in your body, half hovering just above it, trying not to feel so much.
Half invested in that creative idea or business venture because you haven’t yet strengthened the muscle that requires you to be confident and fully trust your process, your value, the vision planted inside you, even when everything around you is screaming it will flop.
What This Means for 2026 (and for you)
If any part of you recognized yourself in these yeses, in the quiet self-betrayals, in the ache for something more honest, then this isn’t just my story. It’s our case study, and your invitation. The invite is not to fix it all by tomorrow, but to choose one Sacred Yes.
One place where you will not walk away from yourself this time.
In 2026, I’ll be going deeper into this work through:
Where I Left Myself: long-form video reflections on the micro-betrayals and micro-repairs that shape a life.
Receipts & Red Flags: Field Notes on Modern Love: carousel series on love, dating, and self-respect as a 40-something “rich auntie” who refuses to abandon herself to be chosen.
Regenerative Case Files: story-driven breakdowns of brands and systems experimenting with less extraction, more regeneration.
Free Spirit: a guided meditation album about coming home to your own inner compass.
Abandoning Self-Abandonment™ talks, workshops, and creator-in-residence experiences for people and institutions ready to rethink how we live, learn, lead, and love.
If you want companions on this path, here’s where you can follow my journey:
Read this full piece and future essays on my site.
Subscribe and Watch Where I Left Myself and Refined Garden on YouTube.
Join the dialogue follow on IG, TikTok, Threads, and LinkedIn where I’ll be sharing more Sacred Yeses, red flags & receipts, and regenerative experiments in real time.
Your Turn: Gentle Assignment
Before you close this tab, here’s a simple starting place:
Name one pattern of self-abandonment you’re ready to retire. Overexplaining? Overworking? Over-pleasing? Silencing desire?
Name one Sacred Yes that speaks to it. A boundary. A ritual. A conversation. A decision.
Practice it once. Not perfectly. Just honestly. Let your nervous system know: we are doing this differently now.
Connect with a sacred yes you can make this week that moves you one step away from self-abandonment and one step closer to self-honoring. Start there. The revolution within has to begin somewhere.
