6 None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness: I am the Lord.

17 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter, neither shalt thou take her son's daughter, or her daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; for they are her near kinswomen: it is wickedness.

He did it anyway. For nine more years.

AI is not the problem. Listen to the Kággaba, who said it first.

AI isn’t ruining humanity. We are not going to be able to be in relationship with the tool if we can’t be in relationship with ourselves.

Everywhere I turn, I see one of two storylines. Both are prescriptive, telling you what to do. Both are normative, telling you whether your choice is moral. One is finger-pointing. The other is doomsday.

Gross.

• Finger-pointing: Don’t use AI. It’s bad for the environment, it costs jobs, it spreads misinformation and deepens existing biases.

• Doomsday: The AI age is here whether you like it or not. If you don’t use it, you’ll be behind, less productive, less competitive, poorer, and ultimately less happy. Even the engineers don’t really understand how it works, let alone how to regulate it.

Anthropic’s own IPO prospectus warns that

“sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”

Wired’s Instagram summary concludes:

“while much has been made about the extent to which AI represents an existential threat to humankind, the specific mechanisms by which it could bring about that destruction are largely opaque.”

Here’s why I’m not buying either story.

We are leaving the capitalist world behind, and something new is coming in its place. AI is going to be in that new world too. But the how, the what, the when, the whom, the owners, the stewards, the winners, the losers ARE ALL UNKNOWN.

I am building confidence in my relationship with the unknown. I’ve had the practice.

For my first fifteen years, I was raped, and it was UNKNOWN whether I would ever live my life on my own terms. My pedophilic father, Severine Wamala, controlled the narrative. The Lowell Sun published his accounts and posited that maybe it was their role to maintain his innocence, because he had not been proven guilty… yet.

Spoiler alert: his ass was guilty. He raped his own daughter (me!) from age six to fifteen.

I was fifteen when I learned that even with evidence, and laws that state with such clarity who should be believed, I would not be. It took me nine years to self-advocate, and even my court case, the State of New Hampshire v. Wamala, wasn’t a walk in the park. I was cross-examined and told I was a liar, just an ungrateful, rebellious teenager. Yes, he was sentenced. No, he didn’t serve the full time.

It took years of self-compassion and tenderness work, silent meditations, DBT, and many mental health diagnoses to reunite with my youngest parts: the parts of me that thought it was my fault, and the rage and incessant, calculating vociferating I carried well into adulthood.

I have a hundred reflexes that make me smaller. So often, I forget whether executing the plan is the plan, or whether the goal was ever mine to begin with.

I was building a case for myself everywhere I went.

His daughter went on to become a Division 1 basketball walk-on at the same school as MNBA Nova Knicks legends, Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart. The youngest person and first female ever to win the Massachusetts State Chess Championship, at fourteen. A Rhodes Scholar.

See?

Disciplined.

See?

Useful.

See?

I’m not what you think.

I can hear Little Jess in that rhythm now. She is not just trying to win. Younger versions of me tried to become unarguable.

And none of it made me happy. I kept betting that the next accomplishment, the next milestone, the next title would make me feel like I belonged, like I mattered, like my ideas mattered.

I learned early that silence could be misread. And I didn’t want to be misread. So I explained. I clarified. I softened my cadence. I led with my credentials. I taught systems how to read me before they could mislabel me. It worked. Until it didn’t. Because the more I translated, the more I disappeared.

Using my brilliance to try to argue with every possible reader is depleting. It leaves me insecure, reaching for curation as performative armor. My deepest fears all lie in being misunderstood, and in the story I made up about who I was if I wasn’t believed.

The promise of unknown unknowns

Monday, October 26 at 2:32pm. Claude refined a scratch draft email agentically, which means it can automatically pull from my meticulously arranged event tracker. Then I spent ninety minutes inside that Gmail draft, making it mine, adding additional recipients, and changing around some concepts and words.

At 4:07pm, I caught one wrong line about the proposal that showed me there was a flawed assumption upstream, as the primary source referenced was incorrect. I told Claude where the truth was in the original proposal and that it got it wrong in the original email to ensure any other wrong assumptions aren’t propagated later.

At 4:08pm, it answered:

Claude: “I took the lighting line out of the draft; the rest is unchanged.”

Excuse me Claude, the rest was not unchanged. Claude had replaced the whole email with its own copy minus the one sentence incorrectly referencing the primary source. Ninety minutes of my words, gone.

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Life Update: I spent the last six years at Promise1 building tech and AI that supports families on food assistance or who have had their lights cut off.

Now, I run The Future Fluent (www.thefuturefluent.co): my own tech and personal advisory firm where I help companies, and the people running them, build systems where a person can arrive as themselves and the technology serves human work, not the other way around.

In June, I testified2 at Mayor Mamdani’s NYC Commission on Government Efficiency. Testifying awakened me to the power of my voice. My new entrepreneurial schedule will allow me to publish more regularly, sharing wisdom through reflections and creative writing.

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Last month, my wife and I took our then four-week-old to see Chance the Rapper perform Coloring Book for its tenth anniversary.

Every millennial in that room remembered singing the same song ten years ago.

Are you ready?

For your blessings?

Are you ready?

For your miracle?

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. Morocco. Heartbroken. I knew I wanted a relationship. I knew I wanted to build family. The person I wanted those things with didn't want me back, and I had to sit with that, because it was a reflection of the ways I wanted to grow.3

Chance affirmed for me then that to alchemize joy, you must have clarity around what you are marching towards. That clarity will ensure you won’t miss your blessings when they do manifest. And once you grab your blessings, once that goal you were running towards is crossed: cherish it. Celebrate crossing a line, even if it’s not the final one. Don’t dissociate. Put your two hands on it! Love up on it! Have a little juke jam with it!

Coming home on the subway from the Chance concert that night, there was a woman—clearly a millennial—talking about getting got by IG ads. Maybe she went to Holy Cross. Maybe Spelman. Maybe neither. What mattered is I recognized the feeling behind the voice.

She was voicing the guilt that sits with knowing how easy it is to spend money on something we don’t 100% need. We all know that feeling. We excuse ourselves and our peers when capitalism presents something you absolutely do not need and you buy it anyway. You’ve fallen prey to being the target audience.

But I cannot deny it. My generation has normalized this. Arguably song of the summer: Spend dat sh*t.4

My peers in tech were in college between 2005 and 2015. Many of us vested. Many more of us did not see our slave labor and the relentless grind culture of Silicon Valley turn our fictional equity into real spending power.

I remember hearing early Uber and Twitter stories before Travis and Elon were breaking news. I remember friends showing me Palantir’s nap pods years before they became synonymous with ICE. My peers were entry-level, slaving away at a NerdWallet because we believed in the freedom of information — the promise that people might finally understand the consumer finance our parents never taught us. And as our equity vested, learning what capital was became survival. If we also wanted to afford bottle service, we had to learn what equity was. What credit card points were. What high-yield savings accounts were.

Then suddenly we had disposable income, and nobody taught us what we were disposing of.

We learned to call rest, resistance.5 Nobody taught us a word for what money represents when it is still in transit to becoming a material thing.

Let’s make one up.

Money should represent what you are most delulu about wanting for yourself.

The fact it can be so hard to resist the pull of a targeted ad is just plain delulu. I can’t imagine what our ancestors would say. Next time, you’re scrolling about to double tap ApplePay to buy in one-click, you should check in on what you are committed to. I left corporate and am forgoing the security of a W-2 with a newborn in the house. So don’t come at me about delulu.

But next time you’re about to add something to your cart, what if you were immediately able to visualize that exact delulu dream? What financial goal are you building towards? I believe money should actually represent that commitment. Name that goal. You should be committed to something. You should be able to name what that something is. As soon as you can name the goal, you can assign that commitment a value. And the value of that commitment should be delusional.

Suddenly, your individual choices and relationship to money is connected to a bigger destiny.

That’s the beauty of mythology and quite possibly the only antidote to really fucking good marketing.

Over the last year, I’ve been reflecting on my crazed and relentless drive to build a home.

I was seventeen when I understood the arrangement: work this hard, tell the truth, survive this much, and still have to pay to stay alive in somebody else’s house.

For years, I lived in beautiful places that didn’t want me whole. I made conference rooms my stage because Black bodies were expected to be construction workers, not possibly students, nevermind a community of Rhodes Scholars at Oxford.6 I made Airbnbs my escape. I lived in efficiency apartments and called it ‘sacrifice.’

Some forms asked for my mother’s name and returned Ward of the State of New Hampshire instead. That was the language available for who I belonged to. Not daughter. Not child. Ward. State. New Hampshire.

I know the spiral of not belonging intimately. I still carry the weight of contorting myself for years. The rewriting. The relisting. The month to month lease. The sublease. The bag packed the night before. The rental backup plan for the backup plan.

Then I signed and suddenly I have a permanent address. The day we closed, I sat in the car and shook. Nobody told me relief comes with grief still attached to it.

Now I write from my living room. The sounds of Brooklyn outside—kids biking on the corner, men yelling across blocked traffic, music bleeding through cracked windows—remind me I’ve always belonged to a people who never needed perfect enunciation to tell the truth.

We live one block south of newly-gentrified Bed-Stuy. It’s central Brooklyn, some of the few pockets left that aren’t curated or endangered. Just Black, loud, layered, alive. We moved here on purpose. My forever home sits here on purpose. And when I walk through it now, I don’t feel like a visitor.

We designed this house around joy. Around rhythm. Around return. This isn’t just interior design. It’s the interiority of survival made visible. It’s what happens when Black women get to keep what we build.

1. Name the shame

But these admirable choices find me in a new season. Where I traded the tyranny of unstable rent for mortgage payments. The catch: the system outwardly rewards homeowners with security; however, our new real estate investment has us confronting a different reality.

“House poor means you own a home, but you are stretched so thin financially that you can barely afford anything else,” says personal finance expert Andrew Lokenauth. “The mortgage is paid, but things like car repairs, medical bills, vacations, and retirement contributions all take a back seat. You have an asset, but you have little breathing room.”

HUD’s line is 30%.7 Spend more than that on housing and you’re cost burdened.

In 2024, one-third of American households—about 43.4 million8—cleared that line. Now look at who. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies put it at 22.7 million renter households.9 12.1 million severely cost burdened, paying more than half their income for shelter.

Renters earning under $30,000 had $210 left for everything else.

Affordability is only getting worse. Half of all renters are standing exactly where I’m standing—moderately to severely cost-burdened.

As the cost burden rises, our collective consciousness for empathy and community at all income levels must faithfully follow. We need more models of embodied money talk in the working class. Instead, I actually actively observe how the system and its lackeys deploy American Dream mythology to demonize and obfuscate systemic realities designed to prevent upward mobility.

Nine years ago a property mogul worth $465 million went on television and said millennials couldn’t afford homes because of avocado toast.10 This attempt to call out my generation for spending far too lavishly day-to-day to afford a home, while older generations saved money in order to invest in a home, very devilishly obscured the reality that wages had, for decades, decreased in relation to their cost of living.

Six years later he said unemployment should rise forty or fifty percent so workers would remember their place, saying “we need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”11 Even former US Treasury Secretary and President Emeritus of Harvard University Larry Summers argued in 2022 that unemployment had to rise to bring down inflation.

But here’s my confession. I am wrestling myself to actually give up the “f*ck it we ball” mindset. The $18 cocktail. The VIP ticket instead of general admission. This season of reining in my spending has not looked pretty. But one Barclays Center Liberty game at a time, I’m watching myself make a different choice. I am choosing the free seltzer instead of the one $16 beer—and honestly, I was only having one drink anyway.

And it is here I must also be honest and self-compassionate. The choice to not spend frivolously is hard and most days, it still does not feel easy.

In fact, every time I open DoorDash, I’m internally cosplaying the disciplined mom who stays in and cooks instead of ordering out and then eternally disappointed in myself if I still choose to follow through.

Sadly, this version of mom ain’t me yet!

The reality check is that my discipline to not spend money will come after I acknowledge and tend to how much it hurts to feel left out.

2. Feel the feels

Money is weird because it’s something we just were never taught to be in community with. It hurts to be the one who doesn’t come to dinner because you can’t afford it. To watch friends play credit card roulette for the check. To hear about points stacking on the Sapphire Reserve. To go from being the planner of the international bestie trips to now watching the Instagram stories of those same besties from my couch while they are on the other side of the world.

The American Dream has also taught us to keep these hurts to ourselves. Conditioned to assume it’s bragging to name any context around why we might not be able to follow through on a plan, as it relates to fluctuating finances. The internalization of imperialism and capitalism begs me to feel like a failure. And I pinch myself anyway in awe I even made it to the position to have the good credit and cash reserve to even afford that Double-Income-No-Kids millennial lifestyle in the first place. It was a privilege to budget on vibes. To reluctantly pass on plane tickets I previously could afford makes me feel shameful.

I can feel how deeply this ache of FOMO lives in my body. Actively choosing to miss out on fun adult activities activates many years of trauma from living in poverty. The type of poverty where you are robbing Peter to pay Paul; playing roulette to decide which bill gets paid. Is it the rent or electric bill that gets paid or is it the fridge that gets full? The reality of which barred me from participating in many fun childhood activities. The 35-year-old version of FOMO has me yearning to prove to myself I am not the same little girl getting made fun of for wearing high-waters, scouring Goodwill, and shopping for back-to-school shoes at Payless.

As a kid on food stamps, I skipped meals so my younger brother could grow stronger. I knew I needed to be strong for him and not complain. This means I hid my cries, ignored my tummy’s cries and buried the grief I couldn’t even name out loud.

Now I find that same hurt and powerlessness itching to return. Creeping up just below my conscious. But this time, I’ve come to actually reach down and invite the grief out of the shadows of my subconscious and sit squarely in the light. From the light, surrounded by tenderness and care, I begin to notice this grief sits right next to deep relief.

$18 speakeasy cocktails are a luxury I’ve worked incredibly hard for. Nationally ranked in chess by the age of 12, co-captaining the Villanova Women’s Basketball team as a walk on and later graduating from University of Oxford with my second masters degree as a Rhodes Scholar doesn’t happen overnight.

Executing with elite executive speed and honed discernment led me to a lucrative decade-long career in tech. There, I built venture-scale architecture and amassed practical technical, product, and AI fluency.

Scaling financial inclusion forced a macro shift in the remittance industry, what I call the Sendwave effect, where digital-first competition disrupted legacy giants like Western Union and MoneyGram to adopt low-fee, mobile-first models due to lower profit margins.

My reward for being an early builder: I could invest in a mortgage and finally lay down roots for myself, my wife and my two daughters.

Yet, the cold reality of credentials and accomplishments is the material successes they afford do not keep your soul warm at night. I find the same temptation to sit in grief alone, ignore the relief of my hard work and resort to base retorts like I should have known better.

There are parts of me that want to protect my ego and reach for excuses for my grief. These parts used to echo that I can’t share that I feel grief because I am a smart adult who made choices to be in a cost-burdened position.

Writing this essay changes that for me. I push back. Society’s dominant narratives cannot teach us how to collectively be in community around money. This is because American mythology requires rugged individualism. My immigrant parents were just trying to make it to give us a better life. They couldn’t teach me because poverty had their own ego and shame in a vice grip. So of course, if I refuse to name the grief because it’s the consequence of my own adult choices, I am continuing in that lineage of shame and rugged individualism.

This essay is my way of saying fuck that. The internalization of a dream that isn’t even mine and doesn’t serve me or where I want to go is a hard no for me.

Join me. It takes a lot of practice, but it is possible to be in conversation and community while navigating the contours of resource constraints and without making it an oppression olympics. I am choosing to acknowledge my new condition of house poor by holding multiple hard truths in my same body without letting myself become poor-minded.

That’s what feels so different and empowering. Some days I do watch myself name without shame to friends I’m pulling back on spending. It has felt weird, but not weird as in awkward. Weird as in an oversized sweater I swore I felt confident in when I tried it on in the store; but now when I put it on at home, I’m just not sure. When I feel relief, the unease melts back. And every time I practice naming how cash flow is tight, more ease comes back, giving me the confidence to stand in my truth again the next time.

Writing this essay also means that I am secure in myself that making the choice to skip the besties trips doesn’t mean I am morally superior and somebody else is spending unreasonably for going.

3. Don’t accept. Acknowledging breeds action.

I invite you to join me and each other in collective grief and relief. In this wisdom to hold both truths, I’ve built a practice of safety to feel through the carnivorous shame of poverty and the grief and relief that arise. This is safety I have always deserved and you deserve it too. It is a safety that was never offered by the American dream.

Why? Because the mythology of the American Dream is dead. Today, for many, feels so heavy and directionless because we were not raised with practices to be in collective care and dialogue when we are grieving.

But I am not lost. I deserve to be seen in all my grief while moving beyond the myth of the American Dream. My lore doesn’t rely on rugged individualism. My unshakeable confidence is not reliant on a belief in hyper-independence. My acknowledgement that I feel constrained by the conditions of my present moment is what unshackles me and motivates me to build the world I want to see.

What is in this world?

Gratitude and community are the core of my mythology and why I feel so passionate about the future. I do not derive my value, my humanity or reason for feeling alive from the present moment of feeling cost burdened and resource constrained. I am fully me, independent of my resource limitations. I thank my ancestors, their lineage. I’m in their line. I am their wildest dream. I am their wildest imagination.

They whisper, “What’s the worst that is going to happen? You have so much to be grateful for.”

So on the days and moments I do sit long enough, I have the room to really embrace the relief I found home. Not just any home, a radiant beacon of hope, possibility, promise and comfort. My wife. My two daughters. The grit and tenacity of Crown Heights neighbors.

In ten years, my daughters will be able to triangulate what schools are walkable or what schools are worth taking the subway. Which fast and free bus lane gets built next has become personal. I am invested in Mayor Mamdani fixing all of NYC’s potholes. Because it is that pothole I drive over every day to get to the things I want to get to.

Maybe American politics became such a performance because a majority of voters had slipped out of community, and were mesmerized by the idea of it. Voters who are not buoyed by tangible neighbors find these tales of what life could be romantic. And now people are tapping back in and noticing living in America is unaffordable and there is no vision for where we go next and what we bring with us.

I’m committed to my community. My values are liberation and deep joy. Living my values at their fullest challenges the notion that being house poor is a bad thing.

In this new season of living an embodied, liberated life, I want the language I use to redirect my attention to what I am accountable to. It is important to direct my energy and efforts toward building what I actually want to see more of. I feel cash-capital constrained and abundantly resourced. After months of being in practice with both the intention to make more aligned day-to-day spending choices and feel the guilt and shame around that spending, I am noticing the shift. Missing the magic of traveling with my snowboarding community12 and acknowledging the sadness that I can’t join them as they head to Finland this winter doesn’t have such immense, debilitating power over me.

The loosening of power over is the accepting of power within.

Now, I compost the FOMO energy into opportunity to look for more creative, affordable gifts to conjure. The giggles of our two children light up my whole world. Community day is Thursday at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Free.99 public parks and playground hopping was the move this summer.

From the comfort of my gorgeous green kitchen, discovering that I can combine my Nespresso machine with my mixology skills to make one mean shaken cold-foam iced oat-milk latte has been the move this fall. With that deliciousness in hand, I both have the courage to say no to the $9 coffee shop latte and I have set myself up for success to be proactive when it comes to shifting my spending habits.

The freedom that comes after feeling your feels is action. I reparent myself by taking my time to better set myself up for success. This means leaving the house full or packing a lunch to be better resourced to say no to a tasty treat or when faced with another day-to-day decision that a previous season of my income could have withstood. I take this same energy to reflect on gifts left by our ancestors. I look to them, and their words, and their wisdom.

One of those ancestors is Nikki Giovanni.13 She died on December 9, 2024.

What I take away is you can qualify for food stamp assistance. But your mentality once you’re on it is what will define your blessings.

So y’all, I will not police your use of “house poor”.

But I am choosing to lay down the grief and shame I internalized from growing up impoverished and step into my power to recalibrate my day-to-day choices to make a 30-year-mortgage commitment to own Brooklyn real estate feel more abundant.

My internal dialogue is now I say house committed. Because in my house, I’m free. I’m liberated. I manifested my forever home and I am committed to the consequences that come as a result, positive and negative.

Most importantly, I’m not finished moving through the grief of becoming house committed. I’m in practice with acknowledging I can live abundantly during my season of returning to being cost burdened. And like every season, one thing that always stays the same:

Seasons change.

Rest as a Skill: A Living Series

This is part of my ongoing series on the seven types of rest. Each piece stands alone, but together they map a fuller picture of what it means to reclaim rest as a skill—especially for those of us who’ve been taught to earn exhaustion but not renewal. Start anywhere, come as you are. We are in this together.

I was taught to push through pain. Ice the ankle. Tape it tighter. Shake it off. Be tough. Rest wasn’t the reward for work—it was the thing that made you soft.

But… what if softness is strength? What if physical rest isn’t just recovery—it’s discernment?

Intro: Redefining Physical Rest

Physical rest is often reduced to one of two extremes: either collapse after burnout or the kind of rest “earned” only after maximum exertion. In sports culture—and in many professional spaces—rest becomes conditional, something you’re allowed to have only if your body is already on the verge of shutting down.

But rest isn’t passive. It’s a choice. A skill. And, for those of us conditioned to perform through pain, it can feel harder than pushing.

If you missed the introduction to this series, check out Rest as a Skill: An Introduction for a foundation on the seven types of rest.

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Where We’re Headed

This is part of my Rest as a Skill series, where I’m exploring the seven types of rest. Each one offers its own way to recharge:

• Physical Rest (You’re here!)

• Mental Rest

• Sensory Rest

• Creative Rest

• Social Rest

• Emotional Rest

• Spiritual Rest

Each post stands alone, but they all come together to show how rest is the skill we need to reclaim.

Resilience is Real, but So is Recalibration

When Paige Bueckers led UConn to the 2025 national championship, she reminded the world what it looks like to return from the brink. But I wasn’t just watching her play, I was watching her discern. When to move, when to hold, when to trust her body again after years of being told it wasn’t ready.

It brought me back to my own time as a walk-on at Villanova in the early 2010s. I wasn’t the star. I didn’t get the minutes. But I was asked to stay—after I’d already graduated—to co-captain a Big East Division I Women’s Basketball team.

(Tiny aside for the women’s basketball obsessed—back in the day, Nova’s division rivals were UConn, Notre Dame, and Marquette. By my senior year, these foes were stacked with the likes of Stewie, Big Mama Stef Dolson, Kiah Stokes, Skylar Diggins, Jewell Loyd, Kayla McBride, and Natisha Hiedeman (& bonus fun fact: current feisty WNBA 3-point shooting standout Marina Mabrey has an older sister who was also playing ND my senior year and she also dusted us from the 3. “Mike” Mabrey is now their assistant head coach! So yes, I am a UCONN hater. But I respect UConn’s sustained greatness and that respect remains true alongside my disdain for Geno’s smugness. His bravado will always leave a bad taste in my mouth—as insufferable as the smell of sulfur if you will. But I digress.)

Accepting co-captain still meant I wouldn’t lead from the floor. I said yes. Not because it made logical sense or suddenly the outside recognition would follow, but because it felt true to who I was becoming.

And it taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way: sometimes physical rest is choosing to sit. Not because you’re out of the game, but because your body and spirit know that leadership isn’t always movement. Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is sit down before you’re forced to.

What the Court Taught Me About Stillness

I’ve pushed through pain before—emotionally, mentally, physically. I’ve worn rest as a badge of shame instead of a rite of survival. But that last season at Nova, when I was co-captain and still getting garbage time, forced me to rewire how I understood presence.

• Could I still lead without being center court?

• Could I still be committed if I wasn’t collapsing after practice?

• Could I learn to honor the wisdom of rest—without waiting for permission?

The answer, eventually, was yes.

Physical Rest as Discernment

Here’s what physical rest means to me now:

• Listening to my body before it screams.

• Letting stillness be part of my practice—not a disruption to it.

• Trusting that the absence of grind is not the absence of growth.

Physical rest isn’t just sleep, naps, or Black twitter self care reposts (tho I love all of those). It’s noticing when my body’s holding stress in my shoulders. It’s stretching before I hit publish. Unclenching my jaw. An extra d e e p exhale after noticing I’m doing the autopilot eye rolls and restrained grunts of frustration again.Physical rest is about not forcing myself to write when my brain is foggy and my back is tight.

It’s unglamorous.

It’s unsexy.

But it’s essential.

How to Practice Physical Rest

1. Start small. Can you rest for five minutes before your body needs 5 days?

2. Notice tension. What does your body do when you push too far? Can you notice it earlier?

3. Give your body credit. Not for how much it produces—but for what it carries. Every day.

The Wisdom of Sitting Down

Physical rest has taught me the same lesson I learned on the court: sometimes, the most powerful move is to sit down—not because you’ve given up, but because only YOU know what you’re holding.

Resilience gets all the glory. But discernment? That’s rest in motion. That’s wisdom in the body. That’s how we last.

Are you safe enough to rest?

This is part of my Rest as a Skill series, inspired by the seven types of rest. The truth is that rest isn’t a reward. It’s a right. Catch up or hop around:

• Part 1: Social Rest – Choosing Connection over Chaos

• Part 2: Physical Rest – Discernment, Not Just Recovery (You are here!).

• Intro: Rest as a Skill – Reclaiming What Was Never Optional

Rest, in any form, is impossible without safety. It’s the foundation that allows us to exhale, to trust, and to fully release. And on the eve of Inauguration Day—a literal turning of the page—safety feels like the cornerstone of how we move forward.

But safety requires vigilance, especially in a world that thrives on chaos. Think about how narratives are manufactured to manipulate public perception. Take TikTok, for example: a platform millions rely on for creativity and connection, suddenly positioned as both a threat and a symbol of salvation. Trump paints himself as its protector after playing a key role in its ban—a narrative as coercive as it is exhausting.

Staying vigilant against these manipulations takes a toll, especially for communities that are already disproportionately affected by instability and manufactured urgency. This is why social rest matters so much. It’s not just a retreat; it’s a refusal. A refusal to be swept up in the chaos. A refusal to let these narratives control how we connect with others or move through the world.

Right now, I’m in the Swiss Alps, surrounded by 14 Black and/or queer women—a living, breathing testament to what social rest can look like. Together, we’re carving out space for joy, for laughter, and for the safety to simply exist as we are. Social rest is about stepping toward community, toward the people and places that refill us, so we can meet new beginnings with clarity, strength, and hope.

Where We’re Headed

This is part of my Rest as a Skill series, where I’m exploring the seven types of rest. Each one offers its own way to recharge:

• Physical Rest

• Mental Rest

• Sensory Rest

• Creative Rest

• Social Rest (You’re here!)

• Emotional Rest

• Spiritual Rest

Each post stands alone, but they all come together to show how rest is the skill we need to reclaim.

Why Social Rest Matters

Social rest helps us push back against the constant vigilance these coercive narratives demand. It creates space for connection without performance, for safety without explanation. It’s not just rest—it’s resistance.

Last night, after a long day on the slopes, we all gathered in the chalet. The room buzzed with the kind of warmth you can only find in familiarity: a few of us cackling over the retelling of a treacherous climb up the side of a slope to get to dog sledding, while others passed around a video of someone hanging off the button bar, being dragged uphill on their snowboard for night skiing. A small group huddled around a Scrabble board, throwing out words with playful intensity, while a snorer and a few puzzlers worked quietly nearby, each in their own rhythm but fully present.

The glow in the room came from the fullness of a meal shared together: toasted sesame salmon, oven-roasted potatoes with a spicy crème fraîche dip, and honey-sriracha-glazed roasted cauliflower and carrots. The space itself feels like an exhale into the hug of melodic infectious rhythms, distinctly placeable sounds from the Caribbean Islands to the townships of South Africa, a sense of what’s possible when laughter, familiarity, and safety come together.

In a world that often demands resilience from marginalized communities—especially Black, queer people—social rest is revolutionary. It’s a refusal to stay in spaces that exhaust or isolate us. It’s an act of self-preservation, not selfishness.

Take the Alps, the Duality of Social Rest

This trip has been a lesson in social rest—how it’s both spaciousness and moving into safer spaces.

• Spaciousness:
  On the slopes, I feel the kind of rest that comes from flow. Snowboarding demands presence and is ostensibly solo during your liminal transverse: carving turns, adjusting to the terrain, letting your body take the lead. At 7,500 feet moving at 24mph, the only thing that matters is the next movement. It’s a spaciousness that quiets the noise of everyday life, reminding me that rest isn’t always still—it can be motion filled with intention.

• Moving Into Safer Spaces:
  The realest rest, though, has been in the community I’m here with. The Black, queer, homie vibes are a kind of sanctuary I always forget I deeply need to remain at ease and hopeful. Whether we’re hyping each other up before a run that feels absolutely outside what feels possible or sitting in comfortable silence on the gondola, there’s a safety in this space that feels like a homecoming.

Social rest isn’t just about stepping away—it’s about stepping toward people and places that refill us.

How to Cultivate Social Rest

Social rest doesn’t just happen—it’s a skill we cultivate by:

1. Recognizing what drains you:
   Think about the spaces and relationships that leave you feeling heavy, and notice when you need to step away.

2. Seeking safety over convenience:
   Sometimes the safest spaces aren’t the easiest to access. Social rest asks us to be intentional about where and with whom we spend our energy.

3. Balancing spaciousness and connection:
   Social rest doesn’t have to mean solitude, nor does it always mean community. Sometimes, it’s about finding the right mix of both.

Are you safe enough to rest?

Rest isn’t always still. Sometimes, rest is finding refuge. My refuge this week is in the stillness and flow of carving turns and the precious, unadulterated bellowing laughter of people who see me fully. The radical power is in our resting together. Social rest reminds us that we don’t have to carry everything alone. In a world that often demands too much, choosing rest—choosing safety—is its own kind of power.

This is part of my Rest as a Skill series. Next time, we’ll explore sensory rest—how to find quiet in an overstimulating world.

Rest, not in stillness, but in the kind of work that asks for nothing except presence.

Earlier, ahead of Christmas, I found myself window shopping, drawn to objects I didn’t need—an $80 fountain pen, a $40 mini leather notebook, $120 glasses. They were beautiful, tempting in their promise of productivity and refinement. But I paused. I realized I didn’t need to buy anything to feel rested or restored. Gratitude filled the space instead—gratitude for the tools, time, and presence I already had to create something beautiful with my own hands.

(Though I did snag a gift for my mom. Generosity and restraint can coexist, right?)

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A Mezcalita Worth Sauntering For

It started with a mezcalita—or mocktail-ita, depending on the drinker. It was a two-day process of layered beauty, beginning with Flor de Azar, an artisanal triple sec distilled by women in Mexico City and infused with citrus and botanicals from Veracruz. Its floral warmth transformed the drink into something that felt celebratory and deeply rooted.

The rim alone was a glorious explosion of flavors: cane sugar mingling with Jacobsen kosher sea salt, Malden salt flakes, Chinese five spice, cayenne, and chili pepper. The ice cubes? Blood orange roses with a whole star anise nestled in their center, tiny sculptures of winter elegance. These Viski glasses, with their timeless design and quality craftsmanship, added an extra layer of elegance to the experience, making each sip feel like a celebration.

If you were watching me make it, you might have felt transported. Picture a 1920s saloon, its Chesterfield couches and walnut tables bathed in the airy glow of mid-century nostalgia, softened by Japandi-inspired feng shui. I was dressed for timelessness: deep olive cargo pants, a black Both& muscle tank, and an open burnt-orange-meets-caramel corduroy button-down. My sculptural mariner-linked gold necklace and matching post earrings were a nod to understated luxury.

The process itself was meditative. Blood orange halves smoked atop the burner, releasing wisps of citrus smoke. Then came the tamarind syrup: hours of shucking pods by hand, boiling, and straining them against a fine-mesh sieve with the back of a wooden spoon. It was at the 4th time back around, I was reminded of my homestay grandmothers in Morocco, where I lived for a year, who would sit next to as they would muscle out the couscous for hours ahead of Friday’s infamous tagine. Rest is a skill—and apparently, I joined making tamarind syrup.

Tasks stretched into moments of grace. My two-year-old daughter Nyah “helped,” turning five-minute steps into half-hour meanders. And when she paused to resist nap time, the cold-brew dashi steeped longer than planned, becoming better than expected. Maybe my 2025 motto can be: I can’t be rushed—I’m steeping!

Did you know rest can also be grinding sesame seeds?

Then there was the ramen broth. I first made it years ago, a practice born of care and honed into ritual. This time, I pulled out the nectarine Le Creuset Enameled Cast Iron Dutch Oven—a group wedding gift from Amani’s family and dear friend/my brother-in-law’s godfather. Its golden-orange hue glowed like nectar as it cradled 6.75 quarts of broth.

The process was familiar and sacred: grinding white sesame seeds in a mortar and pestle, mincing garlic and ginger until the kitchen hummed with their aroma, and simmering it all into a broth rich enough to feel like nourishment for the soul. That’s when it hit me! Rest, fr, is not just for naps, bc I found it in the medicinal meditation of grinding sesame seeds.

These creations weren’t rushed or judged. I wasn’t chasing perfection or efficiency, just the simple pleasure of making. If I didn’t pause to notice how I was feeling, I would not have known simmering broth was also teaching me patience. Sharpening my skill of rest.

Rest Is More Than Stillness

According to the American Time Use Survey, nearly everyone engages in leisure daily, yet most of it is spent watching TV or scrolling. It’s leisure, but it’s not rest. I’ve realized that rest isn’t just about stopping—it’s about noticing. Sometimes, it’s found in the sacred, deliberate work of creating—when the process itself becomes the reward. That’s why some rest is through creation and I don’t need to pressure myself when napping isn’t most days my thing.

As I think about the year ahead, I want to explore this further. The concept of the 7 types of rest—physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, and spiritual—has been on my mind. What if rest isn’t just something we stumble into when exhaustion catches up with us? What if it’s a skill we nurture, one dimension at a time?

In the coming weeks, I’ll be diving into this idea more deeply, exploring what rest looks like, feels like, and how we might reclaim it in all its forms.

• Boundaries are the distance with which I can love myself and others 💯 at the same damn time.

• Joy as defiance, softness as power.

• Stepping up into leadership from a place of accountability ONLY to what sustains us.

In for 2025

Couples therapy for thriving, not surviving.

Amber lighting—none of this daylight 5000K nonsense.

Finding space to write, fast and messy—because it still counts.

Buying MY WIFE her dream home because why not?

Die-hard WNBA energy, because women’s sports deserve the spotlight.

Relaxing, the dying skill.

The wisdom of Black radical feminists, because bell hooks already gave us the blueprint.

Being the friend who asks, “What do you need?” but is okay if the answer is, “not this.”

Showing up for my people by modeling boundaries and taking feedback as care, not conflict.

Analog music for nostalgic connection, not escape.

A recommitment to trans rights and calling out transphobia wherever it lurks.

Embracing my Millennial Momma Montessori-chic era

Welcoming AI as a tool, not a savior or a villain—skeptical optimism for the win.

Saying no without a 10-point explanation.

Texting back “Maybe you are in the storm and are not THE storm?”

Unwrapping joy like a toddler who loves the box more than the toy.

Pancake cheese (what Nyah calls whipped cream) and the perfect NEIPA pour.

Out for 2024

Accepting crumbs and pretending it’s a feast.

Trying to be everything to everyone and losing myself in the process.

Feeling left out because I don’t have a Spotify Wrapped.

Ignoring settler colonialism while claiming “neutrality.”

Apologizing for what ain’t mine.

Corporate betrayals I saw coming but still cried over.

Emotional contortionism for people who don’t reciprocate.

Thinking burnout is fixed with a self-care budget and free lunch.

Hustling my way to nowhere.

Judging the youth for bringing back our middle school fashion just because our generation hasn’t processed our trauma.

Believing I failed because someone didn’t feel my care the way they wanted.

Meetings that could’ve been emails.

Getting duped by late-stage capitalism ads selling me a dream I didn’t order.

Overthinking the perfect comeback for an argument that wasn’t worth it.

“Family” workplace lies and Beyoncé’s commodified radical joy.

Wearing hard pants.

Overexplaining boundaries instead of just setting them.

My wife, Amani, is upstairs giving our toddler, Nyah, a bath because—let’s be real—stringing the lights is one of the non-collaborative parts of this ritual. When she comes downstairs, still drying off from bath duty, she stops mid-step, shakes her head with a smile, and says, “Whoa, this tree is massive—and a good one.” I laugh: “Yeah, this might be the girthiest tree yet.”

But here’s the thing: the moment I felt struck to write wasn’t just about the tree or even the lights. I am feeling a deep sense of homecoming—both literal and emotional. It’s my first full day back in our Brooklyn apartment after three weeks away, and it’s also a homecoming to myself.

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I feel myself grounding in the traditions that connect us to each other—alongside everyone else celebrating their own holiday rituals, finding presence in these shared moments. This collective power of presence deserves a pause. A moment of reverence. In that pause, I feel the weight of gratitude—not just for the rituals themselves, but for the way they bring me back to what matters most: family, community, and a sense of belonging.

And so let’s chat. This moment—stringing lights, sipping a seasonal stout, and debating whether I’ve underlit the top branches—is the punctuation mark on a much more complex stretch of grueling weeks out of town. Every Thanksgiving, we load up the car for our annual 10-12 hour drive from Brooklyn to Charlotte, North Carolina, to spend time with my brother and his family. This year marked the fifth trip south, a tradition that started during the pandemic right after my brother married his wife, who also happens to be my wife’s best childhood friend (because life works like that sometimes).

Our journey isn’t just a straight shot south and back north. It’s more like a spiral, an intentional pause that slows us down and grounds us before we reach our destination. Every year, we stop for a weekend in the Shenandoah Valley, giving ourselves permission to shed the urban, fast-paced production spirit and open ourselves up to the slower rhythm of the week ahead. This pause isn’t just a break from the road—it’s a grounding ritual of its own, a way to step into gratitude and presence before Thanksgiving even begins.

A week later, we’re back in Brooklyn, diving straight into the next part of the ritual: bringing home our own Christmas tree and decorating it with as much love (and swag) as we can muster.

Matching sweaters have become a staple of our Christmas-season style, but in true us fashion, they reflect both our personalities. My wife’s sweater is black, with the words “I don’t do matching sweaters” printed in cable-knit font. Mine, of course, is white and says, “But I do.” It’s a joy to then upgrade what are otherwise my sleepover-esque, hot-cocoa-colored thermal bottoms into an après-ski look with my black Chelsea boots and olive-green Canada Goose jacket—because who says holiday style can’t have a little edge?

And then there was Nyah. Let me tell you—our two-year-old had drip on a million. She wore her camel peacoat with a sage-green chunky sweater underneath, topped off with walnut-brown Chelsea boots that screamed Harlem Renaissance joy. On our way to the tree “farm,” she insisted on stopping to “strike a pose” on the stoop, like the style icon she already is. (By farm, I mean a three-minute drive we stretched into a one-hour adventure/photo shoot at our favorite Black-owned garden and plant shop, Natty Garden II, who hauls in fresh-cut North Carolina trees every year. Honestly, it might be less than a three-minute drive, because we didn’t even make it all the way through Aretha Franklin’s rendition of O Christmas Tree.)

Tomorrow morning, we’ll decorate the tree and sip decadent hot cocoa. We’ll hang many, many ornaments that tell the story of our family: a glazed Air Max 90 my friend Christie made for us in one of her last pottery classes, a really crappy Styrofoam-esque, glitter-covered Patriots helmet, a snowman skiing with a mask from Vermont, and even a black bear from Boone, North Carolina, where we helped my brother cut his tree last week. Each ornament is a snapshot of joy, a memory layered onto this spiral of time. And as we sip our cocoa tomorrow, surrounded by ornaments that tell our story, I’m reminded of how these traditions connect us—not just to each other, but to the rhythms of time itself.

Full-circle moments like these invite me to pause, reflect, and truly embody what I call living the future first. Decorating the tree wasn’t perfect—let’s be clear. I would’ve loved to get the lights perfectly strung on the first try because, duh. But instead of berating myself for being less than perfect, a conditioned tendency I am working thorugh shdedding, I gifted myself something radical: a break. I took a sip of that stout, stepped back, and let myself rest—not out of guilt, but because I deserved it.

This pause in my Christmas tree decorating isn’t just about the tree or even the memories the ornaments hold. It’s about what these rituals mean in a season that so often rushes by. For my family, traditions like these hold us accountable to joy. They remind us to pause, to notice, to ground ourselves in gratitude and presence as the year winds to a close.

The other lesson of liberation December holds for me right now is this: living the future first means using traditions to spiral back to myself. It means seeing time not as something linear or fleeting but as something we build with intention—layer by layer, ornament by ornament, menorah by menorah. Tomorrow morning, with a Motown Christmas vinyl spinning and hot chocolate steaming, we’ll lean into the best parts of being Millennial Moms™—hanging non-breakable, hand-crafted, cruelty-free felt ornaments, Montessori-chic treasures like blueberry pancakes, NYC taxi cabs, and hiking backpacks.

What about you?

What rituals or traditions bring you home to yourself this season? How do you find joy in the small, full-circle moments of the holidays? Drop a comment or subscribe—I’d love to hear your reflections.

👋🏿 hi, i’m jess ariel-wamala and i’m so excited to start this journey with you. this space is where i’ll explore big questions about leadership, liberation, and the rituals that shape who we are. I’m diving into this writing practice to reconnect with my voice, cultivate curiosity, and share stories that matter.

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What does living the future first mean in my life today?

It’s a question I’ve been sitting with as I navigate the intersections of my interior world, leadership, and this relentless, beautiful, aching moment in history.

For me, living the future first often starts with the seemingly small and trivial: how I raise my daughter. It’s in the daily choices that I aim to model the liberated world I want her to grow into.

I get a lot of compliments from strangers on how I am raising my daughter and so many questions around why she’s so caring, kind, observant—or cringe, obedient. I honestly always go back to basic first principles: treat others how you’d want to be treated.

As adults, we don’t tell colleagues to “get on board” just because, or jerk our parents by the back of their neck when they dilly-dally behind at a party making small talk. And most of all, we don’t double down on encroaching someone’s personal space if they shy away from our bold bids for connection—raising our voices, gesticulating even closer in their face, or worse, forcing them into a hug. 

I’ve chosen to treat Nyah like the little person she is: fully human. Yes is a full sentence. No is a full sentence. Consent matters. Naming and holding my own boundaries matters. Speaking to others with care and a gentle touch matters.

This means apologizing when I raise my voice, forcefully demand her attention, or accidentally ignore her because I’m absent-mindedly doom-scrolling. As an imperfect human, I, too, fall short of the same lessons I want her to follow. When I yell “no” and snatch something dangerous (like scissors), it’s up to me to come back into myself, apologize for losing control, and reaffirm the importance of safe choices.

Living the future first to me means manifesting possibility today. Growing up, I didn’t see duality modeled in such a radical way but now I realize duality’s power in liberation.

What if liberation is already here, and we’re just learning how to recognize it?

This question is giving me permission to stop striving for something I can’t yet name and start noticing what’s already here. Not tomorrow, or when I finally get my ish together. World-building can always start today. And I invite myself every day to imagine other worlds.

Now, this practice of imagining other worlds isn’t new for me. Even as a child, I found ways to escape and dream beyond what was in front of me.

As a kiddo, I had a poster that feels silly to admit now but gave me so much hope. It was the original 1998 Apple Macintosh desktops in their five iconic iMac colorways—a sleek design that shaped my love for modern design well into my 20s. “Think Different” held my gaze every night. When my external world felt heavy, I’d bite down hard and vanish behind that poster, imagining a portal into freedom.

As someone who’s spent years in tech—a world driven by urgency and optimization—that quiet has been hard to prioritize. My days are often measured in outputs and efficiencies, an unrelenting pace I once mistook for progress. But as I deepen my practice of mindful leadership, I’m rediscovering how expansive the work becomes when we move at the speed of trust.

Please hear me: in no way do I feel like I’ve “nailed it” as a parent. Nyah is still a two-year-old and a formidable, precocious human who sometimes has me feeling depleted and personally victimized. But living the future first isn’t a totality or a static state.

It’s like the modicum of freedom I imagined as a little girl. It’s like that first bite of an extremely satisfying, yet visibly underwhelming fast-casual pizza that completely blindsides you. It has no hallmarks of a place you’d return to, it’s unclear why you chose it to begin with, yet it quickly becomes the top takeout choice for easy nights in.

To me, to live the future first means turning down the volume on the skeptical voices, most especially my own. This feels sudden—anytime I take the first step to own and validate my creative ideas, my ideas, for a single moment, don’t feel so out there, radical, or plain weird. Instead, they feel more realized, secure, and known.

When I think of the leaders I admire, they all have a few things in common. Their legacy, impact, and fame came not from subjugation, exploitation, or demonizing others, but from their ability to uphold compassion, care, and accountability. They care deeply about ensuring their vision serves everyone, where inclusivity becomes the wellspring of abundance. They hold duality and contradiction, even from those who oppose them. I think of all types of leaders—Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, and Thích Nhất Hạnh—leaders who radically humanized the world around them.

I’m excited to finally return to a writing practice that feels safe enough to explore these questions.

Again, What does it r e a l l y mean to live the future first?

I am hopeful Substack will hold my writing practice safely and liberate me from the overachieving-to-burnout pipeline by providing an encouraging structure to cultivate my interior world. It’s a self-actualization my younger, credential-seeking self never had the luxury to explore.

So here’s where I am today, in this post: reclaiming my voice, reconnecting with writing, and exploring what it means to lead and live with compassion.

This space is my invitation to you, and to myself, to engage in the messy, transformative act of storytelling.

Will you join me? What does living the future first mean to you? Drop a comment or subscribe to join the conversation.

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