Morning always begins before I am ready for it. A kind of negotiation between the alarm and my body. Between what the world demands of me and what little of myself I can keep. I watch as my coffee brews, staring at the steady trickle of brown. That’s the most stillness I’ll have for hours. Even in silence, there’s always something waiting: a call, a deadline, a favour, a message that starts with “hey, quick question…”

Somewhere between packing breakfast and replying to overnight emails, I’m reminded that women’s time is never truly ours. Even before the sun rises, we’re already halfway through a shift no one recognizes.

By the time I leave the house, I’ve answered work calls, coordinated a delivery, and texted my loctician to schedule my next appointment. The hustle never sleeps; not because we love it, but because it’s how we survive. I think of the all the women running parallel shifts: one for the paycheck, and another that keeps our lives from unraveling.

Rest, for women, is an economy of guilt. If I sit down, something somewhere is left undone. The laundry, the invoice, the friend who needed a reply, the dream that should have been chased more aggressively. I envy men who can nap without apology.

At the salon, I sometimes find something close to peace. My loctician’s hands move through my hair with a rhythm that feels almost holy. Around me, women are getting their hair and nails done while, in a separate room, another is having a facial or a massage. There’s gossip, laughter, and a playlist that’s always two beats behind the conversation. It’s our version of communion; this small ecosystem of care and commerce. Here, women build small sanctuaries between shifts.

But even then, rest is partial. Someone’s phone rings, someone’s child needs school fees, someone’s husband has misplaced a receipt. We can’t truly switch off, we just multitask in prettier rooms.

During the pandemic, when the world slowed, I thought we’d finally learned how to stop. I’d stroll through the neighbourhood, breathing in the fresh air, as I watched the sky lose its memory of planes. For a moment, there was stillness. But stillness, too, was expensive. Behind it all was a layoff, a fear of what to expect, a bill unpaid.

Now that the city buzzes again, we’ve returned to the treadmill; faster, louder, more desperate to prove we’ve “bounced back.” I know women working two, three jobs – online and offline – to replace salaries that never recovered. As Kenya boasts a vibrant digital economy, sleepless women type in the blue light, whispering to their families to keep the TV down.

Evening comes, and with it, the unpaid shift – cooking, listening, soothing. The invisible work that stretches across generations and never makes it to CVs. Sometimes, I tell myself I’ll rest after dinner, after the dishes, after one last email. But rest keeps moving the goalpost.

The truth is, we’re all a little tired; not just from work, but from the performance of coping. The smile in the office, the “I’m fine” in traffic, the way we keep showing up when no one shows up for us.

And yet, in quiet corners, women are learning to reclaim their stillness. I’ve seen it in the woman who locks her shop for ten minutes to just sit. In the one who says no to a weekend plan without explanation. In the one who, for the first time, lets the phone ring out.

Maybe rest, for us, will never be abundant. But perhaps it can be intentional. Not absence, but resistance. A small, defiant pause in a world that profits from our exhaustion.

Tonight, I will not answer another message. I will not reach for another task. I will lie in the dark and listen to my breath – uneven, imperfect, mine. It isn’t much. But for now, it’s enough.