You're Not Anxious, You're Charged
Video Transcript
You don’t have to be moving to still feel urgency.
You can be sitting still… and still be sprinting on the inside.
That’s the thing nobody told me.
That even when you stop, urgency doesn’t.
It lingers.
In the jaw.
In the back of your neck.
In the space behind your eyes that keeps twitching when you try to rest.
It’s not always loud.
Sometimes it just feels like you're forgetting something.
Or like rest is dangerous.
Like if you slow down, something bad will happen.
That’s not intuition.
That’s the aftershock of survival.
And for us? For Black folks? That charge is inherited.
Our nervous systems were trained in systems that never gave us stillness.
Rest wasn’t safe.
Slowness wasn’t allowed.
Peace was suspicious.
So now, when we finally get quiet—
we think we’re broken because we can’t enjoy it.
But you’re not broken.
You’re just carrying urgency that was never yours.
It’s not that you can’t rest.
It’s that your body still thinks danger is coming.”
That’s the charge.
The hum in your spine.
The tension in your stomach.
That weird compulsion to check your phone even though there’s nothing there.
That’s urgency, rehearsing its lines in your nervous system.
That’s capitalism’s ghost, whispering:
“Do more. Be more. Move faster. Don’t stop.”
And the wildest part is?
The moment you finally rest… is often the moment your anxiety spikes.
Because urgency doesn’t know what to do without chaos.
Because survival is not the same as safety—
and your body hasn’t caught up yet.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed right now and you don’t know why,
If your week was quiet but your mind stayed loud…
If you sat down and suddenly felt sad,
That’s the static leaving.
That’s the nervous system unwinding.
That’s the flood behind the dam.
Rest is not always relaxing.
Sometimes it’s recovery.
And recovery is grief with its gloves off.
You don’t need more motivation.
You need less electricity.
You’re not behind.
You’re not failing.
You’re just… detoxing.
From urgency.
From inherited panic.
From needing to earn your existence with motion.
You were never meant to sprint your whole life.
You were meant to arrive.