🌱 The risk of staying tight in the bud vs. the risk of finally blossoming.

⏱️ Reading time: 6 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly-ish newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for women of color in social impact navigating power, career, and change.

Hi Reader,

If your summer (or winter, for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere) has felt slower than usual — quieter, less productive, a little foggy — I want to say something you may not hear enough: that's not a problem to fix. That might be exactly what this season is for.

It's August, my birthday month, and this coming weekend, a full year later than planned, I'm finally celebrating my milestone birthday. But really, every moment is a celebration of life, with all its trials and tribulations and triumphs — and I'd rather use this month to talk about slowness than mark another year.

Here's why I trust the slow season so much: a year ago this summer, I had a panic attack. Not a metaphorical one — a real one, the kind that stops you mid-sentence and makes your own body feel like a stranger. It was the lowest I'd felt in a long time.

On paper, my life and career looked great — I was recently married, invited to accelerator programs, getting hired for prestigious consultancies, doing exactly the kind of visible, "successful" work I was supposed to want. Underneath it: years of unhealthy workplace dynamics, a business model that wasn't bringing in money no matter how hard I pushed it, anxiety and PTSD I thought I'd already healed from, turning 40, starting a fertility journey, watching friends lose their parents. Not sleeping, I was the heaviest I'd ever been, and I was constantly on edge.

I didn't have a plan for any of that. What I had, eventually, was space. I stopped everything. I got coached — properly, across every part of my life, by four coaches and three mentors over the years. And in the slowness of last summer something magical happened. Without trying to force an answer, the healthier, happier person that I am today and the pivot that became Fearless as it exists today — a global leadership community for women of color in social impact, 62 members strong across 25 countries and 6 continents — started to take shape. Not because I hustled toward it. Because I finally let myself stop long enough to listen, reflect, rest, and act.

That's the whole point of this message: rest and reflection aren't the break from the work. Sometimes they're the work.

There's a concept from neuroscience that explains why: liminal spaces — those in-between, uncertain stretches where you've left one version of yourself but haven't landed in the next one yet. Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about this beautifully: your brain treats uncertainty as a threat by default, but that same discomfort, reframed, becomes a laboratory for learning, creativity, and self-discovery. A slow summer is a liminal space. So is a quiet Sunday with no plans. You don't have to fill it to justify it.

There's a line from poet Elizabeth Appell that's been living in my head the past few years:

Sometimes blossoming looks like a bold decision. Sometimes it just looks like finally, finally letting yourself rest.

So here's my actual invitation to you this season, not a task, just an offer:

Let yourself be slow on purpose. Not because you've earned it, but because you don't have to earn it. Rest isn't a reward for enough output — it's part of being human. If you want a fuller framework for this, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's seven types of rest is worth ten minutes of your time; it'll probably tell you which kind of tired you actually are.

Run one tiny experiment, out of curiosity, not ambition. A week of morning pages. A solo lunch somewhere new. Nothing you're trying to optimize. If you want a nudge, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon is a small, generous read on giving yourself grace and finding inspiration without needing a five-year plan attached to it.

Notice what's actually here, in this in-between, before you rush to fill it. That's usually where the real information is.

I've been quiet for a couple of months because I needed exactly this kind of slow stretch myself, again. If you've been quiet too — in your inbox, in your goals, in your own head — you're not behind. You might just be in the part of the season where the growing happens where no one can see it yet.

Wherever you are in your own slow season right now — I hope this gives you a little more permission to actually let it be slow.

Warmly,
Maya 🧡

P.S. A bit of comic relief: I saw an Instagram meme about daughters of immigrants recently that made me laugh so hard I had to save it. Sometimes the small silly things carry us too — that counts as rest as well. Just don't doom scroll please 😅

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