Between Work and Water

There is a version of me that exists only in motion.

She wakes before the city does, answers emails before her feet touch the floor, moves through airports like she was built for them. She is efficient. She is prepared. She knows which TSA line moves fastest and which hotel pillows to request and how to be fully present in a room while some part of her is already in the next one.

I know her well. I am her, most days.

But there is a cost to that kind of living. Not one that shows up on your face right away. It settles somewhere deeper, in the shoulders, in the jaw, in the particular exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with being perceived, performing, producing, without pause.

Some evenings I get an invitation to go out and I feel the words before I can stop them: I just need to be still tonight.

Not sad. Not antisocial. Just full. Full of noise and light and the low hum of always being somewhere for something.

On those nights I do not pour a glass of wine. I do not scroll. I draw a bath.

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There is something that happens when you step into herbal waters that nothing else can replicate. The world does not disappear, but it recedes. The nervous system, which has been braced since morning, begins the slow work of letting go. Steam rises. The botanicals open. And something in you, the part that has been holding everything together all day, finally exhales.

This is what a herbal bath ritual has always known how to do, long before wellness became an industry, long before anyone was selling it.

Generations before did not call this self-care. They called it necessary healing. In Haïti, Rituel de Bains were not indulgences. They were intelligence. A means of restoring the body, of finding your way back to yourself. Of cleansing not just the body but the residue of everything the body had moved through. A Haïtian botanical bath was not drawn for aesthetics. It was drawn because the body asked for it.

I think about that often. How much they understood about restoration that we are only now finding language for.

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I travel for work. I sit in meetings where I am the youngest person and usually the only one who looks like me. I smile at the right moments and shake hands that engulf my own. I follow up. I execute. I move through the world with intention and I am proud of that.

And then I come home, or I come back to a hotel room in a city that is not mine. Sometimes in a random Hilton, it's just two compostable coffee cups brewing the blue Alizé bath. It's not glamorous, but it's necessary. I keep it simple, I don't even soak. I just pour two cups of blue botanical bath soak over my body as slowly as I can, and I breathe, and I come back to myself.

Not the title. Not the itinerary. Not the version of me that is always ready.

Just a young woman returning to herself. Slowly. In the aroma, in the steam. In the quiet. And somewhere in that stillness, I think about my ancestors. I think about how this moment, ordinary as it is, might be exactly what they prayed for. But I still wonder if they judge me for how much I spent on facials this year.

That is what Souf was made for.

Not for the performative pause. Not for the aesthetic of wellness. For the real thing, the private, necessary, deeply human act of coming back to your own body after you have given the day everything it asked for. A bath ritual for burnout, for overstimulation, for the ones who give everything and need somewhere to return.

After the intensity, there is water.

There is always water.

And in it, I remember: I know how to return to myself with the help of some herbs. 

Especially after the hardest days when I miss waterfalls in Haïti that I've never seen.