The Invisible Black Woman

You ever notice how the closer it gets to Sunday night, the heavier everything feels? The air thickens, your mind starts racing, and that little voice of dread pulls up a chair at the table like it’s invited to dinner. The weekend glow fades into a dim unease. You start running through your mental checklist: meetings, deadlines, performance reviews, passive-aggressive emails that need decoding like you work for the CIA.

But here’s the truth: peace is not a luxury item on backorder. It’s not a bonus earned after checking off a full to-do list. It is your baseline. Your right. Your non-negotiable.

And yet, too many of us find ourselves in environments—jobs, relationships, spaces—that treat our peace like an optional upgrade instead of the default setting. We brace ourselves for another week of gaslighting masked as feedback, microaggressions dressed up as office banter, and the constant, exhausting labor of code-switching just to be considered “professional.”

Sunday night should not feel like walking the plank.

The term “Sunday Scaries” gets tossed around like it’s cute, like it’s just a little case of the nerves. But for many of us, especially Black women, it’s not a quirky meme or a punchline. It’s a physiological response to a system that has proven, time and again, that it doesn’t know how to hold space for our full humanity.

It’s the tension in your shoulders before you even log in. It’s the extra hour spent prepping, because you know one slip-up means scrutiny. It’s the emotional labor of bracing for whatever tone-policing or undermining will come this week. And most of all, it’s the dissonance of having to leave your joy at the door every Monday morning just to survive in a place that isn’t built for you to thrive.

Peace shouldn’t be something you have to earn back every Friday like PTO hours.

When you have to bargain with yourself every Sunday night just to show up, that’s not peace. That’s survival mode dressed up in business casual.

And that survival mode comes at a cost. It chips away at your creativity. It dulls your intuition. It makes you question whether your high standards are “too much.” It convinces you that rest is weakness and that your exhaustion is just the price of admission.

But let me remind you: your peace is not negotiable. Not for a paycheck. Not for a title. Not for “visibility.” Not even for that manager who swears they’re “an ally” but weaponizes your competence to mask their insecurity.

Peace isn’t the absence of chaos; it’s the clarity to see the chaos and still choose yourself.

What if Sunday night became your time of reclamation instead of resignation?

What if, instead of bracing for impact, you created rituals that reminded you of your power? A playlist that centers you. A journal entry that reaffirms your worth. A quiet moment of prayer or meditation where you declare, “I will not carry what isn’t mine.”

Reclaiming your Sunday night isn’t about pretending the job isn’t hard. It’s about making space for the version of you that doesn’t shrink in anticipation of battle.

It’s about re-centering your nervous system and whispering to your soul: “You don’t have to fight every week to be seen, heard, or valued. You just have to remember who you are.”

Because eventually, you’ll realize that the places demanding you negotiate your peace are not places where you need to remain.

Let’s be real: some jobs, roles, teams, and cultures will never make room for your peace. They’ll give you just enough crumbs to stay hungry and hope you’ll keep performing through your pain. But at some point, the greatest act of self-respect is walking away.

Leaving doesn’t mean you gave up. It means you stopped letting your peace be collateral damage.

You don’t owe your burnout to a job that can and will replace you by Tuesday.

You don’t owe your health, your joy, your sanity, your stillness to systems that profit from your depletion.

You deserve a life where your Sundays don’t feel like goodbyes to yourself.

Until next time, I wish you nothing but sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns, which are no less fictitious than the calm creature you are.