Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast.

Hellie here.

I want to start today's episode with this quote.

It's by Guillaume Apollinaire, it says, now and then, it's good to pause in our

pursuit of happiness and just be happy. If you're like me, you have been someone who's maybe a

goal getter, someone who is ambitious, or you might just

be someone who's always on the go, who has a lot going on in their lives. I don't know anybody

these days who doesn't have 50 things to do on their checklist and maybe it's only getting to 10

of them and then the

checklist just rolls over to the next day.

And as black woman, one thing I am so proud of about us is that we are a group of people who are

always about improving, enhancing, growing, whether it's in our physical bodies, our mental bodies, our

spiritual bodies, we are always seeking to improve, to level up, to be the best versions of

ourselves. That's one of the things I'm most proud of. But today's quote is an invitation to do something that may be the

opposite of who we are and may be something that feels deeply uncomfortable, which is the first

thing is to pause. And then the second thing is just to be. What I love about this is there is a hidden

trap that is baked in pursuit of self-improvement. And this self-improvement trap is that we can

just keep going and going and growing and growing and never actually

take the time to appreciate where we are. This is something I've told you that I struggle with.

I've done episodes about this. I have an episode called opt into

celebration. And I wrote this episode because I'm someone who deeply struggles with the pausing

and the celebrating. And while the words are simple, the concept behind it and the journey to just being happy

...