At 8:30 each night, Letitia Plummer stops being available to “the regular human population.” Her laptop closes. The calls can wait. For one hour, she eats, reads, watches television, or does what she wants. At 10, she goes to sleep.
In a political culture that turns exhaustion into proof of seriousness, the routine sounds almost rebellious. Plummer says it is the reason she can sustain days that begin around six in the morning and run deep into the evening.
She also knows how the boundary can be judged. Black women, she said during her Black House interview, have rarely been given permission to care for themselves. Overextension is treated as duty; a limit can be labeled selfishness.
“We are only better when we take care of ourselves—and then we take care of our village.”
“Strong” can become an unpaid assignment
Researchers have a name for the pattern Plummer described: the Superwoman Schema. It captures a set of expectations many Black women report carrying—the obligation to appear strong, suppress emotion, resist vulnerability, succeed with limited resources, and help others even at personal cost.
Those qualities can grow from resilience and community care. They can also become a trap when strength is no longer a choice. In a study of 405 Black women ages 30 to 46, feeling obligated to help others was associated with poorer sleep quality, sleep disturbances, and daytime sleepiness. Emotion suppression was also associated with poor sleep. Other research has linked the obligations to help and suppress emotion with elevated depressive symptoms, especially under financial strain.
The lesson is not that ambition or caregiving is unhealthy. It is that compulsory availability has a body count measured in interrupted sleep, stress, and the quiet disappearance of one’s own needs.
Rest is not just sleep
Plummer’s campaign rituals begin before the phone turns on: prayer, meditation, journaling, breath work, cycling, swimming, and affirmations. At home, she seeks quiet. She keeps an aquarium beside her bed, burns eucalyptus or mint candles, and arranges fresh flowers on Sundays.
None of this is a cure for structural pressure. A candle cannot undo discrimination, make child care affordable, or shorten a punishing workweek. But rituals can make a boundary tangible. They tell the nervous system that a person is more than the emergencies arriving through her phone.
Plummer’s most useful practice may be the least photogenic: saying, “I don’t have capacity to have this conversation right now.” That sentence protects not only the speaker but the quality of what she can later give. She argues that rest makes her a better mother, daughter, friend, and leader.
The politics of who gets to be unavailable
Rest is often marketed as a purchase: a resort, a product, a perfect morning routine. That version ignores the people working multiple jobs, caring for relatives, or living with the vigilance created by racism and economic precarity. Permission matters, but so do schedules, wages, safe housing, health coverage, and a culture that does not punish boundaries.
This is where a personal practice becomes a public question. Who has predictable hours? Who can take paid leave? Whose pain is believed before it becomes a crisis? Which workers are expected to deliver care while receiving little of it?
Black women do not need another standard to meet perfectly. “Self-care” can become one more obligation—the correct meal, workout, journal, and bedtime added to an already impossible list. Plummer’s example is valuable because it is simpler. She closes the laptop. She tells people no. She protects the hour.
You do not have to collapse first
The cultural script says rest comes after the work is finished, everyone else is safe, every message is answered, and excellence has been proven. For people whose work never truly ends, that means rest never begins.
Plummer flips the sequence. Recovery is not the trophy for surviving depletion. It is part of how a person remains capable of doing meaningful work without disappearing inside it. The right to rest does not have to be earned through collapse.