The grind is a hell of a drug. It numbs you. It fuels you. It keeps you chasing the next hit of proof.

You finish the email. You clear the list. You make the money. You help everybody else. For a minute, you feel relief. For a minute, you feel like you matter.

Then the feeling fades. So you reach for the next task. The next goal. The next reason to prove yourself again. That is how the grind keeps its hold.

A lot of us were taught to judge ourselves by what we get done. We learned to look at the list, the work, and the results. We learned to call that worth. That is the lie.

Did we answer the email? Did we clean the kitchen? Did we make the money? Did we help everybody else first? If we did, we felt good for a minute. If we did not, we felt behind.

A lot of women live like this every day. A lot of mothers do too. We feel useful, so we feel valuable. We get things done, so we think we matter more. But your worth is not your output.

You are valuable before the work starts. You are valuable while the work is happening. You are valuable after the work is done. That truth does not change with your to-do list.

When Productivity Becomes Identity

A lot of Infamous Mothers know how to handle business. We know how to carry a house, a job, a dream, and a family at the same time. We know how to keep going when we are tired. We know how to do a lot with very little.

But here is the hard part. When your identity gets built on being productive, pleasure gets pushed out. Pleasure does not prove anything. Pleasure does not check a box. Pleasure does not make other people clap for you.

So pleasure starts to look unimportant. It starts to feel extra. It starts to feel like the first thing to cut when life gets full. That is not an accident. That is how the story works.

If we are being honest, a lot of us do not just miss pleasure. We mistrust it. A woman who enjoys herself must not be working hard enough. A woman who sits still must be falling behind. A woman who rests must be slacking.

That is why so many of us feel burnt out. That is why we feel overloaded, short-tempered, and too tired to enjoy what we built. It is not because we do not want pleasure. It is because our identity was built without room for it.

And when pleasure has no place in the story, rest starts to feel like failure. Joy starts to feel like something we have to sneak. Fun starts to feel like evidence against us. That is the hard conversation, sis.

🔥 If your identity only makes room for work, then pleasure will always feel like trouble.

SIDE BAR: 💭 When She's Afraid to Want More

I know there may be times when wanting more feels like too much. More joy. More pleasure. More rest. More of your own life back. Maybe it comes with a little guilt, or a voice that whispers you should be grateful and quiet, as if the grind is the only thing you're allowed to want.

But listen, sis.

🔥 Wanting more doesn't make you ungrateful.
🔥 Desiring pleasure doesn't make you lazy.
🔥 Asking for a life that feels good doesn't make you unrealistic.

It makes you alive. And you are one of one. You are already the permission — you never had to earn the wanting.

So lean in. Pop your ish. The grind already proved what it needed to prove. Now let the wanting lead you somewhere sweeter. That's not greed. That's growth. And it's yours.

This Was Never Just About Overworking

This part changes everything. For a lot of us, this was never just about loving work too much. This was survival.

Some of us were teen moms. Some of us were single moms. Some of us had people put a story on us before we had words for ourselves. We got called fast. We got called lazy. We got treated like we were the reason things were hard. We got turned into whispers, warnings, and stereotypes.

So we worked against that story. We became hyper-independent. We became overworkers. We became the woman who always had it handled. Not because we loved the grind, but because we were running.

We were running from what they said about us. And if we are being real, some of us were also running from what we feared might be true. Can I really do this? Can I really build a good life? Can I really become more than what they expected?

So we worked. We worked into a new lifestyle. We worked into better habits. We worked into a new way of seeing ourselves. We worked until we could point at the life and say, “See? I did that.”

And listen, the running worked. It saved some of us. It helped us pay bills, raise babies, build businesses, and make a way out of no way. The work was real. The results were real.

But here is the truth. We built a lot of those lives on proving, not on living. And proving does not know when to stop. Once proving becomes your fuel, enough never feels like enough.

That is why this conversation matters. We are not mocking the work. We are honoring what it did for us. But we are also telling the truth about the cost.

Our infamy lives right here. It is the tension between what people praised and what they judged. They praised the strong one, the reliable one, the hardworking one. They judged the teen mom, the single mom, the woman they thought they had figured out. We spent years running from one side to earn the other.

But wholeness is not choosing one side. Wholeness is owning both. It is grit and glitter. It is swagger and story. It is scars and shine. And when we stop running from our own full truth, we stop needing work to prove we belong.

Yes, The Bills Still Matter

Now let us be real about the concern a lot of us have. We are still building. We are still reaching for more. The bills are due. The rent is due. The kids need things. The business needs money. So yes, we still need to be productive.

We are not saying, “Forget the work.” We are not saying, “Do not care about the money.” We are not saying, “Float through life and hope for the best.” No ma’am. Pay the bills. Build the thing. Handle your business.

But notice the difference between two kinds of work. One is work because life costs money. That is a real fact. The other is work because deep down you are still trying to prove you deserve to exist. That is an old survival story.

Those are not the same thing. We can do the first without signing up for the second. We can be responsible without making suffering our identity.

And because of that, we do not have to steal joy in secret. We do not have to wait for a perfect season. We can plan moments of pleasure. We can also let them happen on the spot. There is a way to build joy into a real life on purpose.

If this hits home, our piece on stopping the hiding behind your accomplishments goes deeper into that pattern. And our piece on why we feel at such relentless capacity names the pressure many of us are still carrying.

The Equations We Need to Tell the Truth

Let us make this plain enough to carry with us.

🔹 Productivity + pleasure = sustainability.
🔹 Worth + productivity = power.
🔹 Proof + productivity = exhaustion.
🔹 Productivity − pleasure = burnout.

These are not cute sayings. These are warnings. These are mirrors.

A lot of us learned the third and fourth equation the hard way. We kept producing while trying to prove ourselves. We kept working while cutting out joy. The bills got paid, but we felt empty. The work got done, but we were too tired to enjoy our own life.

The equation that helps us build something better is this one: productivity + pleasure = sustainability. Pleasure is not the opposite of getting things done. Pleasure is what helps the doing stay human. The bill still gets paid. The difference is you are not dead inside when it is done.

And here is the question, sis. What is going to be your equation? When you look at the life you are building, what are you adding? What are you subtracting? And how do you want to bank it?

Banking Pleasure Like It Matters

This is where Infamous Mothers Economics comes in. Pleasure gets banked like any other asset. It is not a silly extra. It is not a reward for suffering. It is a deposit into the account of your own life.

A woman can earn and earn and earn, and still be bankrupt in her body. She can look good on paper and feel empty in real life. She can have the business, the title, the house, and the schedule, and still have no room to breathe.

That is what happens when there are no deposits. The account exists whether we act like it does or not. And pleasure has to be deposited on purpose.

But here is the deeper truth. You cannot bank pleasure into an account you do not believe you are allowed to have. That is why worth comes before wealth. You already deserve the deposit before you earn another dollar.

That matters for Infamous Mothers. So many of us know how to make deposits into everyone else. We pour into the kids, the work, the partner, the family, the dream, and the plan. But if we do not believe we count too, we leave ourselves out of the budget every single time.

🔥 Pleasure is not a luxury line on the spreadsheet of your life. It is a real deposit.

This Is Not About Earning Pleasure

Let us clear this up, because it matters. If we say one hour of pleasure for every day of productivity, we just built the same trap with a fresh label. Then pleasure becomes a paycheck. It becomes something we collect only after we suffer enough.

That is not freedom. That is still proving. That is still living by the old rules.

This is about balance. This is about planning. This is about integration. This is about two real commitments living in the same life.

The work block gets time because the work matters. The pleasure block gets time because you matter. Neither one is a reward for the other. They walk together like two feet.

There is no one perfect rhythm. There is no magic number that works for every woman. But there is one wrong rhythm we need to name. It is the rhythm where work gets planned and protected, and pleasure is supposed to just happen somehow, and then it never does.

You already plan your productivity. You protect it. You defend it. You move things around to make it happen. The ask is not to work less. The ask is to give pleasure the same respect you give work.

Not earned. Scheduled. Not deserved. Integrated.

What a Pleasure Practice Can Look Like

Let us make this real. Think of a founder and businesswoman who takes her pleasure practice seriously, even while building. She does not have a perfect system. She has a real one.

Every two weeks, she books a two-hour nail salon visit. That time is not up for debate. Two or three times a week, she makes space for two to three hours with her partner. They plan, talk, laugh, and just be together without rushing.

She also has daily deposits. She keeps chocolate close. She laughs on the phone with her friends, even while working. She laughs with her kids most days too, in whatever mix of people the day gives her.

Then there are the drop-everything moments. When her grandbaby pulls up, she stops what she is doing and spends time with him. The email can wait. The list can wait. That moment becomes the priority.

She also uses what we can call strategic stations. Every quarter, or before a big proposal, she books a hotel room. She mixes pleasure with work on purpose. She knows the two feed each other, and she wants the kind of outcome that comes from both.

And she will tell you the truth about what she still wants to get better at. She wants to take real vacations. That is part of the story too. Even the woman who built this practice is still practicing. Integration is a practice, not a performance.

Name It So You Can Build It

This is a pleasure practice. It is like a prayer practice, a workout practice, or a money practice. It is something you build on purpose, repeat on purpose, and strengthen over time.

Nobody wakes up with a savings account full of money. Nobody wakes up with a deep meditation habit either. Those things get built one choice at a time. Pleasure works the same way.

A practice is not something we add when life finally gets easy. A practice is something we build while life is loud. That is what we already did with work. We built our work practice in the middle of real life. We can build a pleasure practice the same way.

Same discipline. Different direction. Same woman. Different equation.

Closing: The Identity Shift That Changes Everything

The move is from “I produce, therefore I am” to “I am, therefore I produce.” That is the shift. The work can stay. The ambition can stay. The goals can stay.

But the proof gets to go. The panic gets to go. The old story that says we only matter when we are useful gets to go too.

And when that story loosens its grip, pleasure finally has room. Not because we earned it, but because there is a self underneath the output who is allowed to want it.

That is where infamy comes back in. The tension between the parts of us that got celebrated and the parts of us that got judged has been shaping this whole conversation. We got praised for being strong, hardworking, and reliable. We got judged for being a teen mom, a single mom, or a woman people thought they could reduce to a whisper.

We spent years running from one side to earn the other. But a whole-ass woman stops running. She owns both. She owns the grit and the glitter. She owns the swagger and the story. She owns the scars and the shine.

And listen, that kind of woman is magnetic. She does not need to prove as much because she is no longer split in two. She knows who she is. She knows what the work is for. She knows pleasure is not a threat to her power.

This Pleasure & Power season is asking us to remember one clear truth. Your worth is not what you produce. You are valuable before, during, and after the work. Rest is not a reward you earn. Pleasure is not a side note. It is part of being whole.

Looking for More?

If this piece spoke to you, here are a few ways to continue the conversation. Covet: The “Disrespectful” Health and Wellness Journal

A Companion Blog Post in this Series

Why Strong Women Forget How to Receive

Go Deeper with Infamous Mothers

Books, Bullets & Babies: Card Game (Wealth Edition) — pull a card, laugh with your people, and get honest about money, motherhood, pleasure and the stories that built you

Dr. Sagashus inviting you into the IMverse through the Wanted Newsletter or coaching.

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FAQ Section

What does it mean to separate identity from output?

It means we stop using work as proof that we matter. Work is something we do. It is not who we are. We are still valuable on the days when we do less.

Why does pleasure feel so hard for some of us?

Because many of us were taught that pleasure does not count. We were taught to respect work, not joy. So when we slow down or enjoy ourselves, it can feel wrong even when it is healthy.

Can I still be ambitious and believe this?

Yes. Of course. This is not about giving up goals. This is about letting ambition come from wholeness instead of fear.

What if my bills are due right now?

Then handle your business. Pay the bills. Go to work. Build the thing. Just notice whether you are working from a real life need or from an old story that says you have to prove you deserve to exist.

What is a pleasure practice?

A pleasure practice is a way of planning and repeating joy on purpose. It can be small daily habits, bigger scheduled moments, or spontaneous pauses that help you feel alive in your own life.

What does infamy mean for Infamous Mothers?

It means owning the full truth of who we are. It means the parts people praised and the parts people judged both belong to us. When we stop hiding either side, that whole identity becomes power.

What should I remember if I forget everything else?

Remember this. You are valuable before the work. You are valuable during the work. You are valuable after the work. And that means pleasure and rest belong in your life too.

ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Dr. Sagashus Levingston is an author, entrepreneur and PhD holder. She has two fur babies, Maya and Gracie, six children (three boys and three girls), and they all (including her partner) live in Madison, WI. She loves all things business, is committed to reminding moms of their power, and is dedicated to playing her part in closing the wealth gap for people of color and women. She believes that mothering is a practice, like yoga, and she fights daily to manage her chocolate intake. The struggle is real, y’all…and sometimes it’s beautiful.

Follow her on Instagram: @infamous.mothers

The Grind Is a Hell of a Drug: Separating Your Worth From Your Output