I was working on the Followers Forever app with Damien Burke from Early Words the other day. Damien is one of those multiphyphenate people who seems to move fluidly between worlds. He’s a tech engineer, actor, and sports enthusiast. The kind of person who is always snowboarding down some mountain or training for another marathon while also building systems and dreaming up new tools for people. We were deep in conversation about the app when he shared something he had discovered after taking a six week hiatus from intense training.

Rest increases gains.

Not just metaphorically. Literally. The muscles need the pause. The body needs the interruption. The growth doesn’t only happen during exertion. It happens afterward. During recovery. During the quiet knitting together of fibers and tissue. During the stillness.

I laughed when he said it because artists have always known this.

As a creative person, and especially as a disabled creative person, I have spent years trying to explain that what looks like “doing nothing” is often actually a critical part of my process. It might look like I’m just sitting in the sun warming my feet while watching a bird hop around the yard. It might look like I’m reading a comic book, scrolling through strange videos online, staring at a wall, or laying in bed listening to music. To an outside observer it can appear passive, lazy, unproductive.

But my brain is working.

The back of my mind is threading ideas together. Images are connecting. Patterns are forming. Problems are being solved without me forcing them. Characters emerge. Visual motifs repeat themselves. Entire systems suddenly reveal their architecture after hours or days of apparent inactivity.

Research is not always typing aggressively into a search engine.
Ideation is not always filling notebooks.
Creation is not always visible.

Sometimes the mind needs open space to metabolize experience.

Capitalism has trained us to worship visible labor. Sweat. Motion. Output. Grind culture loves the performance of exhaustion because exhaustion is easy to measure. But some of the most important work happens invisibly. Underground like roots. Quietly like healing.

Rest is not the opposite of creation.
Rest is part of creation.

The bodybuilders discovered it. The marathon runners discovered it. Disabled people have been trying to tell everyone for generations. Artists know it instinctively. Gardeners know it. Forests know it. Even fields are sometimes left fallow so the soil can recover its nutrients before the next season of growth.

You cannot endlessly harvest from depleted land.
You cannot endlessly extract from a depleted body.
You cannot endlessly produce from a depleted imagination.

Rest is core.
Rest is necessary.
Rest is infrastructure.

Honestly, what a beautiful discovery to keep rediscovering together across disciplines. Athletes. Artists. Technologists. Disabled folks. We all arrive at the same truth eventually: growth requires recovery. The pause is not failure. The pause is where the gains happen.