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Can I Fully Relax Here? Understanding Racial Fatigue and Nervous System Vigilance
- Juel McNeilly
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
A somatic exploration of how racialised stress shapes our relationship to rest, belonging, and the nervous system
The question many people carry silently
There is a question that many people of colour carry through the world, although we rarely speak about it directly. Most of the time it isn't conscious. It isn't necessarily a thought we actively have as we walk into a room, meet someone new, join a workplace, enter a community, or sit down in a café, yet something within each of us is often assessing exactly the same thing.
Can I fully relax here?
Can I be myself here?
Can I stop managing myself here?
Now, to be clear, all human beings assess environments. It is part of how we orient and create a sense of safety. Women entering male-dominated spaces often do, queer people often do, disabled people often do, anyone who has ever felt different, vulnerable, or outside the dominant culture knows something about orienting to a room before settling into it. So this isn't about claiming a unique experience of assessment.
It is about understanding what happens when that assessment becomes tied to a lifetime of racialisation. Because for many people of colour, the question is not simply whether a space feels comfortable. The question is whether the space can hold all of who you are. Whether your experience will be understood, dismissed, questioned, minimised, debated, or defended against. Whether your belonging remains intact if race becomes visible. And whether people can still see and meet you when your truth makes them uncomfortable.
The body learns what is possible
These are not questions most of us consciously ask. But the body asks them. The nervous system asks them, and it asks them because it has learned to. This doesn't happen because you expect harm everywhere, or because you believe every interaction is difficult. It happens because experience teaches the body what is possible.
You learn which spaces allow your shoulders to drop without thinking.
You learn which environments require less effort.
You learn where conversations flow more easily.
You learn where your laughter comes more naturally.
You learn where your body settles.
And often you cannot fully explain why.
Sometimes it's because there are other people present who share parts of your lived experience, or there is an unspoken sense of understanding in the room.
There can also be moments when you are no longer aware of yourself as "the only one" or "one of a few," so your attention is free to move toward life itself rather than toward monitoring how you are being received.
When vigilance disappears
What fascinates me is that many of us do not fully realise how much energy this orientation requires until we experience an environment where it suddenly disappears.
A place where you are not unusual.
A place where your body is not quietly assessing or translating.
A place where your nervous system stops asking questions it has been asking for years.
When that happens, if it happens, and it is a silent wish I hold for every body of colour reading this, the experience can be surprisingly emotional and hit deeply. Nothing extraordinary has occurred. You simply begin to realise how much effort was being expended before.
You discover a kind of relaxation you did not know was missing. A lightness, a spaciousness, something you may not be able to articulate in the moment. You come to realise that what you previously called normal was actually vigilance.
And this is where I feel many conversations about race miss something vital.
Incidents are only part of the story
People tend to focus on incidents. The comment, the exclusion, the conflict. A rupture that is visible and clear. Those things matter deeply, but some of the deepest fatigue, the kind that settles in your bones, does not come from the explicit moments themselves.
It comes from living with the possibility of those moments.
Moments that can arrive suddenly and without warning, yet feel so real in the body that they are never fully abstract. It comes from the quiet knowing that a friendship you deeply value may encounter territory it cannot cross. Or from wondering whether a workplace that celebrates diversity can tolerate honesty. Or from loving a community while quietly knowing that certain truths might alter how you are perceived within it in ways that are rarely spoken about.
Acceptance often means people are comfortable with your presence. Belonging means your full reality can exist without threatening the relationship.
Acceptance and belonging are not the same
It is a learned understanding that belonging and acceptance are not always the same thing.
Acceptance often means people are comfortable with your presence. Belonging means your full reality can exist without threatening the relationship.
Many people of colour know the difference.
We know what it feels like to be welcomed while still editing ourselves. To be included while remaining cautious. To be appreciated while holding back parts of our truth. No one explicitly asked us to, but our bodies have learned that not every space can hold every truth equally well.
The uncertainty itself becomes work. A quiet, continuous kind of work. Not the kind that always feels intense in the moment, but the kind that accumulates over years. A continual assessment. A subtle monitoring. A low-grade vigilance that rarely fully switches off.
Will this person understand?
Can this relationship survive this conversation?
Will I still belong if I bring a little more of myself into this room?
The exhaustion of uncertainty
Most people understand the exhaustion that comes from conflict. Far fewer understand the exhaustion that comes from never fully knowing where the edges of belonging are.
That uncertainty does not disappear when life is going well. It can exist inside beautiful, loving relationships, meaningful communities, and supportive workplaces. Which is partly why it can be so difficult to speak about.
This is not always about whether people care about us. The question is whether they can stay connected to us when race becomes part of the conversation. Many of us have experienced relationships that felt solid until that moment arrived. The body remembers.
And because the body remembers, it continues preparing in the background, even when we consciously believe everything is fine.
When authenticity still feels risky
There is another aspect of this that I rarely hear discussed out loud.
Sometimes, after years of adaptation, years of softening your language, years of translating your experience into forms that feel easier for others to receive, years of code switching, you finally decide not to leave yourself.
You find yourself speaking plainly. You tell the truth. You stay connected to your own experience while sharing it. And even when the conversation goes well, even when people respond thoughtfully, even when you are met with care, the body can still react as though something dangerous has happened.
You leave the interaction and replay it.
Was I too much?
Too direct?
Too intense?
Did I take up too much space?
What is fascinating is that these questions often arise even when nobody has criticised us, and we are met and received. The response is not about the present moment. It is about accumulated memory, the nervous system imprint. The body remembers what visibility and exposure has cost before. It remembers friendships that shifted, spaces that became uncomfortable, and moments where honesty changed the atmosphere. So authenticity itself can feel vulnerable, even when it is welcomed.
Why rest feels so profound
I feel this is one reason genuine rest can feel so profound for people of colour. Because rest is not merely the absence of activity, or even the recovery from the self-abandonment that can lead to burnout. For us, rest is the absence of vigilance. The absence of monitoring, assessing, and wondering whether belonging is conditional. It is the experience of no longer having to negotiate your existence.
For me, this is why spaces of genuine belonging can feel so nourishing. They offer something deeper than comfort. They offer spaciousness. A kind of relief from carrying questions that have quietly accompanied you for years. Relief from the subtle labour of assessing whether you can fully arrive, fully express yourself, and fully relax.
The nervous system finally receives evidence that it can stop working so hard.
These are not perfect spaces where everyone agrees. They are spaces where difference does not automatically threaten connection. Where your experience does not need to be translated before it can be received. Where your body no longer feels responsible for managing the room in order to remain connected to it.
In those moments, something profound can happen.
Your attention returns to the present , your energy returns to your life, your body stops orienting toward possibility and begins inhabiting reality. You simply stop preparing, managing, negotiating... and arrive.
And be.
Because there is a profound difference between being welcomed into a room and feeling that you can finally exhale within it.
One Love,
Juel
Juel helps people return to the intelligence of their bodies, so they can lead with presence, resilience, and truth.
Her work is somatic, trauma-informed, and rooted in nervous system awareness, guiding real change where the body still carries what the mind has tried to move past.
Racial fatigue is often discussed through incidents, conflict, or discrimination. Yet for many people of colour, the deeper exhaustion lives in the ongoing relationship between race, belonging, and the nervous system. Healing is not only about recovering from difficult experiences. It is also about discovering spaces, relationships, and communities where the body learns that it no longer needs to stay vigilant in order to belong.
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