Beyond Hustle: On Vocation, Labor, and Becoming
A resource collection to engage with soulwork as a practice beyond hustle and expectation.
If you have been reading this newsletter for a while you know that soulwork is a concept I’ve been developing that asserts Black people, especially Black women and other MaGeS, have the right to do the work our souls must have. We deserve to ask not just what do I do but who am I becoming through this doing.
Lately I have felt the pull to offer more tools designed to help everyone engage with soulwork directly and personally. I probably hooked you with one of my personal essays, or my takes on Black film, books, TV, and the moments we live through. But soulwork is a practice, a daily reckoning with what our souls need to live and thrive amid everything pulling us away from ourselves. These new resources are for those ready to lean into soulwork on their own terms alongside the essays and reflections you already know and love.
Think of it like a mini-retreat in your inbox, something to carry with you through the weeks, revisit when you are ready, and make your own.
If there’s interest, we may open space for collective reflection down the line.
A Quick Note on Language
Soulwork holds that not all labor is work, and not all work is worth your soul. This week’s study reckons with the tension between professional aspiration and the soul’s actual needs.
Labor is the energy we give, sometimes freely, sometimes under duress. It includes invisible, unpaid, emotional, and domestic labor.
Work is labor assigned structure and value by a system (often under capitalism, which doesn’t value all work equally).
Jobs are formal, income-generating roles. They often determine access to safety, benefits, or respect by way of the system providing work.
Vocation is what calls to your spirit. It may or may not pay your bills, but it nourishes your soul. It’s the sacred labor you’re meant to do because it is the labor that helps you get free.
This Week, We Ask:
What does it mean to have a calling when your labor is always undervalued, yet over-relied upon?
How do race, gender, and class determine whose ambition gets rewarded—and whose is repackaged as hustle?
How have your dreams been sold back to you as labor, debt, or performance?
What happens when we confuse hustle with purpose?
Can learning—inside or outside the classroom—become sacred work? What makes education liberatory?
📚 Core Readings
bell hooks
“Talking Back” Thinking Feminist, thinking black (1989)
bell hooks traces the journey from silence to speech, from Black girlhood to Black womanhood, and from obedience to truth-telling. Talking back, for her, is about reclaiming one's mind, spirit, and dignity in a world that polices all three. This essay reminds us that liberation begins with the decision to speak, especially when silence is what’s expected. hooks invites us to see that soulwork begins when we dare to interrupt systems with our voices, whether in classrooms, boardrooms, pulpits, or at kitchen tables.
Alice Walker
“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983)
Walker reminds us that vocation doesn’t have to mean a paycheck or a title. It might look like caretaking, quilting, gardening, surviving. This essay is a love letter to the women whose creativity bloomed in spite of everything—and a challenge to us to value that kind of labor in ourselves.
Tressie McMillan Cottom
“The Hustle Economy” (2016)
Cottom critically examines how Black women’s labor and ambition are framed as personal hustle within a broader capitalist economy that exploits and extracts value from our drive. She reveals how the glorification of hustle masks systemic inequities and pressures Black women to perform relentless labor as a condition of survival and belonging. This essay challenges us to question the costs of hustle and consider how we might reclaim our calling beyond capitalist demands.
✍🏾 Journal Prompts for Soulwork
What were you told education would give you? Who told you that, and how has that promise played out?
Describe a time when you “talked back”—in class, at work, in your spirit. What was the cost? What did you reclaim?
Name a woman in your family or lineage whose labor was overlooked. What did her work teach you about vocation?
🎧 Bonus Content (for your spirit + senses)
🟣 Playlist: “The Cost of the Climb”
🟣 Interview: Tressie McMillan Cottom on For the Love with Jen Hatmaker
→ “Using Storytelling To Address Complex Social Issues” – Listen Here
🟣 Mini-Practice:
Take a 10-minute walk today and meditate on this question: What is mine to carry, and what have I been forced to hold? Then say, out loud if you can, “I return what is not mine.”
This is sacred work, but it doesn’t have to be solitary. If you found resonance in anything shared here, let me know how this practice sat with you. The comments are open for anything you’re holding, releasing, or beginning to name.
Remember: not every dream sold to you is yours to live out.
Some were planted to distract you from your own garden.
This week, may you discern your true callings from the ones you were marketed.
May you choose vocation that aligns with your liberation.
Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, Buy Me A Book!
