Sad mid adult woman in the kitchen at home 
At the height of my success, I was totally depleted.
My days started with the phone ringing before the sun came up. Either a driver had called out, or a bus was running behind schedule. By mid-morning, I was already managing problems that could not wait. That was not a bad day. That was Tuesday.
My husband and I built a multimillion-dollar transportation company from the ground up, including charter buses, shuttles, vans, black cars, and government contracts. Every day involved managing logistics and running operations in an industry that, if you looked around any room that mattered, did not look like us.
The charter transportation industry is predominantly white and male, and the more financially established companies are almost uniformly run by white men who have access to preferred insurance rates and a network of relationships built over generations. They buy 20 buses at a time, while we buy 3 at $700,000 each and still pay more to insure them. The major industry associations had divisions for minority operators, but they were segmented and separated. The kind of inclusion that keeps you visible but not centered.
As the CEO, I manage contracts and make strategic decisions, but I have sat in rooms where the men across the table directed their questions to my husband, assuming the woman with the title was merely symbolic. I learned to navigate that over time by letting my results speak for themselves when my presence was questioned.
That kind of navigation takes something out of you; even when you win.
As a Black woman leading in that space, I had internalized something that many of us learn early. Be exceptional. Be undeniable. Do not slow down, do not show weakness, do not give anyone a reason to question whether you belong. I became the person who could handle everything. And somewhere along the way, in the years of handling everything, I stopped asking what it was costing me.
In 2020, when the world shut down, our business came to a complete stop. There was silence for the first time in years, and in that silence, I had to sit with something I had been too busy to face.
I was exhausted in every way, and spiritually and emotionally hollowed out. I had built a company and earned respect in a space that did not freely give it to women who looked like me. But I had done it by quietly abandoning myself along the way.
My pastor told me to take a journal and sit in silence for two days with no phone or agenda, just stillness.
I sat outside under a tree in my yard during the day, went inside at night, and came back out the next morning. The first hours were uncomfortable in a way I was not prepared for. My mind kept reaching for a task, a problem, something to manage. I had been needed for so long that I did not know what to do when nothing was asking anything of me.
But then something shifted.
In the quiet, I heard something I had not heard in years. Not pressure. Not expectation. Not the next thing on the list. I heard God speak to me clearly, and what He said was not about the business. It was about the woman running it. He told me there was more. More than the performance, more than the production, more than the version of strength I had been performing for a world that had made it very clear that I had to work twice as hard to be considered half as credible.
That time in stillness under the tree changed everything. I began to understand that the burnout I was carrying was not only personal but also structural. Black women in spaces where we were never the assumed default carry a particular kind of weight. We are not just managing companies, but also managing perception and the unspoken pressure to be so unimpeachably excellent that no one can question our right to be in the room. We are managing the grief of the exclusions we absorb so professionally that no one outside of us ever sees the cost, and we are doing all of that while running operations, raising families, leading communities, and showing up in faith spaces where we pour out what little we have left.
When I started having honest conversations with other high-achieving Black women, I found the same thing everywhere: that we had all mastered the performance of being fine and had not permitted ourselves to rest without guilt. Success does not protect you from burnout. For Black women who have had to fight for every seat, it often accelerates burnout because the drive that got you in the room does not automatically know how to stop when you finally arrive.
I started making decisions I could not have made before because I was no longer responding to everything out of urgency; instead, I created space in my days that was not allocated to production. I began making decisions based on clarity rather than on the fear that if I paused for even a moment, everything I had built would come undone.
I also began building something new. A space specifically designed for women like me. Women who had given everything to their leadership and their legacy and had nothing left for themselves. I called it Soul Sabbatical, a movement rooted in the belief that the most powerful thing a high-achieving woman can do is learn to be still and actually hear herself again. True strength sustains rather than depletes, but it requires you to stop and tend to yourself with the same care you have always brought to everyone else.
I did not lose my ambition or walk away from the business or the fight, and I am still navigating an industry that was not built with me in mind.
The difference is that I am no longer doing it at my own expense. I have made the shift from surviving to sustaining, from performing to actually living, and it did not happen in a boardroom. It happened under a tree. In the silence. When I finally stopped long enough to hear what God and my own soul had been trying to tell me for years.
You cannot pour from a vessel that has never been filled.
And the most radical thing a Black woman in leadership can do is decide that her wholeness is not negotiable.
Jackie B. Grice is a CEO, speaker, and founder of Soul Sabbatical, a leadership movement helping high-achieving women step away from constant productivity and return to clarity, purpose, and rest. She leads J. Diamond, Inc. (dba Agape Travel and Tours) and Launching Deeper Enterprises, a coaching and business strategy firm.
The post Op-Ed: I Built The Business, Secured The Contracts, And Earned The Respect—But I Was Losing Myself In The Process appeared first on Essence.