Rest is a radical vision for a liberated future – @thenapministry
When’s the last time you took a nap (without feeling guilty)?
When’s the last time you did something restful (before you had the breakdown)?
When’s the last time you reminded yourself that your value is not rooted in your transcript and is not calculable in 0.6 increments?
I hope your answers to any of those questions were, sometime recent. If they weren’t, that’s okay. You can change that.
I learned a lot about rest this summer—mostly because I did so little of it. Work was ever-present, constantly demanding, forever urgent. My care for self plummeted and I devalued myself, believing it necessary to maintain my value as a worker.
Compounding this was the underlying realities of this summer. I know I don’t need to tell you about what this summer has been like, has been about. This summer I felt a lot of things: rage, exhaustion, apathy, defeat, grief, calamity. There were many ways to marshall these emotions into action, and I felt a heightened sense of responsibility to take action, to speak out.
And I decided, largely, not to. I decided that I did not have to outwardly perform my rage, my grief, my apathy. I would keep them to myself, nurse and caretake them within my own intimacy. People who were watching? I owed them nothing.
Rest is a form of resistance because it disrupts and pushes back against capitalism and white supremacy – @thenapministry
It is a privilege not to have to labour for your humanity; it is a privilege I don’t have. The years of my life have fracked and extracted emotional and intellectual labour from my body, and I am not a limitless resource. Society would say that such is the burden of the Black woman (and other marginalized women, too). I remind myself that society is racist and capitalist, and these both wreak havoc on people like me.
The summer’s calls for advocacy, for action, for demonstrable indignation, though louder and more widespread than in previous years, were calls I had already taken up long ago. This summer was someone else’s time, someone else’s awakening. I learned that for me, this summer was a time for rest, wherever I could gain it. My reclamation of a right to rest is my reparations for my labour—past, present, future—that has been wrought from my body. I am owed this, and I owe justifications to nobody.
I refuse to ground my identity in worth in the visibility of my resistance; I refuse to predicate my self-worth on how much labour my body can produce. I will not let my body be co-opted into white capitalist supremacy.
This year, I am working on claiming rest for myself and as reparations. This does not that I will rest all the time (though it could); but, if I want to spend a day knitting and watching Netflix, not thinking about the dumpster fire that is our world, imagining something more beautiful than what exists, I will. If I don’t want to respond to text messages and requests for education, I won’t. What I will do is discover what gives me peace and seek and nurture those things.
If you can not imagine or envision a way for you to rest for 15 to 30 minutes a day, how will you be able to imagine or envision a world without police terror and equality for all? – @thenapministry