Lost Archives: Take A F******* Nap
A Post About Rest
From the archives: This piece on rest as resistance was written during the early days of my last construction project when exhaustion felt mandatory. Tricia Hersey's wisdom hit different when you're grinding to survive.
This week I'm thinking about rest and its importance. The title is the reminder I need: take a fucking nap. I'm the sort of person who works nonstop and then says "a little more." In my head there's always a payoff, if I can just do more.
Rest Is Resistance
I'm reading Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. Her book came at just the right time. Despite feeling exhausted from work, it still feels like I must do more. What strikes me about this book is the notion that rest is how we take our power back.
Who is "we"? The overworked masses, the 99%, everyone in pursuit of the American dream. In my case, a Black working professional who wants a better life.
Tricia Hersey was in a similar position when she created the Nap Ministry and wrote Rest Is Resistance. "While in a brutally busy graduate program, with financial issues, family illness, and the threat of racial violence always swirling around, I started to experiment with rest."
Napping sounds lazy. Who has time to nap? But Tricia isn't lazy—it's the opposite, she's busy as fuck. If she's busy as fuck and she thinks it's okay to rest, maybe it's okay for me.
Something else she wrote hit home: "My commitment to rest as a form of resistance...[to] the machine-level pace of our culture and surviving the trauma of the terror of poverty, exhaustion, white supremacy, and capitalism" (pg.3).
I like to be productive. I like the idea of building my dream life. But I have limits. This sentence struck me because sometimes I push myself out of fear. The terror of poverty is real, the terror of white supremacy is real, the terror of capitalism is real. Capitalism has the capacity to create abundance, but it also has the capacity to destroy those who don't fall in line.
I'm still going to work hard. Yet when I'm tired, I'm going to rest. Rest is another way to claim my power. Rest is how I stay in the game long enough to win.
"This book is a testimony and testament of my refusal to donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my Ancestors for theft of their labor and Dreamspace." - Tricia Hersey
Africans across the globe won't be seeing reparations anytime soon, so I'm going to take a fucking nap.