Resting
On my Instagram, I’ve been following this account called The Nap Ministry, a performance art project by Tricia Hersey about how resting is a form of political resistance. She posts about how rest was something practiced by the leisure class as they exploited the working and enslaved classes (with both economic and racial inequities). Today there’s an emphasis on hustle, on being busy, on having side gigs. That’s at least in part because it’s hard for many folks to get a regular, steady 9–5 job with benefits that pays the bills without side gigs, but also because being busy is glorified in our society. Lean out, Hersey argues—lie down, and reclaim your right to rest. I’m thinking about that today because we’ve just had a long weekend, heading into a week off for me. My day job has been incredibly busy as we race to get a big project out the door. (It’s not quite out yet, but my colleagues are handling it, thank goodness.) At the same time I’ve been doing edits for the next Turtleduck Press novel, coming from KD Sarge in just a few months. And I even ended up spending Saturday afternoon working on a piece of the day-job project that arrived, naturally, on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend. After all that, I’m feeling more exhausted and brain-dead than I have in a long time. I spent the rest of Saturday staring blankly at things. Sunday and Monday I started to feel human again,…