Back when I still participated in Twitter, I had been following Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry for years and years. As I’ve unpacked my likely (but not official) autism diagnosis, masking, burnout, depression, burnout, disability, and generally not functioning at the speed that the white supremacist capitalistic hellscape we live in would like me to her rallying cry of rest has resonated greatly. I have pushed back on the demands for my time and energy and routinely schedule what I call sloth weekends where I do only restful things and often shut off from the world around me in order to reset, to rest. I cannot enjoy the things in life that I want to if I don’t build that in. I still get push back and sometimes find myself inventing what I’m doing on those weekends in polite conversation because the idea that I have elected out of the go go go makes people twitchy, as Hersey describes in the book.
Tricia Hersey and I are coming at the need for, and fighting for, rest from aligned but different places. We have to, our backgrounds dictate it. I as a cisgendered queer lower middle class white woman will always have a different experience of the world than my black peers no matter our other intersectionalities. Hersey and I also approach religion differently, which only matters insofar as how she uses faith to explicate her thesis. This relatively concise work is broken down into four sections each with its own reflection questions and an excellent bibliography of further reading. It has been a few years now since this book was published and I am just now getting to read it, but I think this book will meet its reader wherever they are.
Bingo Space: Bird. Since birds are a symbol of resistance.
