Rest is Resistance.

-Tricia Hersey

Rest Is Resistance is a movement cultivated by Tricia Hersey, an artist and community organizer who challenges the idea that our worth is determined by how much we produce. Her central argument is that rest is not simply self-care; it is a path to reclaiming our bodies and our humanity from systems that demand constant productivity.

Hersey's work is rooted in Black liberation and the history of slavery in the United States. She calls our attention to the ways enslaved Black people were denied rest and forced to work, and connects that history to contemporary systems that continue to exploit people's time and bodies.

She argues—and I agree—that grind culture, the belief that we should always be working, achieving, and producing is not simply an individual habit.

Grind culture, and the notion that our worth is measured by our productivity, is part of a larger social and economic system that sees people as instruments of labor.

In this context, rest, an essential element of our existence, is literally a path of cultural resistance. WHAT?!?!?!?

How is it that we have come to believe that we are tools, meant to consistently produce? How is it that rest—an essential element of health—has become a methodology of the resistance movement?

Yet, this is where we find ourselves. And if you live in Western culture, there’s a very good chance you understand exactly what I mean. There’s a very good chance you, too, feel the exhaustion in your body: the tiredness in your muscles, the thinness of your voice, all of the signs that your body just wants to lie down.

What would it actually mean to listen to that call coming from your body? To rest a little more. To refuse to relate to your body as a tool, a machine, or a resource to be extracted, and instead embrace the possibility of taking a load off, breathing and relaxing.

It can be really difficult to find the space to relax when we’re working with others, because we understand how dire the situation is right now. Anyone who works with people can see the overwhelm and feel the exhaustion. We can sense how little time there is to simply be and how deeply people need healing.

And when we do have the time to just be, it can be so hard to relax. Depending on where you live, the layers of crisis unfolding around you—war, storms, greed, collapse—can feel so overwhelming that the nervous system stays in a nearly permanent state of readiness.

And for those of us who feel we have something to give, who want to respond to this state of collapse by offering something to others, there’s a deeper question: Who takes care of us? When do we get to rest?

May you have good spaces to rest and renew.