I remember my first time hearing about Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, and Authentic by Jodi-Ann Burey. Strangely, I read them all at vastly different times, but my thinking was the same each time: how can doing nothing, taking care of yourself, and finding ease be resistance? Don’t they understand that the world is literally on fire, the oceans are rising, and there’s inequity all around? Then I’d start reading and/or listening to the audiobook and have an “ah huh moment,” as puts it.

In the society that has been built, the expectation is to burn the candle from both ends, to always be striving for the next thing, and to prove yourself as worker by:
 

• Being a team player and building new skills by adding out of class job duties to your workload… sometimes, indefinitely.
• Accepting that accessibility will never be accessible for workers, and only partially for customers unless demanded en masse, continuously, but don’t you dare ask!
• Being your “authentic self,” but only in a way that benefits the company, doesn’t make non- BIPOCs feel uncomfy, and in a way that doesn’t expect actual changes to policy.
• Knowing your place – your personhood doesn’t matter so long as we can extract as much for very little or nothing at all.

Thus, rest and seeking joy for one’s own sake are some of the greatest forms of personal and collective resistance simply because it allows for ease, and it’s a silent refusal to feel constantly off-balance and unfocused. Rest doesn’t require you to produce, purchase anything, or constantly seek due to feelings of inadequacy. Rest is the ultimate no and silent rejection of hustle as an ideal. Intentional rest focuses solely on one’s own pleasure, joy, and safety without having to prove anything thus allowing you to actually find what’s authentic to you for the setting you’re in, and also allowing you to really think about whether the setting you are in is worth the squeeze. 

What I loved about each work is that while there is an acknowledgment of these major societal issues that require a lot of work from all of us, each author basically states that you, the reader, particularly those of intersecting identities, do not have to completely immolate yourself on the pyre of change, especially for spaces, jobs, and people that either don’t actually want comprehensive change or don’t want comprehensive change if it means holding those in power accountable for prior misdeed and inaction.