Yesterday, an old college friend posted on Instagram crowdsourcing ideas on “what to do when there’s nothing to do” and ideas for rest. She said “normally I have a long to-do list” and was feeling sort of unmoored without the list to direct her time usage. If that sounds familiar to you- unable to relax, unable to do nothing, unable to be unproductive, unable to guide your day without a task list- I am here to compassionately-but-firmly tell you, you haven’t even conceived of rest. Yet.
Unless you’re disabled with a fatigue-based or exertional disorder like ME/CFS or you’re Tricia Hersey, the Nap Bishop (and if you ARE Tricia Hersey, omg I’m so honored you’re reading this), I promise you there is so much more rest available to you than you’ve ever even imagined. You think you’ll get bored after a day or a week or even a month of rest and you’ll discover that you don’t. That there’s still more room to deepen into rest.
In my own Long Covid experience, I have been surprised at how much rest is still not enough rest. When I went on medical leave in late January 2021, I thought I would have a crash period of maybe a week or two and then would be able to get back to “active recovery”. Here’s what I wrote back in February in this post on Medium (I really should port those posts over here at some point):
i have not rested enough, yet. i’m not sure what i thought would happen but i definitely thought that after an initial recuperation period, i would be moving toward active recovery. i had planned on stretching, yoga, acupuncture, therapy, and a slow pace would allow me to start building stamina. it’s clear to me now at nearly 3 weeks in, that this process is going to be much much slower than i was hoping. my body craves more rest and will demand it with a crash of symptoms if i don’t listen. today, my agenda included shower, first vaccine dose, and therapy. my body immediately crossed that shower off the list because it wouldn’t fit in the energy window. 10 hours of sleep isn’t enough, lounging all day isn’t enough, cutting out activities and energy drains isn’t enough yet. i don’t know when i’ll find the bottom, equilibrium, enough. and. a question bangs around in my head: are you getting well enough to go back to work or are you getting well enough to stay well? it’s eminently clear that those are not the same kind of well.
That was 3 weeks into my medical leave that lasted 12 weeks. I returned to part-time work in May 2021 and lost any progress I had made toward recovery. My occupational therapist told me in May that if I just really cut way way back on my entire life, slept 12 hours a night, and really prioritized rest for three months, I’d get better. She was wrong, it turns out. I’ve now been unemployed for over 4 months again and I still haven’t found the bottom of the well of rest. I promise you, you haven’t either.
And here’s the thing, people want to rest more but an endless scourge of responsibilities prevents them from doing so. People have to work because they have to pay their bills to stay alive. They have to feed their kids, clean the house, get the groceries, care for their parents, get the oil changed, shovel the sidewalk, do the laundry, and stay up-to-date on the crushing amount of news. It is VERY HARD TO REST under capitalism.
This is where community care work comes in. In my last post, I urged people with covid to ask for what they need so they can prioritize rest. But if you’re sick, overworked, debilitated (read an intro to debility here), and overextended, it’s hard to ask for help. Instead of putting the onus on the individual, we can build mutual aid networks of comrades, family members, friends, and community members that allow us all to rest just a little bit more.
Here are some ideas:
- Pool some money together with friends to use for delivery fees associated with ordering groceries on Instacart. (My occupational therapist was right about the fact that going to the grocery store is an extremely fatiguing experience; she tells her concussion and Long Covid patients to avoid the grocery store as much as possible. She verbatim said to me “embrace your weird” and recommended if I must go, wear my sunglasses inside the store.)
- Alternate with your neighbor(s) who does the sidewalk shoveling. Imagine bigger than that and rotate with your whole block?! Maybe this would even work for lawn mowing! The possibilities are endless here. For example, here in Minneapolis, folks in the Whittier neighborhood have organized their Shovel Brigade to get neighborhood shoveling done which I think is about the raddest most abundant thing I can think of.
- Create a small childcare pod with family or friends where each household rotates through taking all the kids once a month so the other parents can get an evening “off”.
- Have a comrade deliver you a meal box. Here in Minneapolis, we have this amazing org, Eat 4 Equity that does incredible meal boxes where most things are already prepared and just need to be combined or reheated. The food is excellent, can accommodate many dietary needs, and the boxes are on a super affordable sliding scale! When I was on medical leave, a comrade I have only met on the internet dropped the E4E boxes at my house multiple different times and having already prepared food literally saved my life. Alternatively, can someone coordinate a meal train for you? If not, perhaps your community members can chip in to help you with some DoorDash gift cards.
- Have your friends come over for a hangout where they also help you fold laundry, wash dishes, water your plants, wipe down counters, vacuum, and other regular cleaning tasks. (This is the thing I’ve needed the most help with and struggled to ask for the most; it’s really hard to ask for this kind labor but it is actually something we can ask for and people will help us meet it.) Spreading the work over 3 to 4 sets of hands while you socialize can dramatically lighten the load and make room for more rest. You’ll be surprised at just how many of the people in your life would be happy to help you. Rotate whose house you go to so each of you gets a little extra support.
These are just a few ideas I could come up with off the top of my head but there are so many more ways we can share our work loads to maximize our collective access to rest. If they sound weird or even a little vulnerable to you, I’m not surprised. The pervasive and insidious nature of patriarchy and individualism may make these kinds of utilitarian and communal activities seem strange or even immodest but they are how people have gotten the work of their lives done for thousands of years. And the pervasive nature of what Devon Price calls The Laziness Lie means most of us think rest and leisure are luxuries when actually they are explicitly vital to our survival.
We live in an unrelentingly grueling world and the logical conclusion of the continuous demand to grind through collapsing conditions is millions and millions of disabled and debilitated people. Rest therefore becomes not only all the more essential but functions as a site of refusal* (a post for another time). If you are struggling without the guide of a never-ending to-do list, please give yourself permission (you already have my permission if you need it) to open your imagination up to the possibility of rest.
*Rest as a site of refusal is the place where Tricia Hersey’s anti-capitalist, rest as resistance work with The Nap Ministry touches Jenny Odell’s thinking on “refusal in place”. I humbly acknowledge that I don’t yet have the range or the knowing to meet them at their levels and adequately write about it but their work constitutes much of what I think about on a daily basis.