Rest Is Resistance

Welcome 8 min

A grandmother in Mississippi, picking cotton at twelve, falls asleep on her feet by sundown. Her granddaughter, a hundred years later, builds a ministry around the idea that her grandmother’s sleep was stolen, and that the theft is still being conducted, in different clothes, on her own body and on yours. Tricia Hersey writes from a specific theological tradition and a specific labor history. We honor both tonight.

How are the vibes? Tonight braids political and clinical registers without collapsing them. Take what serves; pass what doesn’t.

The Skills 15 min

Tricia Hersey founded The Nap Ministry in 2016 and published Rest Is Resistance in 2022. Her argument is theological before it is psychological: rest is reparations, owed to Black bodies whose labor was stolen for centuries, and grind culture is the descendant of chattel slavery’s labor extraction, now generalized across all bodies under late capitalism. Hersey writes from her grandmother’s labor history and from Black church traditions of Sabbath; her work is not a self-care brand and resists being made into one. The political and the spiritual remain inseparable in her account, and the ND community’s reception of her work has sometimes flattened that braid. We hold it together tonight.

Robert Chapman’s Empire of Normality (2023) gives the materialist parallel. Chapman, a philosopher and autistic scholar, argues that neuronormativity is a regulatory ideal produced by industrial capitalism: the cognitive worker, the productive subject, the predictably attentive employee. ND burnout is not a personal failing but the predictable outcome of a system that requires bodies to perform a particular cognitive shape and punishes the bodies that cannot. Chapman and Hersey are not the same argument; the first is materialist, the second is theological. They converge on the structural reading: the demand is the problem, not the body that breaks under it.

Audre Lorde’s “self-care as warfare” gets quoted constantly. The actual context: Lorde wrote A Burst of Light while dying of cancer under the Reagan administration, and her line — “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare” — was a refusal to die quietly under a regime that wanted her dead. The slogan version evacuates the context. We restore it tonight.

Brief mention of allied traditions, each with its own integrity, none of them substitutes for the central braid: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s reciprocity in Braiding Sweetgrass; Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath tradition in Sabbath as Resistance; Howard Thurman’s contemplative tradition. Devon Price names “the Laziness Lie” — the Puritan-derived ideology that productivity is moral worth — which we will pick up in the discussion. Rest is a clinical intervention for ND burnout AND a political stance against the structures that produce burnout. The two registers do not collapse into one another, and they do not need to.

Practice 12 min

Solo-reflect, written or chat. Take eight minutes. The prompt asks for honesty about voices, which can be tender.

1. Audit your week. Where in your schedule does the productivity ideal live? Not as policy, as compulsion. The hours you cannot let yourself rest. The hour you check email “just once.”
2. Whose voice is the productivity ideal in? A parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a culture, a particular employer, an internalized ancestor. Be specific.
3. Whose history is that voice carrying? What labor was stolen, given, demanded? You may not know the answer. Write what you do know.

Discussion 18 min

Prompt 1. What is the Laziness Lie in YOUR head? Whose voice does it speak in, and whose interest does it serve? (Devon Price names this in Laziness Does Not Exist; Hersey names the deeper history.)

Listen for the specificity. Not “society” but a person, a sentence, a particular childhood scene. The Laziness Lie is rarely abstract; it is usually attached to a specific memory.

Prompt 2. Whose rest is read as rest in your life, and whose rest is read as failure? (The good immigrant grandchild’s nap is not the trust-fund kid’s nap, even when the bodies are equally tired. The high-functioning autistic’s collapse is not the same as the well-supported neurotypical’s vacation.)

This prompt invites the racial, class, gender, and disability asymmetries that Hersey insists on. Do not flatten them. Allies and white participants: this is a listening prompt unless you are speaking from your own marginalization.

Prompt 3. What would it mean for your nervous system AND your politics if you took rest seriously this week? The braid, not just one thread.

Closer to integration. Some participants will resist the political register and stay clinical; others will resist the clinical register and stay political. Honor both directions; the braid does not require equal weighting in any one person.

Closing 7 min

A specific Hersey passage, a specific scheduled rest, and the question of whose history you are carrying.

Pick one to take with you:

1. Read the introduction to Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance this week. Not the whole book. The introduction. Let it land in the source language.
2. Twenty minutes of scheduled, defended rest this week, named in advance, with no productive output expected. Sleep, lie down, stare at a wall. The defense is part of the rest.
3. ND-affirming resource: The Nap Ministry (thenapministry.com); Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality (2023); Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist (2021).
4. Nothing. Showing up was the work.

Checkout: One sentence. One thing you’re taking from this hour, plus the small concrete thing you’ll do or not do because of it.