WAKE UP!
Wake Up! is a zine about radical rest.
Wake Up! explores grind culture and workaholism and asserts that we need to re-center rest.
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Content warning: acknowledgement of historical violence
Let me ask you, dear reader:
What's on your TODO list for today?
How much of it is DONE, and how much of it is still something you're trying to get TO?
You may think that you wrote that list, but I would venture to say that many forces moved that pen with you. Perhaps a force that whispers "I'll catch up on sleep this weekend." Another that hisses "If I do not get things done today, I will be a failure."
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I, too, once made TODO list after TODO list, always trying to DO more so that I could get TO the next place I needed to be, the next indicator of success, the next rung on the ladder.
I did and did to the point of being DONE myself. One night during my junior year of college, I picked up my phone from where I was sitting at the bottom of a well of burnout, and told my friend that I felt the kind of bone-deep tiredness that I feared could not be solved by rest.
As a machine, that's when I malfunctioned. As a human being, that's when I began to heal.
You see, I've been simmered in a soup of toxic ideas about work and rest since the womb. Ideas like: the busier you are, the more successful you are, the more desirable. Like: time spent "idle" is time wasted, a sign of laziness and a higher moral failing. That, as a woman, I'd need to learn how to be twice as smart and loud to get as far as my colleagues. Add to this four years of being a student on a university campus where time spent NOT studying or grinding is called time procrastinating, where all-nighters are touted like triathlon badges, where the number of tasks we accomplish each day is inextricably tied to our self-worth, where rest is seen as an indulgence that we treat ourselves to.
Wasn't this, my burnout, simply a moral failing, a rogue streak of laziness that meant I would never go anywhere, achieve anything, be anyone noteworthy?
That night, over the phone, my friend introduced me to the work of the Nap Bishop: Tricia Hersey. Hersey recognizes that sleep deprivation is a social and racial justice issue. She treats rest as an act of radical resistance against white supremacy and capitalism. She knows this is not a new issue - that grind culture was born of deeply systemic issues. That America is built on a slave trade that stripped people of color of their right to rest, to dream, to be worth anything other than their labor. That we have never truly liberated ourselves from that message that we are worth more than our labor.
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These ideas felt almost spiritual in the way they connected my body, my mind, and my lived experience, but I was still a skeptical believer.
Do you see yourself in this picture I'm painting? This is a crisis. Because in subscribing to hustle and grind culture we subscribe to the view of ourselves, not as the vulnerable, magical flesh-and-blood human beings that we ARE but as TODO-list-guzzling machines. We are what we eat. And here's the pill we must now swallow:
There will always be more work TODO. The hamster wheel can only stop when you recognize it exists.
Where is the language of pausing, daydreaming, doing nothing? And inevitably -- of living? This vocabulary has been warped from its divine origins to be associated with shame, laziness. To be painted as secondary to work.
Through this zine I hope to invite you into my worldview, one that has been shaped by Black and indigenous scholars before me. I am joining this conversation as a South Asian-American woman raised by immigrants. Everything I write here is inspired by my teachers Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Tricia Hersey, and others. Today, Radical Rest is a cluster of plants growing in a field, but the movement is continuously growing. Someday it will grow into a lush garden that is open for all of us.
Exhaustion is a humanitarian crisis. Let us reclaim our rest, one minute at a time.
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