radical rest

As a certified bed rotting girlie™️ myself, I can say my horizontality is both restorative and avoidant, and when I work from bed, it can even be productive ( it’s giving Prousting ). Sometimes laying down is just laying down. Other times it’s a depressive episode. The question is: are you in your rot era or is your rot era in you?

—Mariam Sharia p

The world thinks rest, recovery, and general refusal of work is gross. You can — and should — do it anyway. ●

“structureless structure” is in place so that a good amount of agency and experience-making can happen. When I say experience making, I mean, how open is the space? I have no interest in curating an experience based on what I want folks to take away from their respite,

The question of impact is my favorite. If the people doing the impacting are tired and sick and frustrated and have all these needs that are not being met, what good is that impact? The quality of work that we can do for each other depends on the quality of care that we’re experiencing and cultivating for ourselves. I can’t say that enough.

That hour or so in bed letting a blue light slowly erode my retinas was my little feral rat time when I could dissociate and drift off into a peaceful (read: fraught and unsettled) sleep.

I understand the cautions against leaning into depressive episodes. I also understand how many things that people label “indicators of depression” are also 1) forms of deep rest and 2) general resistance to the idea that every day should be filled with lists of things to do , places to be , productivity to exalt. And as Refinery29 writer Sabdhbh O’