We live in a world that asks us to trade our bodies for our productivity. Exhaustion is often treated as virtue, rest as weakness, and care as something we are expected to offer without much consideration for how it might be replenished. These expectations are not experienced equally, particularly for those living at the intersections of queerness, femininity, trauma, and emotional labor.
When I say rest is political, I mean that our ability to rest is shaped by the conditions in which we live. Sleep, something so fundamental to being alive, is not equally accessible, nor is it equally protected. As a therapist, I watch people try to love, create, parent, organize, and survive from places of profound depletion. I know, through research, theory, and lived experience, that the body cannot indefinitely carry the weight of a world in crisis without opportunities for pause, repair, and restoration.
And yet, we continue to organize our lives as though it can.
When we talk about sleep, we're talking about more than REM cycles or melatonin. We're talking about a body living within a particular set of social, economic, and political conditions. Research has long demonstrated the relationship between chronic sleep deprivation and difficulties with emotional regulation, memory consolidation, pain sensitivity, and cognitive functioning. For people navigating trauma, inadequate sleep can further complicate an already strained relationship with safety, vulnerability, and the capacity to settle.
From a psychodynamic perspective, exhaustion can diminish our capacity to process difficult emotions, tolerate uncertainty, maintain boundaries, and repair relational ruptures. Somatically, we might understand this as a body whose resources are already committed to getting through the day, leaving little available for curiosity, connection, or integration.
There are political consequences to this, too. When people are exhausted, their capacity to participate in collective life can become constrained. Organizing, questioning authority, caring for one another, and imagining alternatives all require resources that chronic depletion makes harder to access.
I don't think oppressive systems necessarily need to consciously orchestrate our exhaustion to benefit from it. The conditions of contemporary capitalism already encourage us to treat our bodies as instruments of production. Patriarchal expectations continue to position care as an obligation disproportionately carried by women and feminized people. Racism, ableism, and queerphobia introduce additional demands on the body, including the ongoing work of navigating environments where one's safety, legitimacy, or belonging cannot be assumed.
Fatigue accumulates in these conditions. Sometimes gradually, sometimes all at once.
I find myself returning to the ways Western culture understands rest as an interruption, an inconvenient pause between periods of productivity. We work, produce, recover just enough to begin again, and call this a sustainable life. Even the language of rest often reveals its instrumental purpose: we sleep so we can perform better tomorrow. We take a break so we can return refreshed, focused, and ready to give more.
But our bodies do not exist solely to sustain our labor.
Bodies move through rhythms that resist the expectations of constant availability. There are periods of energy and withdrawal, engagement and quiet, wakefulness and sleep. There are nights when rest comes easily and nights when trauma, anxiety, grief, or uncertainty pull us awake. There are seasons when we have more to give and others when simply moving through the day requires considerable effort.
I am drawn to queer and feminist understandings of time because they offer ways of questioning the assumption that a meaningful life must follow a predictable trajectory of progress and production. Queer time, in particular, troubles the schedules and milestones through which we are often taught to measure a life. It makes room for different rhythms, interruptions, and ways of becoming.
Perhaps we can think about rest through a similar lens, not as something that must be earned at the end of a productive day, but as part of the ongoing experience of inhabiting a body.
Audre Lorde's writing on self-preservation has long offered an important framework for understanding care in relation to survival, particularly for those whose lives are shaped by oppression. More recently, Tricia Hersey's work has challenged the ways capitalist culture extracts labor from our bodies while teaching us to distrust our own need for rest.
What I appreciate about these interventions is that they ask us to consider who is afforded rest, whose exhaustion is normalized, and whose bodies are expected to remain endlessly available.
Of course, recognizing the importance of rest does not necessarily make it easier to access.
Many of us have learned to associate rest with guilt, laziness, or failure. We carry expectations that tell us there is always something else to accomplish, someone else to care for, or another responsibility demanding our attention. For those who have experienced trauma, the difficulty may extend beyond these learned expectations. The nervous system can remain organized around vigilance long after a particular threat has passed. Quiet can feel unfamiliar. Stillness can bring us into contact with sensations or emotions we've spent considerable energy trying to avoid.
For queer and gender-nonconforming people, vigilance may also be a learned response to navigating environments where safety is uncertain. For people carrying significant care responsibilities, rest can feel impossible without leaving someone else's needs unmet. And for those living with financial insecurity, disability, chronic pain, or unpredictable work schedules, the opportunity to rest may be limited by circumstances that cannot be resolved through individual choice.
I think this matters because conversations about sleep and wellness so often return responsibility to the individual. We're told to establish better routines, manage our stress, practice mindfulness, and make healthier choices. These practices may be helpful, but they cannot compensate for every condition that makes rest difficult.
There is a difference between supporting a body's capacity to settle and asking someone to become better at tolerating an unsustainable life.
In my work, I am interested in the former.
I think about rest as something deeply relational, even when it happens in solitude. Our capacity to settle is influenced by the environments we inhabit, the relationships we maintain, and the degree to which our bodies experience safety. Sleep itself may happen alone, but the conditions that make it possible are rarely ours to create entirely by ourselves.
When we are exhausted, our emotional range can narrow. Patience becomes harder to access. Small frustrations feel larger. Our ability to remain curious about another person's experience may diminish, particularly when we are already overwhelmed by our own. This does not make us less caring or less committed to the people in our lives. It means we are human beings with physiological limits.
Rest can support our capacity for emotional flexibility, attunement, intimacy, and repair. But I hesitate to frame its value entirely in terms of what it allows us to offer others. That would risk turning rest into another form of productivity, another task we perform so that we can become more useful.
We deserve rest even when it produces nothing.
Still, I am interested in the small rituals through which we might begin to develop a different relationship with our bodies. Not because ritual can undo systemic harm, but because it can create moments of interruption within lives organized around urgency.
There is something meaningful about marking the transition between the demands of the day and the possibility of rest. Dimming the lights, changing clothes, making tea, or simply sitting quietly for a few minutes can offer a way of acknowledging that the body is moving into a different rhythm. For some people, placing a hand on the chest or abdomen provides a point of contact, an opportunity to notice sensation without immediately trying to change it.
Breath can be another point of entry. A slower, comfortable exhale may help some bodies settle, although I am cautious about treating any breathing practice as universally regulating. For people with histories of trauma, attending closely to the breath can sometimes increase distress rather than relieve it. The invitation, then, is not to breathe correctly, but to notice what feels supportive and what does not.
I also appreciate the simplicity of writing down what remains unfinished at the end of a day. The thoughts that continue circling, the conversations we are replaying, the responsibilities waiting for us tomorrow. There can be relief in placing these things somewhere outside the body, even temporarily. Closing a notebook becomes a small gesture of containment, an acknowledgment that not everything needs to be resolved tonight.
Warmth, gentle pressure, and physical comfort may offer similar opportunities. A blanket, a warm compress, or the sensation of the body supported by a chair or bed can become ways of noticing that we do not have to actively hold ourselves upright in every moment.
And perhaps one of the more difficult practices is allowing something to remain incomplete.
I know how easily the desire to finish one more task can become a way of postponing rest. There is always another email, another responsibility, another small thing that would make tomorrow easier. Sometimes choosing to stop before everything is finished means confronting the discomfort of our own expectations.
I don't think this is necessarily an act of rebellion every time it happens. Sometimes it is simply going to bed with dishes in the sink. But there is something worth noticing in the discomfort that follows, particularly when we have been taught to measure our worth through what we accomplish.
None of these practices are meant to become another set of obligations. I am wary of the ways wellness culture can turn even the gentlest invitation into a demand for self-improvement. A nighttime ritual should not become another measure of whether we are doing enough.
There will be nights when sleep doesn't come. When the body remains alert despite our best efforts, when grief interrupts our routines, or when circumstances beyond our control make restoration difficult. I don't want to suggest that these experiences
Yours in rest and rebellion,
