RESTistance: Rest as Revolution

We often quickly jump to trying to uncover the lesson suffering is here to teach us. It can be dangerous terrain to accept this notion that suffering has to be redemptive. What happens in the space between suffering and learning? And how does rest factor into resilience? Recent challenges have prompted me to see this continuum in a new light.

Grief

Boundary setting is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can mean the end of a cycle of harm and makes room for self-compassion and emotional wellbeing. On the other hand, the aftereffects can shake us to our very core.

I recently set an important boundary with two family members I was close to. While I’m proud of myself for finally ending the toxic cycle, I am experiencing immense grief and betrayal trauma. The boundary meant ending all contact until those parties got the help they needed. Despite relief from no longer being dragged along in their healing process, waves of pain and sadness still ripple through my heart and affect me day-to-day.

In the midst of this reckoning, the universe sent me a glaring message about the space between suffering and resilience: rest.

Three’s a Crowd

My wife postulates that traumatic events come in threes. While still raw from struggling to keep afloat in a river of grief and loss, my wife and I tested positive for COVID. Because I am immunocompromised, active symptoms plagued me for 12 days despite being triple-vaxxed.

When I started to finally feel relief from COVID, I fell down the stairs and badly sprained my ankle (same side where I had broken my leg, foot, and that same ankle previously). Writhing in pain on our sofa shortly after the fall, I felt a rush of grief, as if unlocked by the physical pain. This makes sense, given that we experience physical pain and emotional pain in the same part of our brains.

Not being able to walk or put any weight on my injured ankle meant another 5 days of being bed-ridden. It meant having to accept help from my partner while trying not to feel like a burden. These days felt like 100 years emotionally.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that keeping physically busy can help quell anxiety.

Carving out meaningful time for physical or psychic rest often comes into conflict with harmful cultural messages equating our value with our productivity.

To be honest, even almost 2 years into my journey as an entrepreneur, I am still untangling that culturally ingrained message. Those waters run deep.

RESTistance

Before becoming an entrepreneur, I worked a typical 9-5 in a corporate setting. Any rest or break I gave myself was often shrouded in guilt at the thought of all the things I wasn’t doing.

Yet these last three weeks literally forced me to rest, making me realize how active rest can be.

There’s a reason intersectional feminists like bell hooks and Audre Lorde proselytize the revolutionary aspects of rest. Healing is active work. Rest is resistance. It requires us to say “I am more important than the tasks I complete” or “My needs come before loyalty to a client or company.” With this new perspective, I feel the words of our feminist sisters coursing through my veins. As bell hooks wrote in 2016 in The Guardian:

“To truly be free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy.”

The culture we are swimming in does not encourage rest, which makes it even harder to embrace.

How does rest figure into resilience?

There is an incredible amount of collective grief the world is experiencing right now. We require an abundance of grace for ourselves and others.

Aside from the grief caused by world events, we also experience grief in our day-to-day lives– relationships, personal losses, death of loved ones, sickness, etc. We have pressure to “GIRL BOSS” our way out of everything, despite every sign our bodies and minds give us to simply rest and recover.

What if rest was integral to resilience? One definition of resilience is is “the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.”

The offering of “elasticity” conjures up adaptability and strength under pressure. But how do we allow ourselves to rest and release our reaction to that pressure? To surrender in a way that allows us to heal?

Hooke’s Law

This definition also led me to a definition of elastic potential energy (stay with me!).

According to the Khan Academy, Elastic potential energy is “energy stored as a result of applying a force… to an elastic object.”

The brilliance of how this energy is stored, however, is that that energy isn’t actually released until the force is removed, allowing it to return to its original shape.

Two things I gleaned from this:

1. Rest and recovery should happen in a space that is not pressurized– which means “grinning and bearing it” may actually decrease our ability to store energy to bounce back.

2. Anyone who has survived a traumatic event will tell you that it forever changes them. To carry this this scientific metaphor forward, if the material (us!) is stretched beyond its elastic limit, it will no longer return to its original shape. While some folks experience a return to self following an act of resilience, others may emerge a new person.

Either way, we must know our limits. And our bodies are perfect barometers to help us know when we’ve pushed too far.