Dame Sophie Thinks Rest vs. Laziness is a Harmful, Useless Frame
I had the day off on Monday and I did so little, and it was glorious. My actual activity for the day was: wake up around 7, have breakfast, get back in bed, listen to podcasts, read a magazine, chat with my daughter, shower & dress, get back in bed AGAIN, have lunch, go do some shopping, come back home, move clean laundry from last night into the dryer, then relax. My husband came home and later we watched Halt & Catch Fire after our daughter went to bed. The End!
Many of my friends are, like me, married mothers in early middle-age with a lot on our plates: our relationships with our spouses, with our kids, with our families of origin, with our friends, with our coworkers. Also, hey, our paid work! And our hobbies! We do a lot of emotional labor, and we’re tired. I might once have been inclined to describe my day on Monday as very lazy, but what I just described to you wasn’t laziness, it was rest.
Rest vs. Laziness is a terrible frame, isn’t it? It’s assigns a moral valence to a state that we literally need to carry on living, which merits us cancelling it right off the bat. It also falls into that category of Shitty Self-Talk You Wouldn’t Inflict On A Friend. If one of your friends were to say, “jeez, I was so exhausted this weekend, I took a nap both days!” would you respond by saying, “but what about your laundry????” Most likely, you would not, but if the napping friend was you, you might silently berate yourself for being a lazy bum, because our hyperfocused-on-productivity society has conditioned you to be judgmental of your good self like that.
Without referring to any domestic or world events in particular: managing your emotions all day as you are bombarded with taxing and possibly traumatizing social & political news is tiring. That emotional regulation we’re all doing so that we can continue to function in our everyday lives without hurling bricks through every window we pass is good & worthwhile work, and is every bit as tiring to our bodies as any challenging physical activity. It follows that being so tired that you need to add more sleep to your schedule is your body telling you it needs some help. Your body carries around your brilliant mind and loving heart and fine soul, so tucking it in bed or taking it out for a very gentle stroll in the waning sunlight of the day is a kindness, not a wicked indulgence.
Thinking about my specific body (which I injured today in a very annoying way, forcing me to cancel my fun evening plans, UGH, BODIES), I know I need to be well-rested in order to maintain the status quo of my life and to even think about my various goals beyond that status quo. Thanks to having lived half of my life with chronic migraine, I’m now mildly fanatical about maintaining a rather rigidly boring schedule for myself. Most days I go to bed at the same time & wake up at the same time, and this summer I started eating on a very specific schedule, too, partly to give my migraine brain more of the homeostasis it so obnoxiously craves. It helps, hooray! I am frequently very boring as a result, oh well!
Rest can take a bunch of forms, too. Some of my favorite types of rest involve expending energy but are also spiritually replenishing. It’s worth making a list of favorite rest activities that fall into both the resting-rest and activity-rest categories. Keep that list in a note on your phone or on slips of paper in a little jar on your desk or wherever it’s handy & accessible so that you can do a psychological/physiological pick & mix and not have to think about it. Making decisions all day long is tiring, too! Give yourself the gift of a respite from decision fatigue!
Similarly, you may recall that I wrote a few months ago about acting from an awareness that self-care and self-soothing aren’t always the same thing. Rest isn’t about regularly weaseling off the hook of my responsibilities, though I do take a certain amount of pleasure in doing that, because we were lied to: the terrible racket of being an adult is not doing whatever you want, whenever you want. Rest is about weaseling off the responsibilities hook once in a while, and figuring out how to do what’s good enough rather than my very very best, and also occasionally Doing A Thing now so that Future Me will thank Current Me instead of cursing her very name.
This is a balancing act & obviously, I’m still figuring this stuff out — another fun truth of adulthood! We’re all figuring everything out, all the time! Turning 40 did not make me perfectly well-adjusted! Which was a tad disappointing but also oddly freeing! — and imagine you might be doing the same. I love to talk about this stuff because for me, knowing perfection is impossible makes it easier to accept getting better all the time can only ever really be a hobby for me. So please come find me on Twitter and yell about it with me! What balance of weaseling/good enough-ing/thing-doing is your ideal? What’s your favorite way to rest your wonderful self?
Some stuff that was useful context for this half-baked mini-essay:
- This episode of Secret Feminist Agenda, a newish interview podcast hosted by Hannah McGregor, co-host of Witch, Please (and recent TBD guest editor!), specifically about the distinction between rest and laziness, and the importance of assigning and deriving value from ourselves that has nothing to do with our productivity. Hannah’s guest, Cynara Geissler, will be familiar to all of you who read her piece on Toddler Grandma Style. She & Hannah had such a wonderful conversation that there’s a Part 2 to this episode, about embracing good-enough-ness. Good enough for me!
- I think a lot about my time & energy. What optional things is it worth spending on? How best to invest my time & energy to accomplish goals at work and at home? Protecting Writing Time is written by an academic talking about how she makes sure she has energy for her scholarly writing & editing work, so it may not map perfectly to your experiences if you work outside of academia, but you can probably substitute your important activity (required or otherwise) for “writing”, anyway. Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time is another useful perspective on this chronic challenge.
- Two pieces I’ve seen crop up repeatedly on my timeline and groups on Facebook seem very relevant here: The New Midlife Crisis for Women and Women Aren’t Nags — We’re Just Fed Up. I don’t super-identify with the scenarios presented in each one, but I recognize the situations the authors are describing. The midlife crisis piece in particular is very well-researched and though it’s bleak as hell, it’s very much worth a read in a know thy sociologically systemic enemies sort of way.
