Radical Rest E-Book

Evie Muir

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'This is not to be missed' Stylist We're burnt out. Exhausted; anxiety-ridden; over-worked and under-resourced. Yet the 'solution' cannot possibly lie in self-care, yoga retreats or the odd massage when this bone-numbing fatigue is a symptom of a desperately unhealthy society. We cannot simply 'fix ourselves' under a system that demands and takes so much of us. What is needed is a complete reimagining that puts a thriving life of abundance first and foremost. Through a Black Feminist, abolitionist and nature-allied lens, Evie Muir takes us on a journey of regeneration that reimagines what a world of true rest – radical rest – would look like, how that would feel. As they look to activists and cultural influences past and present for guidance, Evie explores the core emotions associated with burnout: moving from rage, grief and anxiety to the hope, joy and plenty that deep change can bring. Along the way, Evie speaks with those who have been disproportionately impacted by, and working in resistance to, burnout – Black, queer, disabled activists of colour. And what becomes clear as we hear about these lived experiences is that a world of radical rest must exist in community – with one another, with our bodies, and with the natural world. Bold, vulnerable and deeply honest, Radical Rest is a blueprint for change and a salve for the soul. Step in and open the door to a hopeful and healed future. 'An essential read that gets to the root of burnout and how to truly navigate life with intention, gratitude and a deep commitment to self and community.' Leah Thomas, author of The Intersectional Environmentalist 'Open the door to a hopeful and healed future with Radical Rest: a salve for burnt out souls.' Minna Salami, author of Sensuous Knowledge

Leseprobe

To my family:

Mum, Keith, Sam, Bradley, Jessie.

Extended family:

All the survivors daring to dream of, and fightfor, something beyond suffering.

More-than-human kin.

And the little girl who, when asked ‘What do you wantto be when you grow up?’ answered: ‘An author’.

This is for you.

Contents

Notes on Language

Introduction

On Radical Exhaustion

Case Study #1: The Home

On Radical Grief

On Radical Rage

Case Study #2: Education

On Radical Anxiety

On Radical Abundance

Case Study #3: The Charity Industrial Complex

On Radical Joy

On Radical Hope

Case Study #4: The Health Sector

On Radical Rest

Glossary of Re-definitions

Gratitudes

Notes

Notes on Language

Being from the North of England, I tend to have a playful approach to language. Up North we’re not raised to speak the ‘Queen’s English’ and I love that about us, and for us. Our turns of phrases, our commitment to omitting ‘the’ from our speech, our many terms of endearment with just as many colourful expletives: the way words form in a Northern mouth makes my heart sing.

Being an organiser in Black community spaces, on the other hand, has taught me that language is also something that should be taken seriously. It has the power to hurt and heal, to hide and bring to light, to erase and to platform, to appropriate and appreciate, to weaponise and mobilise. Our communities are lyricists. And we are constantly creating expansive terminology to articulate our suffering, express our joy and communicate our dreams.

Being a Black Northern writer and organiser therefore comes with its challenges. Holding both the complexities and creativity of the written word is one of them. I hope to do this here, by referring to some terms used within Radical Rest whose meanings are as important as they are evolving.

On ‘Radical’

The Combahee River Collective, a Black Feminist collective based in the USA, remind us that ‘if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.’1

Similarly, the UK-based author of The Transgender Issue, Shon Faye, states that ‘the liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in society’.2

What has always drawn me to Black Feminism as a political praxis is the ways it not only gives us language to articulate the conditions of our current reality but also offers the tools to ensure the liberation of all those oppressed.

To echo Lola Olufemi, ‘I feel embarrassed when I say feminism and people do not think revolution in service of every living thing. I think I will spend my life trying to rectify this.’3

So, let me be clear. Radical Rest uses the term ‘radical’ in the context of this Black Feminist, futurist, liberatory legacy, not as a warped manipulative tool of fascism that prefixes ‘trans-exclusionary’. This means that those most marginalised by society are not silenced in these pages, nor is our interdependent struggle with the more-than-human overlooked (the natural world and every living thing in it). After all, it is not just us mere humans who are burning out, but our environments too. If your feminism advocates for the subjugation and oppression of any community, you will not find your views represented here.

On ‘Race’

It seems to me that all the terminology used to describe racial identity sits on a spectrum between imperfect and inadequate. Radical Rest is situated in the understanding that race is a social construct imposed through dominant hierarchies, which for some translates to individual and collective experiences of harm and oppression, and for others translates to power and privilege. With an intersectional recognition that this is never as one-dimensional as it may appear, I use language like ‘people of colour’, ‘racialised communities’ and ‘global majority peoples’ to describe all who, due to their race, fall into the former categorisation. In using these terms, I hope it is easier for readers to self-identify and centre their own experiences, but it is with an acknowledgement that some terms are more flawed than others. ‘People of colour’, for example, has rightfully been critiqued due to its proximity to ‘coloured’, and it is my prediction that it will become as redundant as ‘BAME’ (ick), and ‘non-white’ (shudders) in future years. As Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan writes in Seeing for Ourselves and Even Stranger Possibilities: ‘We rarely consider that instead of naming ourselves in relation to white supremacy, we could name white supremacy itself’.4 Whilst Radical Rest intends to contribute to such a naming, I too have found the existing linguistic limitations challenging to overcome. It appears that a term that doesn’t homogenise, minimise, distract or offend does not yet exist – I hope one day that it does.

I come to Radical Rest conscious of the duality of my privilege and dis-privilege: as a mixed-race person who is racialised as Black-but-not-quite. As a working-class person raised by a single parent on benefits in the North of England, who – despite having a fluctuating relationship with the benefits system myself – has also benefitted from formal education and academia. As someone who has suffered with disabilities that are lifelong and chronic, yet invisible, and therefore is arguably able to navigate society, and access care and community with greater ease than those with visible disabilities. And as someone who has been gifted the privilege and responsibility of being able to write a book in a world which systematically silences our words, despite the dis-privileges of the publishing industry that I have felt viscerally throughout the process of writing Radical Rest (thank you to Abi and Sarah for holding my hand along the way).

On ‘Queer’

I also recognise my privilege and dis-privilege as someone who identifies with the expansive, undefining potential of queerness without having grown up in a generation where ‘queer’ was a life-threatening slur. Although ‘queer’ has experienced somewhat of a reclamation and resurgence in recent years, there are many who are understandably unable to embrace the term, due to its association with interpersonal and institutional oppression.

Just as language around race is regularly debated, I recognise the imperfections of language around gender and sexuality. I shy away from using LGBTQIA+ mostly due to personal preference. Although it remains extremely useful for individual self-identification and collective solidarity, there is an emerging recognition of the limitations of categorisation, and that the acronym is becoming as institutionally manipulated as, for example, BAME.

Throughout Radical Rest, therefore, I refer to ‘queerness’ in the hopes of capturing the breadth and depth of existence beyond the binaries of cis-hetero-normativity, and that those who understand themselves to be more expansive, more undefinable than society would like us to be, can see themselves in these pages.

On ‘Abolition’

Throughout Radical Rest I talk of abolition as the long-standing fight against the prison industrial complex. My own introduction to abolitionist, anti-carceral politics comes from lived experience: as a survivor of domestic abuse who attempted and ultimately failed to navigate the so-called ‘criminal justice system’ in search of help and healing; and as a practitioner within the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector who witnessed others similarly try, fail and emerge more harmed than before.

Though there is much to be talked about in relation to burnout and the prison industrial complex as an institution, it is through the abolitionist legacy of imagining a world without prisons that Radical Rest imagines a world without burnout. ‘Racial Justice’ therefore is referred to through the application of practices of worldbuilding, futurism and radical imagining – not through reformist policies such as ‘diversity, equality and inclusion’ (bleurgh).

Content Warning

Please note that Radical Rest contains references to suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm, substance abuse, domestic abuse and sexual violence, racism and racial violence, institutionalisation, and police violence. To begin to heal from burnout requires self-exploration and self-reflection. This may be uncomfortable and may incite an emotional or physical response. Please do what you need to do to look after yourself and each other as you read this book.

Introduction

There is no endTo what a living worldWill demand of you1

Saturday, 20 July 2024

Today is the day in which the future begins for Lauren Olamina, the main protagonist in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and, serendipitously, the same month and year that the book you have in your hands, Radical Rest, enters the world for the first time. First published in 1993, Butler’s speculative fiction considers what the present-future of today may hold for a Black teenage girl growing up in the American South, or, that is, the remnants of it. Journeying through Lauren’s formative years, this present-future is set within an apocalyptic landscape. Climate, economic and social crises amid political abandonment have led to deepening poverty, festering disease, rampant homelessness, indentured slavery, as well as widespread murder and robbery, and drug addiction as a means of survival. In Butler’s 2024, nobody, not even the privileged – especially the privileged – is safe.

Though Butler’s predictions may have been only slightly more damning than our Western realities – with people being forced to rob and kill each other for the little fruit that still grows in back gardens, and where scores of vigilantes, addicted to a new substance nicknamed ‘pyro’, burn every remnant of civilisation – the eerie similarities in the ways society continues to fracture are undeniable.

Despite our own feverish avoidance of its ongoing nature, we have not long since emerged from the dazed remnants of a global pandemic. We now find ourselves amid an economic crisis where the cost of living is rising beyond our ability to meet our needs, while our world leaders continue to play with the rights and health of the planet and its most marginalised populations, as if our futures are nothing more than an egotistical game of monopoly. Meanwhile, as the days unfold, we are bearing witness to seemingly never-ending atrocities, with fascist imperialism setting the backdrop for the killing of Palestinian, Sudanese, Congolese and Haitian people.

That we are experiencing burnout in the face of such imminent catastrophe is not surprising. In fact, one could argue that burnout is the only logical response to the palpable powerlessness felt under racial capitalism – the dominant economic system under which we live. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the prison abolitionist and scholar, states that ‘capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it’. Under racial capitalism the individual is viewed as nothing more than a means of production, with impoverished, racialised and marginalised communities’ labour disproportionately exploited. Within such a system, our emotional, physical and environmental health is at best something to be manipulated to serve capitalism, and at worst, completely ignored. That we are experiencing a widespread burnout is simply a symptom of a deeply sick society, and a signal that change is needed. ‘We can’t undo racism without undoing capitalism,’ Gilmore says.

Despite being published thirty years ago, Parable of the Sower continues to be a mirror held up to the crumbling façade of this white, Western, capitalist society. And in many ways it serves as a spine-chilling projection of what may still be if our only relationship to every living thing continues to be one of merciless extraction. ‘Those nightmares of mine are our future if we fail one another,’ Lauren journals.2

Thursday, 26 March 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic should have been our call to arms. It should have been an opportunity for change, a real questioning of the ways our global and local communities had been operating, and an invitation to develop a society that is both safe and hospitable for people and planet. The Covid-19 pandemic should have turned us all into activists. For the first time we were collectively experiencing a lack of freedom, a lack of choice, a lack of control. Those who had once been protected by power and privilege were – at least temporarily – forced to get a glimpse of what it’s like to exist on the margins of society, to be policed by the state, have your freedoms removed, have your choice and agency limited.

This should have instilled empathy and understanding for those who experience these oppressions as a part of everyday life, a moment to say, ‘hang on a minute, nobody should be subjected to this’. Rather than fostering deeper love for and solidarity with one another, however, we simply became defined by grief and fear. Scared, bereft and overwhelmed, we deserved time to recover, process and rebuild. And from this healing, the opportunity for radical resistance could have been born. Instead? The UK and so many other countries rushed for a return to normalcy, and this denied us the opportunity for transformation. We were not permitted the space to question whether ‘normal’ was actually that great. Whether a society that creates the capacity for endless crises is functioning after all. What could have become a mobilised community became a collection of zombified individuals, expected to maintain our productivity and output while becoming increasingly socially isolated. What remains is a burnt-out nation.

Reflecting on the crisis of imagination and the limitations of reformist politics after a conversation with a childhood friend who just wants things to go back to how they were, Lauren writes ‘she wants a future she can understand and depend on – a future that looks a lot like her parents’ present. I don’t think that’s possible. Things are changing too much, too fast.’3 She recognises that the society they once knew in Parable of the Sower – the society we now have – has never been an ideal. It serves some, but not all of us. She sees the potential in collapse, and despite all the horrors around her, remains steadfast in her belief that building something new is possible. ‘It took a plague to make some of the people realise that things could change’ she writes,4 and in our own post-pandemic present, we are witnessing moments where these shifts are taking place, despite the drive from elsewhere to keep pushing onwards ever faster.

What has been termed ‘The Great Resignation’ is a prime example of this. An estimated 4 million workers quit their jobs in the UK following the home-working and public health measures during the pandemic. In its aftermath, almost 2.5 million public-sector workers went on strike, with healthcare, transport, education and the civil service experiencing intense disruption. Similarly, in the USA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics quantify that 47 million people left their jobs in 2021, with 50 million more following suit in 2022.

This professional re-evaluation of priorities and demand for greater employment rights represents a deep dissatisfaction with the ways capitalism expects employees to live and breathe their work for little to no return. Social media trends also offer an insight into a fast-spreading anti-capitalist consciousness, with ‘soft life’, ‘bed rotting’ and ‘quiet quitting’ signifying an appetite for change, and a yearning for purpose, pleasure and pause.

Despite these small indicators that we are becoming increasingly fed up with the status quo, we’re now collectively running on empty amid a cost-of-living crisis and a callous expectation that we maintain our usefulness without even the guaranteed return of our basic needs being met. We’re disenfranchised and resentful, weary and depressed, drained by the daily atrocities on the news and from feeling perpetually heavy after two years of hypervigilance, health anxiety and fear. With no opportunity to process these emotions, they are rendering us numb and inactive, too exhausted to revolt. Burnt out.

Though the few research papers that have examined the condition have only done so through the lens of ‘occupational stress’, studies into the physical and emotional effects of burnout have proven that it causes cognitive impairment, affecting the limbic structures,5 the hippocampus (which stores information and converts experiences into memories), the amygdala6 (which acts as our brain’s emotional computer and alarm system) and the prefrontal cortex7 (the part of our brain responsible for making rational decisions, upholding socially appropriate behaviour and understanding complex information). It also impacts the brain tissue in areas such as the caudate (which performs critical functions such as motor control, cognition and emotion), putamen volumes8 (which oversee our learning and motor control, including speech articulation, language functions, reward, cognitive functioning and addiction) and cortisol levels9 (which, when high, have drastic impacts on our stress levels). When impaired in some way, all of these areas of the brain influence a person’s ability to modulate and regulate stressful or negative emotions.

Based on these findings, many neurologists surmise that the brain responds to burnout in almost identical ways as it does trauma, and that neurological symptoms of burnout mimic those associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s for these reasons that many go as far as to advocate for burnout to be classified as a chronic illness, and that a trauma-informed approach to burnout is required. Treating burnout symptoms in the same ways that we do mere stress, it is reasoned, will not go far enough in rehabilitating the long-term effects.

To understand burnout through a trauma-informed lens, however, requires us to understand how our brains and bodies react to a traumatic event. When our amygdala is functioning correctly, for example, we have greater capacity to cope with everyday stresses. Under normal circumstances, our capacity to negotiate and navigate issues is larger and we can adequately assess and respond to situations. However, when we experience trauma, our window of tolerance shrinks dramatically, meaning the situations that once felt safe and comfortable to us are limited. Everything is perceived as threatening, and our brain responds accordingly.

Four of the more commonly recognised types of trauma responses include: fight mode – feeling the need to defend and protect yourself, with a person becoming angry, anxious, defensive or aggressive; flight mode – the desire to a flee a situation that we perceive to be threatening, through running away, impulsive actions or obsessive thoughts; freeze mode – the human equivalent of ‘playing dead’ with the inability to think or act in a moment, with forms including disassociation, shutting down, memory loss, feelings of being on autopilot; and fawn mode – the instinct to befriend your attacker to keep you safe. This is often controversially exemplified through ‘Stockholm’s Syndrome’, but can also manifest through people pleasing, avoiding conflict and self-betrayal.

When our brains go into survival mode after we experience a traumatic event and these trauma responses become active to protect us, our brain is simply operating in this way to keep us safe within the moment. After the traumatic event, however, we can find that we’re stuck in this state of hypervigilance because our brains have not identified that we are safe. This can have a long-term effect on how we perceive and interact with the world. Unsafe situations may feel comfortable, non-threatening situations may now be perceived as threatening, and our memories start to be stored incorrectly. This causes us to interact with people differently, exhibit risk-seeking behaviour, make irrational decisions and be vulnerable to further exploitation.

These trauma responses are not simply situated in our brains however, they represent a full-body response, guided by our nervous systems which absorb information through our senses, then process this information and direct our physiological reactions accordingly. Fundamentally, this means when we are burnt out, we are operating at the same levels of hypersensitivity and hyper-vigilance as we would had we experienced a traumatic event. The burnt-out body now assesses and responds to everyday workplace activities – challenging meetings, appraisals and progress reviews, office environments, mounting workloads or changes in responsibilities – as a genuine danger.

Understanding burnout in this way means its debilitating impacts can no longer be undermined as an unfortunate yet inconsequential side effect of work. It also means that at the individual level we can understand that we are, in fact, navigating labour through a constant exhibiting of trauma responses. We see that not only is work under capitalism traumatic, but present-day responses to burnout are inadequate, negligent to the point of perversion. And, while long-term support for trauma survivors of any kind is woefully undervalued and underfunded in the UK, if we wouldn’t send a car crash survivor back inside their fiery vehicle, if we wouldn’t advise a domestic abuse survivor to return to their abuser, if we wouldn’t walk an assault survivor back to the site of their attack, why would we suggest that all a survivor of workplace trauma needs is a week off on sick leave to then return to their harmful place of employment?

If PTSD suggests that our trauma is situated in the past, perhaps burnout can be how we move away from pathologisation, to simply naming the traumas we experience that are present and ongoing; those which transcend the linear boundaries of the institutional and collide with the traumas of existing within a racial capitalist society. Understanding burnout through a trauma-informed lens, means a recognition that when we burn out, we seldom burn out equally. In centring ‘activist burnout’ in these pages, I am attempting to name the embodied trauma response that sits on the intersection of trying to exist with dignity and safety under white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia, while simultaneously resisting and reimagining these oppressions. It is the self-combusting exhaustion that arises when you care so much about society, within a society that doesn’t care back. And, with our aliveness being dependent upon its success, it is impossible for those of us in movement spaces to separate ourselves from the work. This, I believe, is where we burn out. And, unlike a capitalist workplace which thrives on the disposability of its workers, when we burn out our movements die with us, and change ceases possibility. Though through a trauma-informed lens we can recognise the depth and scale of harm shouldered by people of colour, this does not make us helpless victims in need of saving; what it does mean is that we are the experts in our own salvation.

Our societies are failing so many of us under the disintegrating pillars that hold it aloft. Yet what might fill the place of this crumbling civilisation? And how might we build a burnout-free future from its remains? Here, we can look to the ideas that underpin abolition as our tools. Deeply rooted within the eradication of the prison industrial complex, abolition envisions and strategises for the elimination of imprisonment, policing and surveillance by creating structural alternatives to punishment and accountability. While the process of tearing down oppressive institutions is a fundamental factor, abolition asks for more than just demolition. It calls for the complete dismantling of the world as we know it and the building of a new one, one which will offer such an abundance of care that there will be no space in our minds, let alone our communities, for things like prisons. And it is here that abolition becomes the work of creating a world full of love, health, education, food, shared abundance, dignity, safety, justice, freedom and rest.

Abolition reminds us that it would be simply inefficient to look for solutions to burnout under racial capitalism – the place in which it thrives. As Gilmore assures, ‘abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments, and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.’10

When we create a landscape that no longer harms those most impacted by such systems of oppression, we will all benefit. It’s for this reason that throughout Radical Rest you’ll find the lived experiences of activists with intersectional identities centred, those who endure intersecting forms of oppression, both at the hands of our employers and the state. These are the activists, artists, organisers, movement builders, community leaders, frontline workers, healers and disrupters across the UK, who I consider co-conspirators and comrades. Those who I admire and who I am fortunate to do this work alongside of and because of.

I centre activists’ experiences in these pages because although harm under capitalism may be inevitable regardless of your proximity to it, there are those who, I believe, are disproportionately impacted by burnout. A US study, for example, found that up to 50 per cent of activists have experienced burnout, 87 per cent of whom had to quit their activism within six years as a result.11 Those who aren’t activists may experience burnout, but for different reasons and in different ways. Namely, a corporate burnout can be understood as being deeply enmeshed with capitalism, rather than being marginalised from it. While the conditions of working under racial capitalism are likely to be traumatising for anyone, in a corporate workplace burnout is unlikely to be predetermined by intergenerational trauma – the emotional, physical, behavioural and genetic ways trauma is carried through generations – by working within your trauma, or having your trauma exploited as a condition of your employment.

A proximity to capitalism also offers an array of neoliberal benefits that provide the opportunity to rest. Material and financial security, social status and the additional accessibility of individualised wellbeing experiences, such as spa days or expensive wellness retreats, for example, alleviate the impacts of burnout and facilitate a swift return to the labour market to complete the whole cycle again. For activists, however, our positionality of being in resistance to these systematic oppressions means that we are also less likely to benefit from such offerings. Our work can’t neatly fit into a nine-to-five window, and it’s not something we can simply quit or take leave from like a statutory job. This work demands of us our capacity to be responsive, reactive, adaptable and malleable at all hours of the day. Beyond the boundaries of what is paid, our organising includes the unpaid and under-resourced emotional labour of supporting our communities, healing our traumas, advocating for our rights, and being responsive in our protests and campaigns when escalated action is required.

Similarly, rest – for activists – is more than simply having a break from capitalism in order to return to it later, nor is it the ease we associate with a privileged upper class. In many ways, our rest isn’t radical at all. It is no more than a metabolic, psychological and spiritual need that is necessary for a healthy, meaningful existence. And yet, rest – as we’ll come to see together as this book unfolds – is also the embodied healing of our pre-existing traumas. Rest is the space and time to reconnect with ourselves, our communities and the land. Rest is the ability to imagine, dream, create and build a future where burnout doesn’t exist. To rest in this way, under racial capitalism, can only be an act of resistance.

Thursday, 10 May 2018

The ongoing trauma of living in a state of constant survival is something all too familiar for Lauren in Parable of the Sower, who is simultaneously plagued by her own embodied traumas. She was born with a condition called ‘hyper-empathy syndrome’, a side effect of her mother’s prescription drug use during pregnancy. Those with hyper-empathy (often self-described as ‘feelers’ or ‘sharers’) feel what others feel. Every ache and pain, scrape and bruise, wound, internal or external.

Lauren describes the condition as an empathetic agony, which causes her bones to ache, her skin to bleed, her body to bruise as the relentless vibrations of others’ pain seep into her core. Dissociative, detached and disembodied, she experiences the wounds of the injured, the decay of the barely living and the life fading from the dying. But does not die herself.

Like Lauren, I too have been plagued with (and this doesn’t feel dramatic, or an exaggeration) the curse of being empathetically at the behest of my emotions. When I was twenty-four, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder while sectioned under the Mental Health Act in an institute in Rotherham. When the psychiatrist – a tall, white, balding man who was incapable of maintaining eye contact with me or any other inpatient there – issued this diagnosis, I rolled my eyes with boredom. You sir, are at least a decade late.

I had self-diagnosed myself with the condition before I’d even reached my teen years, thanks to the watching and rewatching and rewatching of Girl, Interrupted. In one scene, Winona Ryder’s sparrow-like character, Susanna Kaysen, breaks into the doctor’s office and steals her medical files. She reads the symptoms aloud to a captivated audience of fellow inpatients, describing the ways those with the condition are stereotyped to have an instability of self-image, relationships and mood, uncertainty about goals, impulsive in activities that are self-damaging, such as casual sex, social contrariness and a general pessimistic attitude. While having a name for the torment I was experiencing was, in many ways a comfort, when Susanna’s fellow inpatients dismiss the diagnosis, it made me question whether I’m so abnormal after all.

Of course, no respectable medical professional (and when I was younger I saw many and varied) wanted to label a child with such a diagnosis. So, instead, I went undiagnosed and untreated – or at the very least, inadequately treated – for most of my childhood. Those big emotions and desperate coping mechanisms deepened alongside other unaddressed traumas and seismic griefs. I tried, and I imagine regularly failed, to maintain the façade of a normal teenager, but behind the scenes I was losing myself.

I now reject much of the alphabet spaghetti of diagnoses I’ve accumulated in my thirty years, and all the problematic, disproportionately gendered, racialised stigmas that come with them: BPD now emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD); PTSD upgraded to complex PTSD, or C-PTSD (complex only in the Western inability to offer support), PME, or PMDD (depending on how informed the medical professional is); anxiety disorder; depressive disorder – the list goes on. All of this is simply to say, I have big feelings. Huge feelings. Deep feelings. And these big, huge, deep feelings oftentimes dominate my life in a society that thrives on our disembodied, emotional suppression, and which keeps us preoccupied with pathologisation and individualistic forms of care.

Monday, 18 April 2005

As Audre Lorde once self-described, ‘I was a mess. I was introverted. Hypersensitive. I was all of too intense. All of the words that other people use for little wild Black girls.’12 Without healthy coping mechanisms amid so much emotional turmoil, I turned to self-harm in its many self-destructive forms and every adult around me panicked. What started as a quiet attempt at trying to release the pain through the razor-made crevices of my skin, thrust me into a scrutinised spotlight that I didn’t want or need. My mum, teachers, social workers, GPs, child psychiatrists, parents of friends were all terrified of a child they deemed to be a danger to herself and others.

Somewhere between high doses of antidepressants (where side effects included ‘suicidal thoughts’), hospitalisation and not feeling like I was allowed any moment to escape the pain in my brain, I found myself succumbing to suicidal ideation.

I often look back at those teenage years and can’t help but feel sorry for that person – ‘me’, but not quite. It’s a me I’m detached from, disassociated from. Me, but only in other people’s memories, never my own. That version of me grew up a mixed-race Black girl, in a predominantly white, extremely working-class, ex-industrial area of Doncaster – the kind of town where dreams go to die or are moulded into a functional version of a dream that serves capitalism. A town that once boasted a bright purple UKIP coffee shop, where bigots could bond over tea, cake and their hatred of migration. A town where you surrounded yourself with people – often the wrong people – to distract yourself from the loneliness that never quietens. A town where leaving feels like an escape and returning incites nausea.

In Doncaster I grew up a cliché of unbelonging; fitting in as a teenager while navigating the static electricity of trauma felt impossible. Most of my school friends were years away from ever experiencing poor mental health. Very few had experienced a loss, none of them had ever lost themselves. And so, I held people at arm’s length, not wanting anyone to come too close in case their hair stood on end, or they left singed. You mustn’t let them realise you’re not normal, I thought.

With her father recognising it to be a vulnerability that could be so easily exploited, Lauren’s hyper-empathy is also seen as something to fear. I too have had more experiences than I thought I could endure where my vulnerability was manipulated. Too submerged in grief, unable to find a sense of self that could harness me to any stability, the arms of older, opportunistic men felt like safety. Under the guise of a ‘relationship’, these white men saw a vulnerable Black girl as something to abuse, fetishise and control. My first abusive relationship ensured my adolescent years were defined by stalking, harassment and strangling. When he tired of me was I able to leave him.

Bruised and broken, a second consecutive abusive relationship soon followed with a person who, over the course of six years, would proudly boast ‘I’ve never hit you’. Too clever to ever leave a physical mark, his power was harnessed through the ability to reduce any sense of self, agency or identity to a malleable pile of jelly. A truly narcissistic person who has left scores of wounded women – no, girls – alongside me in his wake, he would then mould you into an obedient partner. One who could withstand whatever emotional torture he inflicted – the cheating, the gas-lighting, the financial abuse, the sexual violence. I endured it all. Now, even though I can’t remember the days, weeks, months or years from that time coherently, I’m still left with the residual feelings that girl carried. That’s why, throughout Radical Rest we will explore how an embodied practice must be at the heart of our revolution. We cannot heal, create or build when we’re stuck in the trauma responses of survival mode, but through the honesty of somatic practice – connecting mind and body – we can honour our hurt, feel the interconnectedness of our experiences and shift the internalised oppression within ourselves.

In Parables, Lauren begins to reframe her once shameful ability to feel as a potential tool for change, a strength that if everyone possessed would prevent suffering and harm. As she becomes attuned to the ways her hyper-empathy gifts her with the power to safeguard herself and those around her, she reasons that no one who could feel the pain of others would be compelled to inflict it. Having been isolated in her hyper-empathy her whole life, she then begins to yearn for a community with shared lived experience, people she can live among in safety and solidarity.

Like Lauren, I too find myself interested in the ways my emotions – our emotions – can be a transformative tool for our liberation from burnout. Even though there are days when I still can’t quite imagine a healed and rested version of myself, I now trust that it is possible. This hope is new and novel. I realise that the only way to actualise this kind of healing is to delve into the depths of the emotions, understand them, work through them, discard what no longer serves me and let go of the pain to make room for joy and rest. It’s for these reasons that each chapter within Radical Rest centres around an emotion that I have come to associate with burnout.

The first four chapters – which focus on exhaustion, grief, anger and anxiety – unpack the ways in which so-called ‘negative’ emotions are political and how they can be transformed into a tool for change. The final four – abundance, joy, hope and rest – interrogate why we so often feel a lack of these positive emotions, and pose the possible futures that could be created if they too were harnessed as a revolutionary tool. These are by no means the only emotions that I could have examined. Love, awe, gratitude, calm, excitement, pride, for example, could have found a home here too. Fear, guilt, shame, apathy, envy, greed also come immediately to mind. And depression. It may seem strange to omit an emotion – a state of being – that has dominated so many of our experiences, of my own experience. But I reason that we can understand depression as an omnipresent feature of burnout, the culmination of all the above. By addressing their intricacies, we can begin to open the possibility for a depression-free, burnout-free existence.

You may also question whether some of those chosen feelings are even an emotion at all, and for that I ask you to indulge me a little as I ponder what it would be like if abundance or rest was in fact an emotion that we nurtured. In Parables, Lauren tells us that nothing but rest can ease our pain. Here we consider what could be if we were more often able (or enabled) to enter a state of being, feeling, seeing and knowing. If we could transcend the confinements of exploitation and suffering. When understood in this way, rest is an emotion that I most certainly want to feel more often.

To situate this emotional exploration in tangible, systemic grounding, throughout Radical Rest you will also find four case studies dotted among the chapters. They are: The Home, Education, The Charity Industrial Complex and The Health Sector. These are all institutions that we have been told are ‘caring’ as a default and, therefore, are often beyond critique in the public consciousness. In these case studies, however, we embark on a deep dive into how racial capitalism has transformed all four into institutions of harm, with great propensity to influence the burnout so many of us experience.

You’ll notice too that the events I share in Radical Rest don’t follow a linear timeline. This is because for those of us existing with trauma, the moments of our life are rarely remembered in a consecutive fashion. As someone whose emotions can fluctuate moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day, I know this to be true. So in an attempt to capture the ways in which it is possible to jump from the harrowing replaying of a day in the life of an abusive relationship, to the hopeful, heart-full moments of a walk in the Peak District, to the freezing sensation of grief and isolation, these emotive chapters offer anecdotes from my life as I associate them with embodied feeling, not in the order in which they took place. In centring the emotions that both drive and impact our work, what I hope to pose in these pages is the intimate ways our traumas can be a transformative tool for burnout recovery in all of us. The personal is, after all, political.

Sunday, 24 April 1932

From a feeling, an intuition, a need; from questions whose answers lie floating just out of reach, throughout Parable of the Sower we follow Lauren’s evolving commitment to envisioning something other than the pain around her. As her observations become verses, verses become visions, and visions become a tangible plan and ethos in which to live by, ‘Earthseed’ is born in Lauren’s imagination.

A religion? Perhaps. But only in that Lauren redefines God not as an omniscient power but as change. If God is change, Lauren reasons, then it is actually we who are the powerful, we who can incite change for good, we who can create a haven in which sharers – those who feel deeply – can thrive. What unfolds is the building of a community which, by virtue of her hyper-empathy, is a safe place to feel pain and let it go. Suppression, self-medication, self-mutilation and a commodified notion of self-care are all coping mechanisms that have allowed us to survive so far, Lauren realises, but sooner or later we must face these false promises of capitalism and transform them into something that can serve the community.

Upon realising the impossibility of accessing healing and justice in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector in which I once worked, I left in search of alternative possibilities for survivor’s care, ones that also allowed me to heal alongside my community. Peaks of Colour is the humble manifestation of exactly that. A Peak District-based grassroots nature-for-healing community group, by and for people of colour only, Peaks of Colour exists as an informal yet intimate invitation for members of our community to join me on a journey of abolitionist imagination, nature-allied community care and healing justice. Through our walkshops – creative and holistic workshops in nature – we collaborate with other artists and activists of colour to curate spaces for those with gendered and racialised trauma.

I founded the group from a place of extreme burnout and as a result I was adamant that, in its initial form, a monthly walking club was all it would ever be. When I left the VAWG sector, however, I began to experience a gradual capaciousness. My ability to imagine strengthened, and with it Peaks of Colour’s place and purpose in a broader movement for racial, gendered and land justice became firmly rooted in our local soil. Now, our work seeks to be a small, slow, soft revolution, whose home is in the rolling hills and leafy valleys of the Peak District.

Our restful rebellion is not the first that the Peak District’s landscape has witnessed. The Kinder Mass Trespass, which took place in 1932, was a widespread protest that saw an estimated 400 working-class people from around Manchester and Sheffield convene across popular Peak District landscape, Kinder Scout. The march resisted the ways wealthy landowners forbade public access to the countryside and is credited with influencing the creation of UK national parks – the Peak District being the first – as we know them today.

That I should be drawn to a place with such radical history, in the moments when I was fleeing both an abusive relationship and oppressive workplace, now feels like an unconscious calling. Regular access to nature has been documented to substantially improve our physical and mental health and, over the years, and I have come to rely on the Peak District for my own trauma recovery as heavily as I do any other form of therapy. Like many artists, poets, writers, scientists and ecologists who have come before me, I am grateful to have the opportunity to experience the breathtaking promise of aliveness this place offers. Through Peaks of Colour, it is my hope that this journey does not have to be traversed alone, and that together we can grow a rested, mobilised movement.

Thursday, 17 August 2023

By now you may be thinking, ‘I’m not an activist, this book’s not for me’. Though I can’t speak to the corporate experience in these pages, I hope it’s possible for those whose work doesn’t neatly align with that of ‘activism’ (in truth, there is very little neat about it) to still find some meaning, guidance, maybe even transformation here. That you do is vital in this fight for a restful revolution. After all, the responsibility of dismantling and deconstructing racial capitalism cannot lie solely with the oppressed without, once again, facilitating our inevitable burnout.

This fight requires those who benefit from such systems to reflect on their role in perpetuating harm and inequality, and to join us in active solidarity. While our lived experiences and our traumas may be disproportionate, we all share a mutual oppressor. Maybe in these pages you will find pause to reflect on the ways your participation in capitalism influences burnout in racialised communities, or perhaps you will be able to identify the ways your own strengths and skills can facilitate the movement. Either way, creating a society where rest isn’t simply a break from dominant structures that is afforded to the privileged and powerful is a collective responsibility.

Perhaps this is also a good time to hold the complexities and contradictions of who is considered an activist. When we hear the word ‘activist’ we often think of those marching en masse on the front lines, megaphone in one hand and a placard in the other. There’s an element of sacrifice and disruption associated with this imagined activist. Maybe they’re chanting and screaming, tying themselves to lampposts, or on a hunger strike. This type of activism is known as ‘direct action’, and while it is an integral form of movement work, it is not the only role available to play.

But by positioning activism through this limiting lens, we exclude scores of people who, for a range of reasons, can’t participate in this way, or who participate in other ways that are integral to successful action. Despite caring being central to their work, teachers and nurses, for example, are not considered activists in their day-today roles – unless, that is, they strike. As we saw in the days when the public health and cost-of-living crises merged, almost overnight striking public-sector employees went from being the nation’s heroes who were clapped for in the height of the pandemic, to being demonised by the media and penalised by the state. Though their current proximity to systems of colonialism and capitalism often means we can’t see the education and healthcare systems we currently have as sites of abolition, it’s not difficult to imagine how transformative these institutions could be, if they were seen as opportunities for resistance, rather than merely a vocation. I write Radical Rest at a time when this binary notion of activism is being weaponised and criminalised by a Tory government. Amid a national campaign to disassociate the public from a sense of collective responsibility, that so many are yet to identify their place in the movement, or are afraid to consider themselves activists, is benefiting no one more than the state.

Deepa Iyer’s ‘Social Change Institution’s Ecosystem Framework’13 is a useful tool for mapping the multiple and varied roles we can all play in an anti-capitalist resistance to burnout. The roles offered within this include: the disrupter, the healer, the storyteller, the guide, the weaver, the experimenter, the front-line responder, the visionary, the builder and the caregiver, and they are all important and necessary components when creating meaningful change. This means that no matter who we are, we all have something personally and professionally to offer in the fight for social justice. The stay-at-home parent, the cleaner, the artist, the construction worker, the avid gardener, the tech-whiz, the daydreamer, the kid who’s always in detention, the executive director, will all be able to see themselves within this framework. This is one of the things I find most encouraging – that alongside helping us to identify our own place within the movement, through the concept of an ecosystem we recognise that we are more effective, and our movements are more sustainable, when we align our efforts and distribute roles according to where we can thrive the most. This relinquishes the responsibility of a few people assuming all the roles, or roles we are less suited to, and burning out in the process.

Just as Peaks of Colour is a space in which we can experiment on the intersections of racial, gendered and land justice, Radical Rest is also a playground in which we can speculate. It’s for this reason that if you came here for quick-fix solutions, answers, conclusions, advice or direction, you will likely be disappointed. You won’t find a cure for burnout here either. I simply can’t profess to have the answers. I am in the trenches with you, floundering against tidal waves of capitalism, and for the most part I rarely feel afloat. I too have felt on many occasions like I was drowning in a sea of overwhelm and overworkedness. And while Peaks of Colour has been my self-made raft with which to weather the storm, I haven’t yet succeeded fully. In short, I’m still burnt out.

Radical Rest is, therefore, simply a modest attempt at seeking and sharing a lifeline. It is an invitation for you, the reader, to join me on my own ongoing journey of burnout recovery – one that seeks, with hope and sometimes desperation, to find alternatives to what is ultimately a dire situation. Despair, I find, sits in the acidic, belching stomach of acceptance. The possibility that this painfully exhausting life should be the only option for us is one I’m not yet prepared to yield to. These pages, therefore, are where we can consider the transformation required of our present and future and ask: how does it feel to be truly rested? What does a society look like in which we can rest? What do we need to dismantle and what do we need to build in order for our rest to be actualised?

There have been many moments during the course of writing Radical Rest when the answers to these questions have felt beyond my reach. There have also been questions posed to me that urged me to reckon with what I wanted this book to be. One such time was during an artists’ residency hosted by RESOLVE Collective. Here I met André Anderson, fellow author and headmaster of the alternative art college Freedom & Balance, for the first time. I was introduced as someone writing their debut book on burnout, and without a moment’s hesitation André said: ‘Three questions immediately come to mind, if you don’t mind me asking.’

‘How are you writing this book without burning out yourself?’

‘How are you writing this book in a way that ensures you will return to it yourself, if you were to experience burnout in the future?’

‘How are you writing this book so that your readers don’t burn out?’

My only answer to all three was: I wasn’t. Alongside building a community group from the grassroots and trying to survive despite my own material insecurities within a cost-of-living crisis, I have reached burnout multiple times throughout the process of writing Radical Rest. Being transparent about this here, at the very beginning, feels necessary, not only to rid myself of the guilt-ridden reflex of imposter syndrome, but also to ground this exploration in the messy imperfections of its reality. Throughout, I have been reminded consistently that healing is hard and I have found the process of excavating my own traumas in order to examine and communicate them on these pages necessary but excruciating. I have become burnt out on the intersections of overthinking and under-being, and I’ve felt like a hypocrite and a failure for my inability to be emotionally present throughout. I carry a lot of guilt about this. I don’t think I’ve been a very good partner, daughter, sister or friend during the process of writing this book, and upon the realisations prompted by André’s questions, I felt like I was letting soon-to-be readers down by not being able to practise what I preach too.

When my emotions feel too overpowering to navigate, however, engaging with Black Feminist text returns me to a state of comfort and calm. When I need to better understand myself, the world and my place within it, I turn to Black Feminism and receive grounding and clarity. When I am feeling lost in this work, Black Feminism offers me direction and purpose. I am repeatedly awestruck by the way I find Black Feminist theory, or rather how it finds me, every time I need it the most. Black Feminism feels like a constant homecoming.

On one such day, I noticed that I was disassociating as I questioned, not for the first time, if finishing this book would be possible, safe even. I was numb, on autopilot, and reached for bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. The pages flipped themselves to a pause, and my eyes rested on a previously highlighted quote towards the end of a page:

‘It is not easy to name our pain, to theorise from that location.’14

To expose our wounds is a vulnerable undertaking, hooks reminds us, but to do so facilitates our remembering and recovering of ourselves and renews a commitment to liberation. From this self-excavation we can transform the trauma within into healing words, healing strategies, healing theory.

It is in this Black Feminist tradition of speaking lived experience into theory, and theory into practice, that Octavia E. Butler captures so seamlessly in her Parables series. This is what Radical Rest